New to distillation, or simply new to the HD forums.
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I became interested in home distillation of spirits after reading the homedistiller wiki.
I very quickly jumped into the deep end designing and constructing a fractionating still with a capacity of somewhere near 12L costing me about £80 (made the money equivalent in moonshine back in only 2 cooks).
I have made a few batches of moonshine, the latest coming in at 92% ethanol, all of which used a plain sugar wash.
In the future I would be interested in using the still without the reflux cooling to produce a whiskey, as I now feel confident in producing plain (mostly) unflavoured moonshine.
I would also like to work out a way to cool the water used in reflux more efficiently, as I'm currently using quite a lot of water per batch (I was thinking a high surface area radiator?)
Always feel like Walter White when cooking up a batch of pure unflavoured shine
Hi Muha and welcome to the forum
Nice to see another from the UK here as well. several things you can either run the water through a car radiator and back to the columnto cool or get a 50 litre container and use a garden pond pump to circulate this water through your column or even better combine the two. Hop this helps.
regards
Patch
A car radiator would be very good. I do have doubts about the 50L container alone because my original solution was to use my 32L (filled to about 20L) fermenter as that container, and I still needed to replace the water in it every 20 mins or so.
Given the 50L container would also likely have a lower surface area to volume ratio (so less heat dissipated per kg of water per minute), I assume it would also heat up to too high a temperature after maybe an hour instead of 30 mins and I would still need to change the water.
I have looked on ebay for car radiators that would fit my (I think) 8mm plastic tubing but couldn't find any at a decent price. I guess I could make an adaptor to make it fit to any radiator input/output tube size though.
Thanks for the help
Hi Muha
A normal bored demijohn bung rammed in the car radiators inlet/outlet holes works wonders. As to the 50 litre cooling water vesel. On a 3 -4 hour run in cooler weather i only have to change the water once. Hope this helps.
Regards
Patch
I used transmission coolers with fans for my recirculating system. They use AN fittings which can easily be converted to barb fittings for the hose. You can see a picture of it at the link in my sig. I use my sink with about 6 gal (24L) of water and don't have to change it in a 3 hr run. It also helps to heat my basement. I a 3hr run I go from 65F to 72F. Downside is that they sound like a jet taking off if run at full power.
Best place to start for newbies - click here - Courtesy of Cranky :-)
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