Maximum boiler size for hobby???

[HolyBear]

Ok fellas, what is the maximum boiler size for hobby? Maybe that could be answered by, what is the minimum size for professional grade??? Hummm???? How many 50gal boilers does JD have?
Do you think someone could make a livin on a 50 gal boiler??? Or even make a profit??? I don't know cause I don't sell, but dang,...

A 15 gal boiler requires several stripping runs for enough volumn to make a good stripping run. (Somebody else can do the math, I've still got me boots on...) Each time a stripping run is made, yer exposing yerself and taking additional heat up time. Think about that fer a minute. What if you chose only to run a few times a year? Wouldn't that reduce yer exposure time???

That new fella Arcmaster was starting a nice build. It looked like had some real skills and i was looking forward to his build. I'm about to start a stripper project meself with some new ideas. I guess it will get shut down too...

I know, and fully understand that we want to keep things at the hobby level, I'm all for that... but damn,(yes I said a curse word), is 50 gal professional grade??? Hmmm???

Master distiller, you can hammer me now, but please, for the sake of TRUTH, let this thread run....

[arcmaster]

yea what is it ? i've read threads and seen pics of 50 gal boilers with 6 in columns on this forum 50 gal is not that big and no way comercial or micro. nano maybe but thats us. any thing you build in your garage in your spare time is hobby. the tank was free so thats what i went with this is a great hobby i just happen to build process equipment for a living and have access to alot of cool stuff that can be used in this hobby.

[Prairiepiss]

This is an ify subject. And only you can answer this question for yourself. How big you want to have around and have to try to explain.

I know of one micro starting up with a 50 gal boiler. There is also a distillery in new jersey that has like 5 Brewhaus stills on like 8 gal boilers. So yes they are out there.

Technically any size boiler is to big. But it would all come down to the one in charge of prosecuting. And the situation.

[acfixer69]

Ok fellas, what is the maximum boiler size for hobby? Maybe that could be answered by, what is the minimum size for professional grade??? Hummm???? How many 50gal boilers does JD have?
Do you think someone could make a livin on a 50 gal boiler??? Or even make a profit??? I don't know cause I don't sell, but dang,...

A 15 gal boiler requires several stripping runs for enough volumn to make a good stripping run. (Somebody else can do the math, I've still got me boots on...) Each time a stripping run is made, yer exposing yerself and taking additional heat up time. Think about that fer a minute. What if you chose only to run a few times a year? Wouldn't that reduce yer exposure time???

That new fella Arcmaster was starting a nice build. It looked like had some real skills and i was looking forward to his build. I'm about to start a stripper project meself with some new ideas. I guess it will get shut down too...

I know, and fully understand that we want to keep things at the hobby level, I'm all for that... but damn,(yes I said a curse word), is 50 gal professional grade??? Hmmm???

Master distiller, you can hammer me now, but please, for the sake of TRUTH, let this thread run....

I agree I have barrels and 1 or 2 runs to fill for aging stock would be my thing . I was watching it tooo. Great skills

[arcmaster]

This is an ify subject. And only you can answer this question for yourself. How big you want to have around and have to try to explain.

I know of one micro starting up with a 50 gal boiler. There is also a distillery in new jersey that has like 5 Brewhaus stills on like 8 gal boilers. So yes they are out there.

Technically any size boiler is to big. But it would all come down to the one in charge of prosecuting. And the situation.

you are 100% right its all against the law unless you have a licence that you can get for free to make fuel

[Tater]

Ok fellas, what is the maximum boiler size for hobby? Maybe that could be answered by, what is the minimum size for professional grade??? Hummm???? How many 50gal boilers does JD have?
Do you think someone could make a livin on a 50 gal boiler??? Or even make a profit??? I don't know cause I don't sell, but dang,...

A 15 gal boiler requires several stripping runs for enough volumn to make a good stripping run. (Somebody else can do the math, I've still got me boots on...) Each time a stripping run is made, yer exposing yerself and taking additional heat up time. Think about that fer a minute. What if you chose only to run a few times a year? Wouldn't that reduce yer exposure time???

That new fella Arcmaster was starting a nice build. It looked like had some real skills and i was looking forward to his build. I'm about to start a stripper project meself with some new ideas. I guess it will get shut down too...

I know, and fully understand that we want to keep things at the hobby level, I'm all for that... but damn,(yes I said a curse word), is 50 gal professional grade??? Hmmm???

Master distiller, you can hammer me now, but please, for the sake of TRUTH, let this thread run....

In my opinion a 50 gallon still is not hobby size.Ive known fokes that have made a living with stills that size.Big brother will not see any that size on HD at this time .

[Prairiepiss]

you are 100% right its all against the law unless you have a licence that you can get for free to make fuel

I wouldn't agree with this wording. Even if you have a free fuel permit. If caught making drinking spirits. You will more then likely be hit even harder. Because you would not have any excuse. Because as someone with a fuel permit you should already know legalitys of making a drink.

Another way to look at this is like this. If someone has a keg laying around. That's not uncommon. And easily moved to another area. And or fits in nicely with homebrewing of beer. But if you have a 50 gal stainless steel drum or copper boiler. Not so easy to move/hide. Just looks odd and out of place. And would look good in a pic for a front page news article.

All that being said. 50 gal sounds like a great size to have. And I would love to have one. But its to big for my comfort level. So at this hour in time I would say its to big for my idea of a hobby.

Posting while Tater was.

[HolyBear]

All I'm saying is look at the reality/logistics of a 50gal boiler... Somebody with their boots off can do the math,...
At 10% charge(much less with a mash), with cuts (and we are after quality), you're lucky to fill a 5gal barrel with 65%.... then you've got aging to contend with. So, after 4yrs, you can finally sample what you did 4I yrs ago???

Lets look at stripping. Say you have BW going in a 50 gal drum. Same thing, 10% ifn yer lucky, 3 stripping runs with a keg, (exposure time,and additional heat up time), all could be handled in one run then a spirit run with the same 50gal boiler... less heat up time, less exposure, more efficient ...

Maybe somebody could make a living with one, then again, folks in Ethiopia. Make a living on a dollar a year...

[BrooklynTech]

I'm not worried about exposure as my biggest pot is 9 gallons and havent used it yet. My 5 gallon pot is my standard. Shoots, how much do you drink? Me a shot or two a day is max. So what wuold I do w/a 50g pot?

[Tater]

All I'm saying is look at the reality/logistics of a 50gal boiler... Somebody with their boots off can do the math,...
At 10% charge(much less with a mash), with cuts (and we are after quality), you're lucky to fill a 5gal barrel with 65%.... then you've got aging to contend with. So, after 4yrs, you can finally sample what you did 4I yrs ago???

Lets look at stripping. Say you have BW going in a 50 gal drum. Same thing, 10% ifn yer lucky, 3 stripping runs with a keg, (exposure time,and additional heat up time), all could be handled in one run then a spirit run with the same 50gal boiler... less heat up time, less exposure, more efficient ...

Maybe somebody could make a living with one, then again, folks in Ethiopia. Make a living on a dollar a year...

Not at this time .Is there any way I can make it planer to you .

[MitchyBourbon]

I say go for it. If your quiet about it and your not selling, what's the problem?

[HolyBear]

I'm not worried about exposure as my biggest pot is 9 gallons and havent used it yet. My 5 gallon pot is my standard. Shoots, how much do you drink? Me a shot or two a day is max. So what wuold I do w/a 50g pot?

How much do I drink? About a half gallon per week of traditional 50%, plus me wife(she's Irish decent mind....) a 5gal boiler wouldn't wet our whistle, besides, who wants to be running a still every spare minute ya got??? Considering kids, grandkids, ballgames, hunting, fishing, gardening, and don't forget work... who's got time to be running a drip at a time???

[pfshine]

I have thought about making a 50 gal boiler just because I dont have many weekends off to make my mashes and do my runs. and at that size it would allow me to fill my oak barrel in two runs instead of 7 or more to me that is at least 2 to 4 months difference.

[Buccaneer Bob]

For me, long-term storage containers are not in my family's budget right now. If making liquor was making me money, I could probably justify spending some money on barrels, glass carboys, virgin bottles, etc.

But since I'm only doing this stuff for cheap hooch to share with friends and family, I can't really justify any major expenditures on storage containers.

And here lately, I'm even having trouble getting friends and family to return my old bottles.

Heck, I'm going to have to go to a deposit system here pretty quickly if some of these rascals don't start getting better at returning my old bottles or rounding up new ones.

So anyway, if I rule out long-term storage, and if I can only use so much alcohol per week, a really ginormous still would cut me down to doing only one run every few months.

And if I'm only doing one run every few months, I'm going to end up forgetting a lot of the finer details of how I'm doing things by the time I do my next run.

I try to take good notes, and I might be able to roughly duplicate my current process in a few months time, but I will surely forget many of the finer details if I wait that long for my next run.

So what has been working for me is pacing myself at one run every 10-14 days and making just enough liquor to supply my peeps for 10-14 days, with maybe a week or two of layover time to give my hooch some time to "age".

[pfshine]

thats the thing I am not doing this for CHEAP HOOCH I am doing this for the best possible spirit I can get. A barrel is the next step in my progression and a larger boiler would accommodate that for me. not only would a larger boiler do this but it would help make cuts more discernible and pronounced. All and all I think I will be building a larger boiler soon for my hobby still.

[Ayay]

The revenoors demand you have the capacity to give.

Don't have the capacity to give.

[arcmaster]

thats the thing I am not doing this for CHEAP HOOCH I am doing this for the best possible spirit I can get. A barrel is the next step in my progression and a larger boiler would accommodate that for me. not only would a larger boiler do this but it would help make cuts more discernible and pronounced. All and all I think I will be building a larger boiler soon for my hobby still.

exactly everybody has there own level in any hobby.

[Buccaneer Bob]

thats the thing I am not doing this for CHEAP HOOCH I am doing this for the best possible spirit I can get.

I didn't say it was bad, just cheap.

Liquor is ungodly expensive where I am. A fifth of something you've heard of starts at the equivalent of about $10.00 USD and goes on up from there, and that even includes the stuff made locally.

Considering that this is a Third World country where many people are scraping by on the equivalent of about $10 USD per day, some more, some less, it just doesn't seem fair that liquor is so expensive here.

I mean, just imagine spending a day's wages on a fifth of run-of-the-mill Jim Beam or Bacardi. It's just crazy.

Well, I can make a fifth of rum for the equivalent of about 55 US cents, and that includes the cost of propane to distill it.

And I'm fortunate enough to be in a position where I can gift a few of those fifths of rum to my friends and family, which frees my peeps up to use their day's wages on something else besides liquor.

I think that's a wonderful thing, really.

Cheap is a good thing around here.

[rtalbigr]

Tater's pretty much made the thing clear for this forum. No 50 gal stills. So I'm guessin that if ya make one ya just better keep that to your self.

That bein said, I know of some individuals that do sell and they use stills from 10 to 50 gal, so sayin a 10-15 gal is strictly hobby isn't necessarily true either.

Webster's says a hobby is something ya like to do in your spare time. So is having a 50 gal still that ya fire up once or twice a year really a hobby?

Ok, there's also been comments about how much do ya drink, I guess the implication being, make enough to satisfy that. Well, that presupposes a lot of things. If all your doing is tried and true, ya drink it white, flavor with juice, distress age, etc, than I guess that would work. But for someone like me who does predominately AG's and extensively ages everything, then my hobby definitely becomes a long term prospect. Even when I make wine and mead it's at least 1-2 years before they are ready to drink.

So I think it boils down to how you are defining this as a hobby. Are you distilling just to have something to drink, or is there more to it than that? For me it involves the entire process. Mashing and fermenting is actually a much bigger part of the hobby than the actual distilling, so in a certain aspect the actual size of my still in a way becomes irrelevant except that it be larger enough to be efficient for my needs. Then there are those in the forum where the actual still is a big part of the hobby. I have looked at pictures of some reflux columns that are beautiful works of art.

Big R

[Durace11]

I'm going with what Mr. P said on page 1, nothing bigger than I can hide with my home brewing stuff. So, 15.5 gallon keg is the max. I can always explain it away as holding wine/mead for long term storage(and some of them are right now) and having a few just means I am storing more longer.

I see the 50 gal barrel like this, if you are using it to only have to run twice a year, that's about three runs in a 15 gal keg, so instead of two 50 gal runs a year you would do six 15 gal runs a year? Once every other month is too much to handle but running a 50 gal barrel every 6 months is fine?!? Doesn't add up IMO. If you actually drink enough that you need to run a 50 gal barrel every month or every other month, that's a different story completely, then you probably need to upgrade or ramp up production on your keg still.

Now I also agree with BigR on doing enough to nautrally age it for several years. This IMO doesn't justify a 50 gal barrel when the same can be done with multiple runs in a keg size still. Strip and store until you have enough for a spirit run, store the spirit runs on glass until you can fill a barrel, how hard is that to understand? Sure the cuts aren't quite as easy as in a larger size but where does it end? 150 gallon boiler? 300 gallons? You are aging a product for years so rushing to get it done doesn't add up with the patience it takes to age it.

Go as big as you think you need but the bigger it is the harder it is to hide and the harder it is to explain. I see it like growing pot indoors, if you are using a spare closet it's probably not an issue but once you take over the entire bedroom you have to ask yourself if you are controlling it or is it controlling you?

[midcarolina]

I am just a simple man....... and I could be totally wrong here but.......... I think Tater is partially trying to protect those who would build a 50 + boiler from themselves..............

" hobby " is just a way to describe personal use distilling.......... cause it's all illegal....
What I mean is If the HD servers are located in the states ( i have no idea ) and pictures and descriptions and such are on here about building and running larger size stills the Gov. could MAKE the owner of the forum hand over user info including IP addresses....... Plus I would imagine there could be legal implications to the owner of the site...........

I think it's an educated guess that as long as the discussion stays about small boilers/stills that johnny law will ignore us as being small fish!!!

Just my 2 cents.......

[mash rookie]

Well, I suppose I may as well jump in. A keg sitting in the corner is a keg. A column is a column. I don’t need anything larger for my column testing than a 15 gallon keg. Testing a six inch column was put on the back burner because it wont run on a keg.

Yes, I am showing off a large boiler build. BUT, I clearly stated that is intended for sale to micro distilleries and will never be run or even tested in my shop. I posted copper porn for you guys to view.
I have a business license and am persunig a business building equipment.

Remember just a few years ago everybody was using two inch columns? Now everybody is building four inch.

If everybody starts building six inch 50 gallon hobby units the Feds will surely start looking closely at HD. Who will make the decission which hobby distillers or how many they want to bring down.

Do you really want that? If you cant destroy your liver with a keg size boiler and four inch column you are doing something wrong.
My two cents.
MR

[squeezins]

You can make more with a 15 gal boiler than you can ever drink. If you have a 50gal or larger then you can run a years worth in a weekend and where's the fun in that. If you want to open a legal distillery then get a large still, if not keep it small and fun.

[HolyBear]

Thank-you Tater for letting this thread run... I think from reading back through this thread that it should be obvious that there are various opinions on the subject. I think some very good points were made on both sides if the issue. I also think feelings were sometimes used instead of logic. Maybe it does atleast warrant a conversation about it between the mods?

Any wayz, it looks like Mr P and MR finally agree on something,...kinda

[mash rookie]

Any wayz, it looks like Mr P and MR finally agree on something,...kinda

We agree on lots of things. We just do it in PM’s so we don’t ruin our public reputation.

[HolyBear]

Oh I get it now, kinda the ol good cop/bad cop rueteen. I should've remembered how that goes, but that night is still kinda foggy...

[myles]

If I had answered this question 6 months ago it would have been simple.

The biggest boiler you would ever need is a dedicated strip/wash boiler that provides enough low wines to charge your spirit boiler. So lets say you are using a 50 litre keg as your spirit boiler then your wash boiler should produce 40 litres at 30% ABV. Going by the rough and ready 1/5th calculation, that means your wash boiler would need to be charged with 200 litres, so a 250 to 300 litre drum would be more than big enough.

However things have moved on since then. Energy wise, probably the most efficient means of stripping a wash for the home distiller has to be some form of continuous stripping still. One of the big reasons IMO is that with a conventional wash boiler at the end of the run you are left with a big boiler full of hot waste that you can't reuse. Wasted energy.

Use a smaller boiler on a continuous basis and you can recover the energy from the spent wash, to preheat the wash you are feeding into the system. A smaller boiler is also easier to insulate, but my gut reaction is that the big energy saving will come form re-claiming the energy in the spent wash, and by NOT ending up with lots of hot wash at the end of the strip run.

The energy consumed to strip the alcohol out of a 200 litre charge will be the same in both methods, however where that energy comes from is a different matter entirely. Throwing away lots of energy at the end of the run is just expensive. How important it is to YOU is a personal issue.

[Boda Getta]

This is a touchy issue. I suspect any of us could justify whatever size boiler we wanted to use,
whether it’s 50 or 100 gallons. But we need to keep one thing in mind. What we all are doing,
us in the US, is against State and Federal law. The State and Federal law enforcement know we
are out there. We are allowed to practice our hobby at the pleasure of these authorities. Since
starting this hobby I have believed that we are allowed to pursue our hobby because the
authorities view us as exactly what we claim we are; just a bunch of guys who want to distill a
few gallons for our personal use and have absolutely no desire in transporting or selling. We and
them both know that what we are doing is illegal, but they have decided, for the present time, that
they have more serious crimes to pursue. The only thing we have going for us is our credibility;
at present they believe we are hobbyist distillers. Don’t think for a moment they don’t monitor
this hobby and this forum. If they ever decide this hobby is getting too popular or they keep
reading about folks building larger stills than what they believe is “hobby size”, this tacit and
unspoken agreement between us could change. I guess what I am saying is, for our survival, the
important thing is not what we think is too large for a hobbyist rig, but what they think is too
large.

Just my opinion, I could be wrong.

BG

[arcmaster]

Listen i'm not doing anything illegal here i have applied for the permit i do have interest in a micro distllery just not now i want to practice with this size boiler and various columns and this permit will let me practice all i want with fermenting and distilling i just have to burn it in my truck and equipment here on the farm. it will also be used as a demo for some folks that also have interest in this size boiler. now that being said the only ones needing protected here are the people building stove top potential bombs with pots and pans and flour so they can poison themselvs and freinds. holly crap i dont know how some of these people havent blown themselvs up or burnt down there homes.

[HolyBear]

" I guess what I am saying is, for our survival, the important thing is not what we think is too large for a hobbyist rig, but what they think is too large.

Just my opinion, I could be wrong.

BG"

Yes, yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to get to... So, where do you think they(the authorities)will learn what size boiler is considered too big for a hobbyist??? Answer,.. right here, where else. HD is where all the best information about home distillation for personal use can be found. I'm sure the authorities have learned from the information available on this site too, so, because of that what we say on here, does have an effect on their opinion ....