Home Distiller

My last ferment of this took forever. But I didn't ad the recommended amount of yeast. Although I decided to distill at around 1.020 it produced a great product. I'm going to try again soon with more yeast to see if I can get it to ferment in a week or so instead of a month.

Did a sugar wash for the first time. Took forever to ferment.....thinking I should have used more yeast. After it fermented to 1.020 I got tired of waiting and ran it anyways. I got 10 jars of stuff at about 165-170 proof. Cut that down to 120 and ran it through a brita filter three times. Turned ou...

Hmmm. I've been experimenting with actually boiling vs just using a 90degree water. But the jury us still out.

Maybe the bucket lid was loose and let more co2 escape? How much and what kind of yeast did you use?

So ran this stuff over the weekend. It was about 8% and produced 7 half pints of 180 proof and I collected 20 half pints in total.
Feeling pretty good about this thing.
Now to make cuts and water it down to 40-50%.

Well brewed 10 gallons of beer this weekend. Had enough second runnings to make a 5 gallon wash added 6 lbs sugar to get about 1.080 gravity. Will ferment it out and try to run it through the reflux.
Then I'll do the straight sugar wash next.

Cool sounds like there's no right or wrong answer just depends how you want everything to taste. Thanks for the tips guys. Back to the lab for me. Gonna try a sugar wash next for cheap practice!

I got agree on the chest freezer. Makes a great fermentation chamber.

Yeah I guess it's all situational. So one more question and I'll leave it alone and go experiment some more. When combining stripping runs do you typically dilute it with water? For instance if I have 3 gallons at 40% would you want to ad a few gallons so you don't run the still dry? Or does that di...

Looks great. Did you weld up that keg yourself?

I originally thought to make a whiskey for instance you'd want to retain flavor so just run as a pot still. But that didn't give me quite the abv I wanted. Would it retain some flavor just running in reflux mode with no stripping runs? But if you're going for a neutral spirit stripping runs are also...

Thanks for the reply.

Ok. So that's a lot of stillin to get a good spirit run going. Which is no big deal. But what will happen if I just reflux a 5 gallon sugar wash? Is it just less efficient? And less abv?
And I understand you don't want to distill anything over about 40% correct?

It's from hillbilly stills. It was on sale so I went ahead and got it. I need a ton of practice! As far as running I think my banjo burner is too big to run slow so I think I'll just use a smaller burner so I can slow it down. As far as running the sugar wash do I just reflux it one time? Is it cons...

Hi guys! I'm new to this hobby and so far I am loving it! I have been a homebrewer for a number of years and I finally thought I'd try my hand at distilling! I bought a stainless reflux still that has a separate reflux chamber and can be run as either a pot still or a reflux. I went ahead and did th...