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Oh boy, where do I begin? How about an apology for your constant stream of off-topic personal insults toward me ? I'm not always right - don't claim to be. Your constant stream of "wow is steveea wrong" with zero detail nor any contradiction, is just childish. I WANT to discuss distilling...

I am still playing with performance and extraction efficiency. This is supposed to be a stripping still, so when I have stuff coming out at 60-70%, I feel I am 'over doing it', and using more resources than necessary. Not really. In order to get your proof down you'll need to try and get your alcoh...

Really excellent build. I believe you are near the practical limits of flow rate for 2", and your power efficiency is good. Hard to beat that.

Steve, you are not factoring in grain in solids are you? This is getting pretty far off-topic, but solids don't change the boiling point (they impact nucleation). Pure water boils at 100C = 212F at 1atm. If you add polar solute then you can increase the BP a little. Seawater boils at ~102.5C, ~216F...

Doug asked me not to convolute his thread. Pope's thread would also get a bit convoluted with this post. But I did want to post this as a visual response to one (or two) of stevea's assertions (on Pope's thread) about a particular design that he said either did not exist or wouldn't work (or some s...

http://adiforums.com/index.php?/topic/8458-finding-the-right-alcohol-proof-rubber/ "Look here the chart says..." "But the chart doesn't say at what percentage..." "...and temperature...". adiforum 2017 looks worse than homedistiller 2005. Unbelievable. ... That poster ...

There is a LOT of FUD wrt plastics & toxicity. *SOME* plastics will deform and soften in the presence of certain solvents. Some will deteriorate in the presence of extremely strong acids or bases. Any fear of "toxicity" is related to the "plasticizes" used when forming the pl...

I see no issues with the liebig . Reflux stills would run with at least 9:1 reflux ratio and often higher . It only needs to deal with about a 1/10 of the vapour produced ,( as the rest is returned as reflux) , so about 200w worth on a 2kw element . First - I'm less-than-a-noob; I'm working on desi...

*IF* you want optimal proof-gallons (the most ethanol) - then you should learn to drink 10% ABV grist-y wash. {no one rational does that}. I do not understand the point of this comment? Maximal "proof gallons"= max ethanol. So if you drink wash you don't have the losses at the bottom. No ...

You should get grim's thoughts on this to round out your thought process. He put together a low budget, tri clamped solution for steam injection with an eductor head. All tri clamp. Not 40k. Not 10k. Puh,,,prolly not more than 1k. How many barrels do you plan on laying down a year? More than 600? H...

Lol, bit late, but I need to say this is a fantastic thread, kudos! And I figure I can add a bit of tangential info on fermentation. Grey Goose is continuously fermented, as is the New Zealand brewery whose name escapes me but is pretty well documented (and patents long ago expired). A number of ot...

Excessive Maillard? Hmm? Were you able to sample for yourself how excessive? Not everybody likes foie grass evidently. Luv the pun : Maillard, mallard, goose => foie gras. Definitely not. I base this comment on reports on "Whisky Science ..' by Piggott .... They report what some Scottish disti...

... It doesn't intrinsically require energy to separate etoh from h20. It isn't endothermic or expthermic. Thank you all for your interest. My still does work. I will totally admit I have had to rationalize some of the results and it took a lot of failures to get it to work. And I do still have pro...

My still is continuous. It requires enough reflux to ensure the temperature gradient so the top of the column is colder than the bottom. Any rectification column (of a given height with a given packing) needs the same reflux given mash ABV and given product ABV, whether its batch or continuous feed...

Let me say that none of this is very obvious at first glance. There is a fair bit of complexity in a column still or continuous still. The reflux to energy relationship is pretty simple. The reflux to product ABV is complex. The number of plates needed vs some reflux amount isn't so clear. That ther...

Imagine a different paradigm. What if rather than boiling ALL the water repeatedly we inject boiling beer mid point in the column so that ONLY pure water dripped off the bottom of the column into the boiler. What reflux rate would this require? Easy peasy. In a McCabe-Thiele method the "qualit...

We've had some disconnects. What does latent heat of vaporization mean to you? To me it means a pound of water requires 3 times as much energy to phase change to vapor as does a pound of etoh. To me, a gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds. A gallon. Of Etioh is about 6 pounds. Does this seem about...

Football wrote: "So reflux cost energy because it reduces rate of product take off,,," It also raises the abv. You have to think in proof gallons. And then you have to identify which "efficiency" needs to be exploited the most. Usually labor hours will be the priority. *IF* you ...

stevea wrote: ↑Mon Mar 14, 2022 2:24 am ...
A ml of EtOH is about 46 gram and 57ml
...

A MOL of EtOH is about 46 gram and 57ml. Sorry - but some auto-correct is at work.

.... Pre-heating wash helps, but it's not huge. It's a small fraction of the still energy ... I need to correct/revise/clarify that. The energy amount isn't large at all compared to the energy used for any rectification of neutral spirits from say a 10%ABV wash. *BUT* the heating of the feed change...

.... Where could the discrepancy be :?: I feel certain there is some measurement error. It could be he's not getting azeotrope, nor even neutral spirits (US Fed definition 95%ABV). [that's not enough to explain it ...] It could be the power in isn't correctly measured. [** my guess] It might even b...

Phenolics/tannins. Though they may make your wash taste bad, but you *should* lose most of these in the distillation (I speak from theory, not experience). The more volatile ones have a BP around 200C. The most volatile - creasol, guaiacol, are the smoke in scotch whisky, and a bit makes it through....

Why no jet cooker? Excellent question. For those unaware, a jet cooker is basically an eductor that pulls wet mash through an oriface gap using steam pressure and thus instantly gelatinizes the mash grist starch. Corn-fuel ethanol pants use these, however their corn has been wetted for several days...

The goal was to develop this system, and controls, at lab scale then upsize for a full production whiskey distillery at several liters per minute capacity. What's the advantage of producing a continuous output of wort given that fermentation is batch process ? Cost. This system would allow a medium...

Demy wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 5:44 am For the preparation of beer it uses a small mash-tun with motorized blades, the engine is a 12V powered car wiper, it works beautifully.

Will car wiper motors operate continuously for days under load ?

You could use a part of the wasted energy to preheat the wash. But this won't help much, because it needs much less energy to heat the wash to its boiling point than to vaporize it. Help much? Mate, 10% wash will make vapor at about 190 F (88C). If you can recover enough heat to get beer injection ...

TL;DR ? I suppose I should have begun with a thumbnail sketch. The system presented allows continuous mash production using some remarkably small tanks for <viscosity, gelatinization, saccharification>. A 1 liter/minute flow rate system requires tanks liquid volumes of <60 (228l) gallons total, and...

Operational Considerations: How do we get the system to ‘steady state’(SS), at startup ? First, let’s consider basics. At 1lpm flow the tanks (optimally) fill at times: TANK1: T=34min TANK2: 34+64 = T=98min TANK3: 34+64+114 = T=212 min (3.6 hr) So ~3.6 hours (212min) after startup the first drops o...

UNEXPLORED FERMENTER OPTION: Adding a TANK4, for yeast propagation and starting the fermentation strongly, without lag was considered, but not implemented or tested. Levelspiel text covers the dynamics of generic ‘fermentations’. The yeast dynamics are not ‘first order’ tho’ they are quite close du...

More Theory: CSTR A “Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor” consists of one or more sequential tanks performing the same reaction. *Sometimes* splitting a reaction this way results in dramatically smaller tank volumes. Just as an example, the 1 lpm CME requires a single TANK3 with 114 liter liquid volume...