Home Distiller

Looking at the foto of your rig, I would put the u-bend before the 90* elbow. Put it into the horizontal plane with the elbow turning from horizontal into your vertical product condenser. The way it is now, there is a natural (bouyant) force to cause the vapors to rise into the shotgun deflag, henc...

Sounds like w/SPP in you're running it with too much power. The deflag tubes are much smaller volume than your 3" column so they flood with less power. Liquid is trying to drain down and the vapor keeps pushing it up due to amount of power from below. Flooding of a 3" SPP packed column an...

That upturn in the pipe after your reflux condenser goes so high and where the butterfly is located confuses me also. Just there to stop any liquid bubbling into the product line. The top sight tower bubbles with boiling liquid in this design. If I had to guess, i'd say with that upturn in your out...

Shotgun is open to atmosphere of course, otherwise product couldn't flow out of it
Attached is pic, top of the still is the 3 inch shotgun condenser used for reflux.

I have a shotgun condenser at the top of my tower, and just before that is a 3x3x2 outlet that goes to my product condenser which is a 2inch by 15inch shotgun condenser. When I shut off the butterfly valve to the product output and attempt a full reflux I get product being output over the top of my ...

that should really blur the cuts and blockages speed up vapor not slow it... (unless condenser output is near totally blocked with soaked SPP) Try a colder shotgun condenser with no blockage and an angled liebig final condenser rather than SPP Well I know how to stop it from happening, I am just cu...

If you have a pot big enough dump the shotgun condenser in a ~5% citric acid bath and boil it, will be spotless in 10-30 minutes. Citric acid is also used as passivation of stainless steel so doesn't harm it, actually protects it if it has been damaged somehow.

I have put some SPP at the bottom of my 3 inch wide by 10inch long shotgun condenser on my VM still in an attempt to slow down the speed of the vapor. With the valve closed to the product and attempting full reflux there is an interesting thing happening. The shotgun condenser like this is operating...

I just finished stripping the 90l in two separate runs. The sugar and dextrose both smelt good to me, no sulfur or anything bad noticeable. Both tasted pretty clean too. I ran it through my SPP VM still because I found a better way to clean it and thought why not get something more pure. I am runnin...

Bit surprised my brews are still going but their average temperature has only been 22C . The sugar brew is nearly done as it is only bubbling every few seconds now, looking at probably 6 days at 10g/litre yeast for 12.5% ABV at 22C. The dextrose run is closer to 15% and probably has 2 more days to go.

Tried all that and every other piece of advice I've found here, in regards to sugar washes, and I've never had anything near neutral. Even after bentonite and carbon, which I am doing right now, it still has this signature funk that I always seem to have, which, thinking back, is probably why I sto...

The most recent test was with chalk (gypsum, plaster of paris) after seeing someone mention it in an old thread about people adding it to wine but the stuff I got must have been different because it had a burnt smell, actually what I remember the stuff smelling like from art class, and it just ruin...

Here is another idea, if you are using a tri-clover to attach the column to the keg, how about finding a lid that you can clamp on the bottom with the tri-clover so that you can pour the cleaning solution into the top, let soak and then just loosen the tri-clover to drain, maybe hose down to rinse....

I think I've posted before that most of my own kids, all adults, don't like my clean booze. They want the buzz. Last week I had a blind taste test of my rum and two expensive commercial bottles. One guy, said he liked the commercial better because it had more bite and buzz! Only real alcoholics pre...

Of course there's more than one way to skin a cat. I was just thinking that you are making SPP cleaning out to be a bigger PITA than it really is. Anyway, maybe getting a large enough pvc pipe with one end capped so that you can slip your entire column into a citric acid/water solution without taki...

There is something I don't get about the method behind your madness (not to be taken the wrong way). From a couple vids on the matter it seems like nothing more than a 10-15 min soak in acidic water. Maybe I'm missing something? Is cleaning SPP a bigger operation than using fining agents? - If so t...

Any updates on your experiments? What is your current method for getting a neutral? Hard to believe this thread went silent two years ago and honestly I have not done any real experimenting except that I have gotten into the habit of dropping copper off cuts into my wash for a day or so to help wit...

From what I could find on the net is seems like activated charcoal works on non-polar chemicals and bentonite works on polar ones. Already have pounds of both so a one-two punch on low wines seems like my next test. Any updates on your experiments? What is your current method for getting a neutral?

Experiment started: 360ml water 54g sugar 30°C in 1l bottle with airlock 18g dried yeast 13:00 central european time 30min - the foam has more volume than the wash. One bubble per three seconds. 1h - I had to shake the foam down 2h - The problems with the foam have stopped. All 2-3 seconds a bubble...

I finally found a local source of cat litter that is cheap enough to try. Ground it up in a grain mill. Ended up with a very fine powder mixed with a bit of sand sized bits. Don't know how OP got it to clear in a couple of hours but the stuff I had took a couple of days. I have since read that it n...

DAD300 wrote:Where are you building a pressurized vessel?

Still boilers should never see any pressure...

Yeah I probably shouldn't have used that word, "Sealed" is better.

Since you can TIG you have many options available to you. Beer keg, yes you can buy them new. Breweries do :think: . You also can look at stainless barrels like wine barrels that come in a variety of sizes. Olive oil comes in stainless barrels. Here in the states small ss barrels are used for maple...

IMO this forum has an American context. It's much orientated on tasteful distilled grain spirits. What many here describe as a good vodka, is a relatively high distilled whiskey with strict cuts. No use for carbon here. If you look at Russian homedistillers, you see not only higher columns (Lava or...

Beer keg mate. Beer keg. Add a 1 inch ntp nut or furrel to screw the water heater element in or go with 2 inch furrel and get the adapter setup from stilldragon.com for your element. If your column is 2 inches it will clamp right to the 2.inch furrel already on the keg. Add yourself a drain port an...

Carbon treatment (stone charcoal, pipe 1m long 2" diameter, flow control) removes all the taste, except for the heads (so a good heads cut is even more important for this). It tastes lighter after that, it has lost the body. It's perfect, if you want to mazerate or vapor infuse with it, becaus...

1) Do a stripping run, don't add the heads, strip till most alcohol is gone (so most tails is in) 2) Treat result with base (bicarb, etc) and let it rest for some time. 3) Do another run this time making sure the entire rig is clean. So basically do a steam clean before you distil your low wines. 4...

Good plan. But now you loose almost all the time benefit of the huge yeast amount. Bicarb treatment also needs time. But, the main added benefit of the fast ferment is, at least in theory, that there are no esters. Bicarb shouldn't make a differrence or...the theory is wrong. The main benefit of fa...

Sorry, somewhere at page 5 or 6 I forgot, what hoochlover wanted to achieve or prove at the beginning. It is still an interesting experiment for me, but more theoretically. Ok hoochlover, 400ml water, 60g sugar, 1g epsom salt, 20g bakers yeast, 30°C? What yeast? The dried stuff or fresh? A 1l bottl...

When I run my SPP-column, the temperature just over the packing rises fast from room temp to about 80°C first. After that it drops slower and slower to 78.3 (or lower if there are foreshots). This 80°C is the proof, that the first vapor is not 95% but about 85% at the beginning. And the main goal i...

Ok that is interesting, where did you see that 5-7 percent is optimal? I agree that 1.1 isn't the upper limit, it is just what I was comfortable using on this larger scale. And it was good I only used that much because I already wasted so much due to my shitty fermentation vessel. I can't find wher...