Home Distiller

Yep, wash fermented completly. I took hydrometer readings 24 hours apart and both were the same. The urn has a control dial to control the heat level. Your last point sounds like whats happening to me. As I see my head temp start to rise, I back off my collection and the temp drops soon after. I the...

Nixon Stone Head. 41 inch column (2 inch), packed with SS scrubbers. Boiler - 15L urn, low med high. High=2400w My spirits have what seems to be a faint smell of caramel. Im assuming I took to much methanol and tails. I only discard 50ml from the 25L wash as foreshots, Im going to increase this to 1...

So once my head temp hits 78c, how does one tell how much time the column needs to equalise?

15mins, 30mins, 1hr etc?

In regards to stopping collection before the tails start coming through. Is stopping it prior to the temp just hitting 82c ok?

A few posts Ive read say let your column equalise for about 30mins, this would depend on your still.

Once the head temp is stabilised has it achieved equilibrium.

My head temp seems to stablished after about 15 minutes once its heated, am I right to go at this point?

Whats the best type of water to use for diluting neutral spirits?
Distilled , purified , demineralised etc?

I was going to distill water in my still to use, but I found you need a pretty powerful condensor to do this.

They say discard the first 50ml for a 20L wash. My urn is only 15L capacity.

Hence I will run a 10L wash. For 10L do I discard the first 25ml, or does it not work like this?

Paul

Yeah, i did have a thought that the collection pipe / valve may be blocked. So to test this I tipped some water into the top of the condensing chamber and water did come out of the collection pipe. Im guessing what my query is, will there be a remarkbly reduced difference in the collection amounts b...

I made sure that the collection tube did not protrude into the chamber, so I know thats not the problem. The urn does have a low setting, so I guess as you guys have stated, set it to high to bring to the boil, then switch it to low for the distallation process. Im still confused as even on medium I...

Well, I gave my still a test run yesterday just with water. I used Matt's Nixon Stone design as a basis to make mine, with a few slight differences. My still is a Nixon offset head 41inch 50mm Column packed with SS scrubbers, 15L Hot water urn (2400W) for the boiler, Condensor is 260mm long. Cooling...