Home Distiller

There have been a few posts in the past about distilling beer. I believe the two main problems with distilling beer is that it foams a lot and the hops give the distillate a strange taste. Supposedly if you are wanting to distill beer, your best bet at a quality product is trying to make gin.

Guest, if you're going to make the time argument against growing your own grain, then I'm going to have to make the same argument against distilling your own alcohol. When you factor in the value of your time, it is rarely worth while to distill...Of course, this is a hobby for me so I don't care if...

Hydrogen fuel seems to be the scientific flavour of the week. Hydrogen fuel has a great power to weight ratio, but a lousy power to volume ratio, hence it makes a great fuel for sending rockets into space, but not a great fuel for cars. It seems counterproductive to turn a dense fuel into a less den...

Hydrogen fuel seems to be the scientific flavour of the week. Hydrogen fuel has a great power to weight ratio, but a lousy power to volume ratio, hence it makes a great fuel for sending rockets into space, but not a great fuel for cars. It seems counterproductive to turn a dense fuel into a less den...

Well, you have to take into consideration your starting proof(4% wash vs 20% wash). In general with my pot still I usually get a wee more bit than one theoretical plate:

http://homedistiller.org/refluxdesign.htm#multi

Well, if you are really set on sticking with a 5L still, you could rig up some sort of resevoir/drain system like many scotch distillers use. You could use the heated cooling water of your condenser to preheat the resevoir so as to reduce the amount of wasted energy. Of course, the simplest thing to...

Well...one study doesn't really amount to a hill of beans when dealing with something as insanely complex as the human brain.

I've taken care of it. To fix the wiki, go to history, copy the old version, then paste it into the new version. There may be an even easier way, but I haven't figured it out.

I believe the spiral still is a varient on a wok still(aka the overhyped Amazing Still). In the design, the distillation is done at fairly low temperatures over the course of several days.

Yes, sugar can be added during fermentation. In order to achieve really high ethanol concentrations(~23%), sugar is added slowly as to reduce the amount of stress on the yeast.

Well...having a lab test your sample is going to be quite expensive. If you want to cheaply test to see if your stuff will kill/maim/blind/etc, you may want to consider animal testing :twisted: . Mice/Rats can be bought fairly cheaply at a pet store. Be sure to scale down the volume of hooch you giv...

http://homedistiller.org/intro/methanol

Actually, the post is fairly correct. The key thing to remember is that the author said: fermentation of sugar, not the fermentation of molasses, or the fermentation of grain, etc. In a pure sugar wash the production of methanol is extremely small.

By pipe going downwards I'm guessing you mean the condenser. Adding scrubbers to your condenser would increase the amount of copper in contact with vapor which may be beneficial. Also, if you have a high vapor flow through your still, increasing the surface area inside the condenser may help make su...

While cool the scrubbers are unexpanded they will seem loose enough. But if you heat them up they will expand

I don't believe that stainless steel expands very much when heated 70C.

Well, it is unlikely that there bubbles being formed if the wash wasn't fermenting. A simple way to test if you have made alcohol is to taste a milliliter of your wash. If it isn't sickeningly sweet, then fermentation has occured. If you can't taste any sweetness, then practiclly all the sugar has b...

This will give your whiskey a uniform flavor. This brings up an interesting question, does the typical home distiller want their product to be uniform in quality? Uniform quality is an absolute must for commercial distillers since a single lousy bottle can turn off a loyal customer for a lifetime. ...

Whisky, technology and marketing is another good book for covering the theory of distillation. It has a great history section and theory section. I've been reading the 4th edition of The Alcohol Textbook, and it does have some good information in it, however, the editor did a poor job as the same in...

Chill filtering your final product will take care of the crystals forming. All you have to do is put the rum in the freezer overnight. In the morning, filter through a coffee filter.

Also, if you ever have a wash boil over, you'll appreciate being able to scrub the inside of your column.

How long will this take to ferment?

There are a lot of factors affecting how long it will take. Temperature is a big variable. How active the yeast are is another. Bacterial infection will also reduce the ethanol yeild.

is it possible to scale down the column to a stovetop size (~40cm, i guess), and still make a drinkable and safe product? Well, you don't need a column to make a safe drinkable product :lol: so yes. Anyway, I use a ~30 cm long column that is ~3 cm in diameter(this is as long as I could go without h...

Its important to remember this is a hobby. That means that decisions aren't based soley on economics, but on what you enjoy doing. If you take into account the value of your time, it would be difficult for anyone of us to economiclly justify making their own alcohol. Here's my estimate of how much i...

With the corn to total volume ratio you used(12lb corn to 15 gallons) it would may be difficult to feel much of a change in viscosity. I've done a few washes with 3kg(~6.3lb) per 5 gallons total volume and the change in viscosity is very noticible in the first ~3 minutes of stirring after the enzyme...

Sipping a wee bit of mash is probably the easiest way of telling whether or not all the sugar has fermented out. If you are concerned that a nasty bacteria infection has taken over your wash, you may want to boil the mash. 15 seconds in a microwave easily boils a few milliliters at the bottom of a s...

Banning that IP adress, or making it so that the main page isn't editable might be a way to deal with this problem if it continues to happen.

Someone with the floating IP of: 69.50.XXX.XXX is basiclly being a jerk. Luckily, its easy to revert the page back to the way it should be.

Errr, I think I might have been the one giving out misinformation! 95.6% it is Heck, I don't know :lol: On the homedistiller website, there are two references to the limit being 95.6% http://homedistiller.org/types.htm http://homedistiller.org/dtw.htm There are also two references to the limit bein...

Yttrium, you obviously made a little typo!

Hmm...well, that'll show me to not just cut and paste. I guess Tony has some misinformation on his site.

http://homedistiller.org/types.htm

http://homedistiller.org/dtw.htm

Without using some fancy tricks(molecular sieve, etc) I believe 95.6% ABV is the highest you can get based.

I tried the scowering pad route and was not satisfied with the results. The stainless steel ones rusted (?) and the copper ones turned out to be some kind of copper coated metal. The copper mesh is the real deal. It sounds like you bought some low quality scrubbers. When buying copper scrubbers, al...