Why You Can't Control Temperature

[fizzix]

=This deserves its own thread=
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Why You Can't Control Temperature
by Saltbush Bill:

A few things for you to ponder, regarding temps and how alcohols react in a still boiler
Firstly you can not regulate the temperature of the wash in your boiler, there for its kinda hard to regulate the vapor temperature.
Water boils at 100 C ......no matter how much heat you apply to it it wont get hotter...it will just boil harder and create more steam/ vapor.
Alcohols work in the same manner.
Acetone boils at 56C
Methanol at 64.7C
Ethanol at 78C
Water at 100c
That is only the boiling point of four of the many things found in the average wash.
Now to complicate things further you are trying to boil a mix of the above ...........what is the boiling point of that mixture????????
The answer is that the boiling point is constantly changing as the different / lower boiling point alcohols leave the boiler. It will increase the whole time as the ABV of the wash gets lower.
This is one of the things about distilling that many newbies have trouble understanding at first.
The last thing worth thinking about is that if you put a shallow bowl of water outside in hot weather , after a few days the bowl is empty. Liquids don't need to boil to evaporate and that is partly the reason you can never make perfect cuts / separate the fractions of a wash perfectly. Different still types do a better or worse job of it, pot stills smear worse than most.