New to distillation, or simply new to the HD forums.
** Your first post MUST go here. Introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your interest in distilling. Any posts asking distilling questions will be deleted. **
I've been reading this forum for a couple of months and have learned alot about home distillation! I don't have the space to build my own, so I ordered a 13 gallon milk can still with 40" X 2" reflux column from Mile High Distilling. Managed to run a batch this weekend and I enjoyed every minute of it! Of course visions of an all-copper homemade beauty are in my head. But all considered, for me, the Mile High is a good starting point for learning small scale distilling.
At work, I run several distillation columns ranging from 120 feet to just over 200 feet. Boy is there a difference between a home still and an industrial column. Besides taking almost a half million gallons of feed per day, the main differences are that we use pressure to affect temperatures in the column and we use side draws to get a purer product. We consistently make 40,000 gallons of 99.98% pure benzene every day. So, if you are thinking about upsizing your operation, I may be able to help.
Thanks for all of the knowledge that you guys have already imparted. And I look forward to the on-going conversation.
Welcome aboard. Sounds like you will be able to contribute some good stuff to this wonderful knowledge base. Looking forward to see some posts from you.
And dreaming about copper porn comes with the territory. Some fight it off better then the rest of us.
On The Bayou wrote:At work, I run several distillation columns ranging from 120 feet to just over 200 feet. Boy is there a difference between a home still and an industrial column. Besides taking almost a half million gallons of feed per day, the main differences are that we use pressure to affect temperatures in the column and we use side draws to get a purer product. We consistently make 40,000 gallons of 99.98% pure benzene every day. So, if you are thinking about upsizing your operation, I may be able to help
I am wondering if you could share the designs for these columns I could be worth trying to downscale them for home distillation.
Thanks for the welcome. I have been spending all of my HD time over on the recipes pages. I have already made and run a batch with corn meal and sugar (didn't like the raw taste of the corn meal). And I have a batch of NCHooch''s Carolina Bourbon in the fermenter now. It smells so good, I'm thinking it just needs a little butter and some salt and pepper. I'm licking my lips waiting for that to finishing fermenting. Planning on aging that for at least 45 minutes. And I have a plum brandy that will be ready for the heat on Fri/Sat. I find myself getting nervous if I don't have something fermenting for the weekend.
A few of you have asked about industrial-sized distillation and I will be more than happy to share... just ain't sure which forum to post that in.
Some fight it off better then the rest of us. 
