Hello from Finland to you all fellow distillers, I'm new to this board. I became recently interested in making alcohol drinks for personal use after doing years of chemistry and other chemical engineering hobby - I have made alcohol only once in my life, few years ago and it was not a success at all because I paid little attention to any details whatsoever and just put some yeast with sugar and waited for a week - my air lock leaked and eventually I forgot it and it got all nasty and I succeeded to extract some formed alcohol with my borosilicate chemistry distilling apparatus, but I only got some few % yield and I dumped them.
Now I suddenly became interested in making my own recipe of Jagermeister and I thought, hell, I need my own booze for those attempts. So, I went to my warehouse and got my 60-L barrel distiller which I originally built for plastic waste pyrolysis, but never used for anything, so it was practically brand new. Now, I made the yeast-sugar brew with proper airlocks and activated carbon filtering in a 60-L barrel and I got decent results with the very-hated turbo yeast, and prepared a distillation setup. I collected a total of 4 bottles of liquid, first to with 200mL glass jars and two latter in 2L soda bottles. I never measured the first two's alcohol content, but the third one has 80% and fourth has 60% of alcohol by volume according to float-alcometer. Now, all these distillates had a strange smell, and when I opened the still flange I found out something had leaked from the barrel coating and stuff, so I will probably just discard the fluids. My reflux column is of 1.8m height and I packed it with leca aggregate, and it obviously was not a good choice. Well, It's already on it's way to scrapyard..
..Since I'm building a new one, all from 316 stainless. I got some 30kg worth of stuff from my scrapper recently. I thought to make it smaller initially, but since I have very limited time to do this at my current life situation, I'd make one-two bigger fractionations and go long with the results. I'll post more about this project into another topic in it's proper area when it gets going..
Say hello from Finland
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Re: Say hello from Finland
Welcome Spirit Tisler, sounds like your using a lot of plastics in your distilling. This is a big no no as plastics will leach into your product. Start reading crankys post 'a little spoon feeding for new distillers'. It's in novices right at the top. This will give you a step up in this great hobby. Enjoy the forums!
If you wear underwear then it's a dress!
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... 15&t=62150 How I run a small still
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... 15&t=62150 How I run a small still
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Re: Say hello from Finland
Hi and thanks for the tips. For your convenience I foresaw that my first distillation was pretty much ruined so I just got some clean bottles around to collect the separates in the first place. I'll use all-SS and all-glass for my next batch which I intent to actually be made for drinking.
Re: Say hello from Finland
Tervetuloa! and again welcome to the Forums! From a neighboring Swede
One could imagine a state where shining is legal and the government is losing taxes, therefore moonshining is an illegal practice. It is perfectly safe the problem is greedy governments. Not health or poisonus shine as they claim!