Building an Alembic with Optional Offset Column Hybrid

[AlChemE]

It's funny how once you make a still, all you want to do is build another, and another, and another.....

It's been a few years in the making, but I am getting close to finishing up my still. It started as a simple idea, and inevitably, I had to make it more complex than needed. I was at the antiques store and came across a vendor selling a 100% copper vase and sphere. Whenever I see copper, I usually think how I can turn it into a still... I thought I could make it into an interesting alemebic head like those Scotch distilleries.

I wanted to make something that didn't look like a bunch of plumbing parts put together. Something that looked like a single sheet of copper molded and shaped to fit. So I opened the sphere up, sanded off all the old solder (in case of lead) and resoldered the sphere together with the vase on top of it.

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I started thinking about what kind of boiler I wanted to use. I figured a keg wouldn't look right with a beautiful onion head, so I started looking around for copper boilers. I came across this:

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I usually make 5 gallon all grain brews, so this would be large enough, it had a good thickness to it, and for $175 with free two day shipping I couldn't pass it up!

I was really impressed with the quality, but I thought that the thin bottom could warp and wear quickly. I wanted this to be a stove top distiller, so I needed it to work with a spiral stove element. I had an old flange laying around that had the same OD as a large burner, so I traded a flask of whiskey for a machinist to turn it smooth. I soldered it to the bottom. My thoughts are that the flange will provide a buffer between the ON/OFF cycles of the burner and maintain the heat more evenly.

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To keep the still safe, I had a 5 PSI pressure relieve valve laying around from work that was pulled from a Vendome pot still. As ugly as it looks, I figured it would be good practice to add to the boiler to keep it from over-pressurizing in the event of a blockage.

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With the boiler and columns semi-complete, I did a mock-up of what it could look like...

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I wanted to use 3" TC ferrules for ease of connecting and disconnecting the boiler to the column. It's huge! But I really like the way it looks.

That's it for now! But I've got a ton more to this rig that I'll share soon!