Hello from Scandinavia

[Maris Otter]

Hi there, new Scandinavian guy making a first post.

I've been lurking the forums for about two years now, but it seems like the search function is not longer going to answer all different questions, and I have to join the discussion.

I started of as homebrewer but the bottling killed a bit of the interest. It's also much easier to to bring some homestil rather than 10 bottles of homebrew. Been distilling for about a year, mostly gin, vodka, aquavit and whiskey. Favorite vodkas have up until now been made by long grain rice and oatmeal, but I don't have all that much experience with other grains(potato wasn't a hit). I mostly use Angel Yellow Label, Lallemand Voss, Safale BE-256 and T-58. For aging I have mostly been using local oak, birch and aspen.

My interests include almost anything related to distilling, but I want to do some whiskey and rum first before moving on to some Asian stuff like baiju, soju and shochu. Learning about how Empirical Spirits add koji to their malt to add that nutty flavor found in sake and shochu has inspired me to wanna explore that later on.

My current set up:
20L (5gal) sankey keg
Column is a 4' long 2" stainless steel column
1 1/2" shotgun condenser with three 12mm copper tubes (one got jammed trying to clean it)
3500 watt element (SCR controlled)
Reflux is done by copper cross tubes now, but planing on making a copper dimroth condenser later for increased reflux power
Packing is the aliexpress stainless steel spp (not the cheapest, but works well enough)

Looking to increase it to a 60L keg with a 4" column all stainless driven by two 3500 watt elements in the future

[contrahead]

I started of as homebrewer but the bottling killed a bit of the interest.

Howdy.

Your right about the bottling. Entirely too much work for something that gets consumed so swiftly. It's much more expedient and not much more expensive to let someone else or some company do all the hard work; so just buy the finished beer.

[Berserk]

Welcome to the forum from another Scandinavian!

How's the local Oak, birch and aspen working out for maturation and aging?

[NZChris]

Welcome to the forum.

Check this out before you spend money on stainless.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 0450.x/pdf

[Maris Otter]

Thanks Chris!

I was considering that article when deciding to build a still. Problem is that we can't get copper pipes here for anything less than what would make the usurers of old seem reasonable. When i run the still i fill the column with copper tube cuttings. I would imagine i fill it with something like 2 kg copper each time I do a stripping run.

I don't know if it is enough, but I plan on adding more copper once I care to go to the plumbing store.

[Maris Otter]

Welcome to the forum from another Scandinavian!

How's the local Oak, birch and aspen working out for maturation and aging?

Thanks!

I've used local oak with fairly good results. The birch I find too sweet. Might be good if used sparingly. The aspen experiment I had didn't turn out too well. I think I made too greedy cuts.