New member from Wide Bay, Qld

[Apollo]

Evening legends

Intro - Steve from Wide Bay area in Queensland. Absolute newby who is trying to learn as fast as he can and reading up on advice and lessons learnt by others. Thank you!

Running a copper T500 with a digiboil. Picked up a deceased estate sale and ended up with a whole heap of stuff that I am learning to use. Am trying different washes based on advice and receipes here as well as the university of youtube and playing around with trying to improve technique. Have given a straight sugar wash, birdwatches and a weetbix wash a go. None have failed (yet). Just comparing results and ease atm. Now playing with oak (type/size/duration) to find out what Iike, plus what essence bases the others in my family like.

I have followed advice to stop watching the temp guage on the T500 and focus more on the out flow looking for the drip, drip, dribble as a guide. Seemed to work ok last run.

I am on tank water so the pressure pump kicking in a out does cause flucuations in waterflow so I moved to a reticulating system via multiple 200-250L tanks and gravity/constant pressure pump. Must admit to being surprised at the amount of water used in a run so now this is not lost down a drain.

I have some questions relating to increasing knowledge and imporivement, but will ask elsewhere if i cant find during a search session.

Thank you for your excellent posts in the past.

[Yummyrum]

Welcome to HD Steve

And also Howdy Neighbour from Hervey Bay .

[MooseMan]

Welcome to the forum Steve/Apollo.
Went to Qld once and loved it there, but that was Brisbane.

This is the place to learn everything you will need to know for distillation.
You tube is for entertainment only.

Enjoy the forum.

Moose

[MarkChap]

G'day and welcome
Great people here to help you on your way

[sadie33]

hello and welcome, there is a ton of great knowledge here and a bunch of great people that can help.

[Bradster68]

Welcome to the club

[Apollo]

Appreciate the warm welcome. Love learning new things and really enjoying soaking in the experience of others.

Steve

[Renhoekk]

Welcome! Never really thought about stills popping up at deceased estate sales, but there you go I wouldn’t feel too bad about running a T500 by temperature - it’s literally designed to be a “plug and play” setup. It won’t operate well outside of a 50-65C range. Keep it to the lower end of the range and it will pump out ~92% ABV all day long. Quite a few craft distilleries have them on hand to run test batches of recipes. The comments on HD about not running a still by temperature is because a lot of beginners have the wrong idea about distillation. You need to understand quite a bit before you can use temp readings as a tool….for most people who want to make a nice drop at home, it simply is not important. But again, the T500 was designed so that novice users could use temp to easily dial in their water flow for refluxing.

There is a float tank attachment you can buy for T500 that ensures even water flow.

This “drip drip spurt” nonsense on how a still is supposed to run was popularised by a certain YouTuber who isn’t very popular here.

[Apollo]

Thanks for the guidance. So much for me to learn. So far, my ABV have been 92-94% so I think that is ok. Doing cuts and learning to pick suttle changes is whole new level of skill set I am working on. Quite a cool ride.