I hail from the snowy country north of the 49th parallel, EH !
I'm not new to the sport, but have been at it for about 15 year, but the still has been cold for over a decade.
My first was a DIY that my best friend and I made when we were about 16, made out of copper tubing and ABS pipe. We managed to distill some of my dads home made wine, but neither of us had the courage to drink it
We had no idea what Methanol was so probably just as well, but none the less the seed was planted. My next DIY followed a trip to eastern Europe, where home distillation was just something you did. The lord of our B&B made pear brandy in the barn, and that rekindled the fire. The next device was made from a stock pot and some some copper pipe, putting to good use my soldering skills. Honestly it worked WAY better than I thought it would and I probably made 15-20 gal of various grain recipes (Horse feed was the weirdest - look it up
)before again it got put away and lifes other priorities stepped in.Fast forward to earlier this month and I found a Turbo500 on Facebook for a price I could not pass up. Within a couple days I had done a spirit run of 25L of feints that were lying around (made great hand sanitizer during COVID) and I made some pretty amazing neutral !! The T500 came with a couple bottles of essence so I have mixed up some gin and some whiskey and ..yup .. the itch has come over me again
On the weekend i bought a second hand mash pail, some sugar and some tomatoe paste - you can see where I am going ... and I am going to see if I can refit my old pot lid to be an alembic on my T500 so I would have pot still and reflux still capabilities ...
Glad to be here - and thanks to ALL of you folks that have kept me busy reading. There is no end to the experimenting and the learning and that is one of the things that draws me in ...
M1M