So I've been dabbling in spirits on and of for quite some time now and I made a couple different stills.
I started off with an old 60L copper boiler i heated over a gas burner. Then made a smaller copper boiler with a water-heater element in it. Then went big with a 120L stainless boiler that I adjusted a bit (see picture)... All good fun.
But working in the lab at school I couldn't help noticing the air-still we use for distilled water and I happened to find one online and it wasn't that expensive so I thought... why not... why not try the other end of the spectrum?
I was curious to see what it could pull off (if anything at all) and if I could adjust it a little bit.
The first run I used some Calvados that had failed miserably and boy did it run! Way too fast if you ever want to get any taste out of it.
Not strange with a 750W heating element... so I started thinkering about trying to cut the power to the heating element, and I remembered I had a high-power dimmer (with a beefy triac) laying about.
So anyway... Here's my dim-able air-still:
The power output is now very controllable as I now tested it with Odin's gin. The stilling went okay and I could easily adjust the power so it wouldn't run too fast. If this works, this could be a nice and easy alternative for stilling smaller macerated batches...? Don't really know. I didn't put copper tubes in the kettle yet as the alcohol I was working with was quite pure to start with and I'm not really planning on doing stripping runs with it.
Anyway. Thought it was a fun project and I'd share.
Thoughts?