Not another "new distiller"

[DamianRyan]

Well! here we go,I'm honoured to be a member of this group and enjoy reading as much of the postings that I can.
I purchased a house in the northern cape here in South Africa and it has a fully fleged,leagal still attached to it.The guy who built it used to build stills for a distilling company in Malawi.He sold it to a bloke who sold it to me after a year,I was told that distilling is and I qoute "easy not rocket science at all" and he would teach me how to do it.HA HA HA HA.The run where he taught me went like this
1.1200 liters of water into a tank
2.drop the shreded carrots (that's what we distill) into the water
3.Add 200 kg of sugar
4.mix the yeast and add it to the tank
5.stir every morning untill the fruit sinks (it never did)
6.6 weeks later he pitched up pumped the 1200 liters through a filter into the boiler and lit the gas burner
7.about 200 liters distilled through to the copper tank
8.I then pumped it back into the boiler and lit the gas burner again (needless to say he had left the scene never to return).

After 3 days of boiling I had +- 80 liters.The boiler has a themometor attached to the top of the tank.I did'nt know that one has to controll the temp. so closely,.When the alcohol slowed to a weak drip I raised the temp to 100 deg.Still could'nt get it to run so I stopped.
I thought I'd have to chuck the stuff away but the lads from thr Revenu service smelled it and told my to distill it again and to take more off at the begining as it smeld to them like all that was wrong was that I had to much heads,they call it 'foorloop" directly translated it means "front run"
On Monday I will be doing another run and fortunately I have found a notebook with the prcedure that the original owner used written out.Hold thumbs and keep fingures crossed for me will let you all know how it goes.
Damian