Home Distiller

RumBrewer wrote: Does a magnet stick to it?
That's not a fool proof trick, because some grades of stainless will stick to a magnet, but not usually.

There is a weak attraction, stronger around the weld join. The inside is very clean with small traces of surface rust around the weld line. That surface rust should scrub off easily between runs.

Home stretch now for sure. The liebig is now built and attached to the outlet tubing. I hooked up all the hoses, cranked up the pool pump and got a nice smooth flow through the liebig and back up through the coil. There aren't any leaks, so it's all good. Thank goodness for thread tape .

ebswift, I use 100% SS scrubbers for packing and the vapor must get enough contact with the copper column because I haven't had any problems... Using a combination of copper and stainless is a viable option if you prefer to go that route...

nice looking build and great drawings, thanks!

Well I've certainly taken my time with this build, slowly but surely. I finally got to read the relevant chapters in The Compleat Distiller to try to understand what I'm doing. The cleaning runs were leak free, so on the weekend it was time to pack the copper and try for some alcohol.

I put in around 8L of cheapo cask wine along with 2L of water. A new gas burner ring I got along with some wind shielding (it was very breezy) helped get it to the boil very quickly. The remote thermometer alarm was going off way before I expected it to. When I checked the temperature, it had reached exactly 78°c and stayed rock solid at that. I wound the gas down a bit and let it equilibriate for two hours where it dropped to 77°c. I'm assuming that will drop further when there are more foreshots to be had in a real wash.

At that point I took off the 'foreshots' until I saw the temperature move up steady onto 78°c again. The first lot had a real nail polish remover smell about it. I proceeded to take off another 150ml or so as the heads and moved onto the hearts. There was a noticeable difference in smell between the 3 lots. I let the hearts come out in a trickle and as soon as the ethanol was finally depleted, the temperature started going up right away where I changed to a new vessel. The trickle slowed fairly quickly and the temperature shot up, so I shut everything down.

The hearts output came out at 400ml of dead-on 93% so I think that's a pretty good test run. I'm also very impressed how this design works when operating it properly (though I still need to learn the different smells). Temperature changes are exactly by the book. I think where it's possible to go wrong is not having good equilibrium and rushing.

I do have a couple of questions though.

Firstly, given the large column I'm using and the long length of packing, would equilibrium be reached sooner (assuming a fairly high stability of temperatures in the column)?

Secondly, I know the general rule of thumb is to let out a gentle trickle for the hearts, but having a 2.5" column, this increases doesn't it? Is the optimum output worked out by measuring the purity of the output? i.e. faster = less, slower = more? That being the case I should be able to tune my output for the specific size. No us running it too slow when it's built for output.