Steam continuous stripper idea

[Bolverk]

Howdy all,

Here's an idea I'm working on that I'd love for someone to try. I've already got my steam boiler, so I dont exactly need this anymore.

This is kind of a cross between my steam boiler and the auto top off from AndyNZ boiler.

My steam boiler thread:
viewtopic.php?t=92012

AndyNZs thread:
viewtopic.php?t=92612

So the way I see it, continuous distillation has a few really big benefits.
1. being the ability to process more beer with less wattage.
2. Minimal water usage
3. Quick heat up time
4. The ability to easily stop and start more easily than with batch distillation. (As someone with a young kid, i don't always have 3-4 hours to dedicate to a run, so having the ability to fire this up run for an hour for a few days is huge to me)

Adding steam allows us to process beer with solids.

So the idea is that you can use a 5 gal water cooler water jug as an auto top off into a 4" sight window. It feeds into a 2" spool with a 1650w element, feeds into a 4" 4 plate column to strip your grain in beer. This isn't going to win any awards for speed as it will only process roughly 4 gals of beer per hour (using Larrys 408w pg/ph). It could do more with more heat recovery, but that starts to layer on more complexity, so for the ease of building this, just use the vapor path heat as the beer HX. Beer is the green line. It enters the bottom of the dephleg sized condenser,  then goes into the PC and then into the column. The small hx is to prevent heat channeling and make sure you have complete condensation of the vapor.

Uses the SD 4" perf plates so you can strip on grain.

At 1650w, you'll only be using .69 gph (2.64l/ph) of water for steam, so this 5 gal (20l) water bottle will last hours.

20241013_074602.jpg

(Built roughly to scale, 1 square = 1")

Steam continuous distillation has been used for over 200 years, i think it's time we start using this at the hobby level.