Home Distiller

Hey guys, long time no anything. Ran a bit of shine but gave up after a while because my setup was slow and pretty inconveniant. Thats all about to change!

My brother rang me up with a pretty keen note in his voice, said he found thirty feet of half-inch copper tubing in a dumpster...I was speechless! Needless to say we both knew what we'd do with it, having made previous attempts at stills with varying success. We both wanted a relatively high capacity setup, capable of handling a decent burner and boiler. We also knew we didn't want to go water-cooled because we reckon they're inconveniant and a bit fussy, probably due more to our setup location and personal laziness than anything else. The last point we wanted to experiment with was a small pre-condensing coil to help up the purity of vapour going into the main condensing coil. Nothing fancy, just a few turns before the real deal.

I set to work with a few mates to give me a hand, and before you know it I had this:



Its yet to do a run, but I'm going to do one this evening if I get the time. Basic sugar wash with turbo yeast, nothing fancy at all. The end product will be flavoured several ways; woodchip aged and 1% maple syrup for some Bourbon, as well as using a few basic essences I've had alright results with to give a basic rum. I suspect I might need a better heating element, but I'll fire back when I get the chance.

Cheers - boingk

I don't think you will get a high capacity out of that size boiler, the drink can is about right when you have removed foreshots, heads,and tails.

Not hoping for high capacity with this boiler, its usable volume is about 5 litres. Total collected volume would be around the 2 litre mark. I'm looking at getting a larger (10~20L) boiler and using a 3-ring burner I've got laying around. For the moment though, its a definite improvement on my other aircooled still.

I did the first run just then, and this is definitely suited to higher volume runs. It took a while to heat up, and the vapour only heated probably 40% of the way down the main coil stack - without the fan. Its quite cool here at the moment, but I was still anticipating having to use the fan. I'm guessing its because my element is only 1800W. The 3-ring should help fix that

If anyone has any comments, questions or suggestions I'm all ears.

Cheers - boingk

To collect 2lts of good spirit from a 5lt boiler sounds highly optomistic to me.

boingk wrote:We both wanted a relatively high capacity setup, capable of handling a decent burner and boiler. We also knew we didn't want to go water-cooled because we reckon they're inconveniant and a bit fussy, probably due more to our setup location and personal laziness than anything else. The last point we wanted to experiment with was a small pre-condensing coil to help up the purity of vapour going into the main condensing coil. Nothing fancy, just a few turns before the real deal.

Thats an awful big foot print for such a small......not so high capacity setup. Why don't you put your energy to build something that at least looks like it has some structural integrity?

Best wishes.
L.T.

If you are intent upon using that air cooling configuration, at least build a wind tunnel tube around the secondary worm to make better use of the fan... That fan design is intended to disperse air to a broad area so you need to channel the air flow to where it will do the most good... Right now you're cooling the entire work area, including the boiler and hot plate with residual air... An air cooled worm setup will work if properly designed and implemented...

+1 on the need for a bigger boiler...

5 litres to give around 1.5 ~ 2 litres of foreshots, takings and tails sounds right to me, using a ~20%abv cheapo sugar wash to start with. Probably less though, you're right. Bit hazy seeing as I havent done a proper run in a while. From memory I think I got something like 250ml of takings from a 2L boiler with my previous setup, with perhaps 50ml foreshots and double or more in the tails. The runs were quick but heatup time was the killer.

A tunnel to direct the air sounds good, I'll see what I can do.

As for structural integirty I know its far, far from ideal. Its all suspended in place by the two hooks you can just see at the top, with the collection arm having its slack taken up by a line. Might looks spindly and dodgy, but its all fairly well suspended in place and doesn't want to move around. Definitely up for making something more substantial next time, though.

Cheers, and thanks for the advice guys - boingk

Eventually, reality will rear its ugly head, but until then, do enjoy!

I agree with the bigger boiler, working on the structural strength and adding a shroud to the worm, but hey, if you're making progress and learning, good for you. Keep it up.

You have to start somewhere.

Instead of just Talking about it, your actually doing it.

That's the biggest step.

It's all refinement from now on.lol