Simple, yet effective 2" plate column

[Barney Fife]

In a "thumper" thread a few months ago, where the OP(original poster) wanted to try adding a thumper or two in-line, directly above his boiler, I questioned if this wouldn't turn out to be a glorified and/or complex plate column. I suggested that I'd try playing around with the idea of a small scale plate column this winter.

Well, winter's not here, but I have already played around with the idea, and while I have a lot more playing around to do, I saw in the "mentor" section where dnder replied to someone asking about 2" plate column designs, that he wouldn't find any under 4". Well, I'm here to say we can indeed make a simple and effective 2" plate column! Like I said, there's more to be learned, but what the hell, I'll put this out so other tinkerers can work alongside of me if they wish.

My pot still is a 15" or so 2", vertical column/lyne arm to goes into a vertical(downward) liebig(1" inside 1-1/2"). On strip runs, it consistently puts out 50-55% ABV, with a lot of flavor, but always requires a second and more often than not, 3rd run to yield a great final product, in the 75-78% ABV(hearts) range. What I did was cut into the 2" column and soldered-in a pair of slant plates, staggered ala bokabob, but each one oriented -upward- to CAPTURE distillate(where the bok design has the upper plate angled downward, feeding the bottom slant plate. This effectively gave me 2 plates that hold approximately 25ml each. The first run showed I'd gained roughly 5% ABV throughout the strip run! Not huge, but definitely showed potential. I added a 3rd plate before the next run, and gained another 2-3%. I now was now well into the low 60% ABV range at stripping speed. Not bad at all, for the minimal effort required to add the plates.

Here's where it gets interesting: wanting to do a spirit run right after the last strip, I decided to see if packing would be effective now, so I wadded up some copper mesh, maybe a 3" long wad that is wadded up tightly, and set back and watched. Nothing changed when pushing full power, but she responded nicely when I backed off a bit, as expected. About 1/4 way through the spirit run, I had an idea, grabbed a 12" fan, and set it up to blow directly on the column. Bingo! I immediately noticed a huge drop in distillate coming off the condenser! Sure enough, the ABV jumped to over 85%. I pushed more power, and got the condenser to give me a nice stream again, yet the distillate remained at well over 80%! Flavors came through very nicely, and I'll go out on a limb and say I got more flavor AND higher ABV than with my usual 3rd run. The ABV doesn't drop gradually as it did before during a run, but instead, the output slows, while the ABV holds pretty steady, until the ABV drops suddenly when at the end of the tails.

I've since done one strip run with the packing above the plates, and with the fan running, and was able to pull the strip at 80% in the hearts, though she dropped to the mid 70's in the early tails, then dropped like a rock to 20% or so at the end. Interesting to note that my tails are nearly as clear as my hearts; barely any oily appearance at all, where my tails were always easy to spot. The hearts here were as good as any 2nd run product I've ever done, and quite likely as good as most of the 3rd runs; very tempting to keep them as-is.

What next? I want to remove the packing now, and add more plates; my thinking is that these simple plates are working indeed as plates should work, and that is holding and re-distilling product, and because they do hold product, they retain a lot of flavor VS a non-plate, packed column.

More to come, later....