Usually I'm not a great craftsman, but I was able to pull it together. And better yet; on the test run it didn't leak! At all! All the soldered joints held! (That's more than I can say about my Pot Still that I built a couple years ago.) It's not really a testament to my handy work but to the plans. This is a good set of plans, especially if you don't want to deal with an open flame.
The hardest thing in the plan was making the heat exchanger coil. Turning that copper tubing into a such tight coil was damn near impossible. I ended up kludging it a little bit I made large coils that run north and south (up and down the exchanger) instead of east and west (side-to-side down the exchanger).
Surprisingly, it works! It's actually cooling quite well. The top of the exchanger is very cool. I didn't think it would work, but I was so frustrated that I had to try something.On my first production run, I used a corn/wheat wash, and it turned out pretty well. The beer stripping run was almost too effective (may have stripped some of the "taste" out of it). I skipped one of the steps of adding a voltage regulator (dimmer switch) inline. I probably shouldn't have done that. I really needed a way to dial down the heat on the run. I'm going to add one to see if I can control the heat any better.
But overall, this solution felt good. It's good enough that I'm not embarrassed talking about it. The thermometer sits a little sideways; I might have to go back and fix that. It's a little irritating. Here's some pictures:
- Old Copperhead Still
- top of column
I had to shorten the packing in my column to accomodate the cold finger, so I took a few points off my top ABV, I'm waiting for some fun money to mod it up to the next version.
? with the price of copper these days.
