Newbie

[stillin]

Been making wine for a while and thought it was time to graduate to something more challenging. Decided to build my own still for privacy reasons, but because of my lack of experience with soldering copper and still building, I settled with a 2" by 2 1/2 foot column with a cap and thermometer at the top, the column 90's over to my condenser which is 3" copper & 1/4" coiled tubing for cooling water and a collection valve on bottom of cond., with a 13 gal. milk can as a boiler. Packed my column with copper mesh and rasching rings, fermented a wash with 16lbs. sugar, 6.5 gal. water & one pack of Turbo Pure 48 hrs. Let ferment for 7 days and used clearing agent because I was impatient.(gonna let settle out naturally next time). Used a butane burner for heat and on my first run after about 1 hr. the temp. shot up like crazy. Had a real hard time keeping temp. stabilized for a few hours lots of spikes and lows, but eventually got it right. Could this have been because of the size of my boiler versus the amount of wash?(6.5 gal. in a 13 gal. boiler) I discarded the first 200ml and soon after could smell a sweet aroma. I'm guessing this was "heads". Did all the tasting, smelling, checking for a blue flame etc. & was shocked to see 90% ABV on my alcometer(87% ABV after temp. correction) I've never drank hydrochloric acid but it can't be much worse. I'm guessing this was because of the temp. ups and downs contaminating the distillate with heads and tails. Not giving up though, gonna try another run soon. Any advice is appreciated!! Sorry for the long post.

[LWTCS]

Lots of sugar there.
That along with your turbo ain't gonna help your cause.

Try a recipe from the T nT section and keep reading.

you'll be fine.

Dilute your nasty batch to 40% and run it again.

[stillin]

Thanks for the advice. I'll do that!!

[Samohon]

Welcome to the boards stillin....

[rubber duck]

Welcome aboard.

[stillin]

Thanks. Really cool to find a site like this with so many experienced distillers willing to share info. that took them years to gain. By the way I got a batch of wineos sugar wash going as I'm typing. It's been fermenting about two days and airlock is bubbling real good. Can hardly wait to make a run with it!!