Home Distiller

Hello All,

I've been reading this forum for a couple of months and have learned alot about home distillation! I don't have the space to build my own, so I ordered a 13 gallon milk can still with 40" X 2" reflux column from Mile High Distilling. Managed to run a batch this weekend and I enjoyed every minute of it! Of course visions of an all-copper homemade beauty are in my head. But all considered, for me, the Mile High is a good starting point for learning small scale distilling.

At work, I run several distillation columns ranging from 120 feet to just over 200 feet. Boy is there a difference between a home still and an industrial column. Besides taking almost a half million gallons of feed per day, the main differences are that we use pressure to affect temperatures in the column and we use side draws to get a purer product. We consistently make 40,000 gallons of 99.98% pure benzene every day. So, if you are thinking about upsizing your operation, I may be able to help.

Thanks for all of the knowledge that you guys have already imparted. And I look forward to the on-going conversation.

Cheers,
On The Bayou

Welcome aboard. Sounds like you will be able to contribute some good stuff to this wonderful knowledge base. Looking forward to see some posts from you.

And dreaming about copper porn comes with the territory. Some fight it off better then the rest of us.

Welcome OTB!

Glad to have another "professional" distiller in the community

Lots of good material here for the mining to help you make the transition to the good stuff!

Welcome Bayou...

Careful that PP feller.....He is copper whore..... and he says bad words some times.

I'd be very interested to read about your observations concerning similarities and differences between the two scales.

Please start,,,,,.......... Did I say welcome yet?

welcome to the forum.

LWTCS wrote:Welcome Bayou...

Careful that PP feller.....He is copper whore..... and he says bad words some times.

I don't know what he's talking about?

On The Bayou wrote: We consistently make 40,000 gallons of 99.98% . . . . every day. So, if you are thinking about upsizing your operation . . . .

D A M N -- did someone mention upsizing?

Welcome to HD O-T-B

On The Bayou wrote:At work, I run several distillation columns ranging from 120 feet to just over 200 feet. Boy is there a difference between a home still and an industrial column. Besides taking almost a half million gallons of feed per day, the main differences are that we use pressure to affect temperatures in the column and we use side draws to get a purer product. We consistently make 40,000 gallons of 99.98% pure benzene every day. So, if you are thinking about upsizing your operation, I may be able to help

I am wondering if you could share the designs for these columns I could be worth trying to downscale them for home distillation.


OD

olddog wrote:I am wondering if you could share the designs for these columns I could be worth trying to downscale them for home distillation.

I was waiting for that...

Sounds interesting, On The Bayou...

Welcome, and good luck...

Glad to have you aboard, also glad to have another plant operator on board.

Welcome and dido on sharing the designs, sounds like you have an interesting background and I am looking forward to reading some of your posts!

Thanks for the welcome. I have been spending all of my HD time over on the recipes pages. I have already made and run a batch with corn meal and sugar (didn't like the raw taste of the corn meal). And I have a batch of NCHooch''s Carolina Bourbon in the fermenter now. It smells so good, I'm thinking it just needs a little butter and some salt and pepper. I'm licking my lips waiting for that to finishing fermenting. Planning on aging that for at least 45 minutes. And I have a plum brandy that will be ready for the heat on Fri/Sat. I find myself getting nervous if I don't have something fermenting for the weekend.

A few of you have asked about industrial-sized distillation and I will be more than happy to share... just ain't sure which forum to post that in.

Cheers