Well, wife and I have been stilling water for essential oils and other things using an old 8 Qt. pressure cooker(stainless) and a 15 ft. copper coil outa 1/2 inch dia., in a big bucket. It goes pretty good, do it on kitchen stove.
Anyway wanted to do Etoh for starting my old diesel cars and a truck and rigged up a feed for alky and thinned down diesel fuel for cold start, don't wanna do ether, could wreck the engines. Well, and I want some for my arthritis medicine, I'm 73.
So a couple of weeks ago we got this wild hair to make some starter fluid/pain med. juice and so we did what I think y'all call "sugar wash"(?), basically sugar, water and yeast(regullar store baking yeast-5 Star) 2 gallons in a plastic bucket and let it sit for about 2 weeks. She only covered the bucket with a clean towel, though I thought we should'a sealed it with a pinhole in the saran wrap. Anyway yesterday we stilled it, one gallon per stilling done twice to get the 2 gal. all stilled. She had done cloves and lavender before and it stunk up the first stilling pretty strong. The results tasted pretty fair, maybe a bit sweet. We did dump the first part, about 35 milliliters. So we ended up with about 430 ml. first pass.
Well then we ran the first pass through for a second stilling and it turned out nice and sorta sweet like, burns your tongue and throat as it goes down, and the clove/lavender stink went away, thank god. We had about 305 ml. left after 2nd pass. I think our overall yield was low but I really don't know. Probably should'a fermented "anaerobically" I think the term is?
Anyway we want to get a stock pot(about 30 to 32 Qt. or so, stainless steel) for the pot and right now have to budget, SS and city retirement only go so far. Money tree died.
So there's an old saying "No fool like an old fool" and I r it. Wish they made bi-focal computer moniters, squint, squint.
Sorry so long a blah-blah on my part, I'll try to be more concise henceforth.
Really interesting forum, Awful lot of years experience here, thanks folks.
