Not enough wash to fill up a boiler

[jon1163]

I'm running Odin's gin today and some of you guys a while back give me the tip of filling my boiler up with marbles to displace liquid so that I won't run my still with an uncovered heating element. I have two boilers. One is a 15 gallon keg boiler the other is an 8 gallon milk can boiler.

After making my lemoncello's and vodkas I had about 2 gallons of neutral leftover in which I macerated some juniper berries, Tangerine Peels, and coriander seed. Of course the problem is that was 8 gallon milk can boiler and 2 gallons of gin I'll expose my heating element and ruin it.

I just want to start a new thread so that some of the newer guys won't have to search so hard to find an answer to this question.

So I filled my boiler up with marbles and I still wasn't displacing enough to keep my heating element submerged. I found a handy little trick though and I filled about 51 mason jars, without the lids, with River Rocks that I washed up and submerge them around the marbles. Wonderful displacement and inert. Another nice thing about this is the displacement is able to go above your heating element unlike the marble trick. Marbles are great to fill in some space in between the base of them but the rocks in the mason jars can really take up a lot of space.

[still_stirrin]

What I'd do....is get the fermenters filled with more neutral wash. Then, I wouldn't worry so much about running the boiler less than a proper charge. Doubt I'd ever fill the boiler with rocks or marbles....unless I'd lost some of mine!

Leftover neutral won't hurt anybody if kept in glass jars until needed to rerun through the still.

For gin, I have a 16-quart stock pot potstill that I heat with a modified hotplate. The ginstill is a "purpose built" tool for that very reason. You could easily build a little stove top potstill for such "micro batches". And the cost to do so would be minimal too.
ss

[jon1163]

here's the inside of the boiler after the run.