Home Distiller

hello,
the last few months i have been very interested in distilling, i have read several books and many articles, blogs, and forums post, many on this website as it seems to have the best combination of knowledgable people and it has a focus on small scale which is what im interested in.

where I live unlicensed distilling for human consumption is fully illegal and i don't intend to do that. I don't really like anything stronger than beer, maybe some cocktails are okay, but everytime i've tasted a "top shelf" liquor its been wasted on me since it tastes just as gross as the cheapest bottom shelf plastic bottle stuff. But I want to research more about the small alcohol fuel producer route as a hobby to run lawnmowers. I have some chickens so already am buying a bit of corn anyways for them, and they probably wouldn't mind a percentage of their feed being WDG.

I've seen on this forum many times people say "don't talk about fuel ethanol here there are better forums for that" but many of those posts are very old. The yahoo groups shut down. biofuels@sustainablelists.org mailing list shut down, complete archives are hard to find. So it seems this site is the last remaining holdout of activity.

I will promise to keep most of my posts to the fuel forum and be respectable of the differences in motivations, listen to advice of experienced peeps, and do my best to avoid the stupid questions that get asked repeatedly and make everyone mad.

Welcome, we had a few people get into bio fuel around 2010 so you might be able to glean information from some of the older posts.

Thank you I already found so much good info on this site. It seems around 2010 was somewhat of the last golden age for this specific interest. Right after "Alcohol can be a gas!" was published (this is the book that really got me into the idea), a lot of the new closed mailings lists and forums seemed to be at peak activity.

It took me a while to translate between the fuel ethanol concepts and the beverage distilling terminology, words like heads/hearts/tails made me think of playing cards and flipping coins. And I heard of terms like "packed column reflux still" but here I see "VM/CM/LM/CCVM etc" but after reading more I understand those are refinements or variants in accomplishing controlling reflux ratio by different "valve" adjustments.

nothign about the 2010 era information seems wrong, but it just seems like this community has a bit more refined understanding, knows more about modern suppliers, and practical implementation at small scale, etc. than what was written about 10 years ago. Not saying the science has changed in the last 100 years, but there's a lot to be said about just knowing what materials are mass produced easily available and how to make them work compared to buying raw materials and fabricating everything custom.