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I spent this morning running sugarwash low wines through my reflux still, which is a 5l still spirits unit. I'd previously run the wash through the same still, detuned to be a regular pot still. My main question is whether or not the temperature reading is the same when running low wines as to when running a regular wash, as it seems to be ALOT lower than normal. I.e: when I ran the low wines, the distillate started at about 72-74, and didn't really rise above 80 at all. My assumption is that because the thermometer is after the cooling jacket in the reflux tower, the reading isn't showing methanol production, but just cooled alcohol production. Does anyone have any experience in this area, or with this unit?

Cheers,

Mr. Moonshine

At the risk of getting flamed.

Temperature readings of vapour are an indication of the alcohol content.
When distilling a wash with a pot head, the alcohol is probably coming over at 50-60% abv% or so with a temperature reading somewhere around 92-94C
When you put those low wines in the boiler and run them with a reflux head, you will be collecting spirit with an abv% of between 75-95% (depending how good you are) and the thermometer reading will drop to around 78 - 86C accordingly.


Cheers.

Cheers for the reply mate, much appreciated!
I checked the ABV% as I was going, as well as tasting and making sure heads/tails weren't present, in addition to measuring the ABV% of the finished product (Bottle by bottle). It finished up at about 89% ABV, which I thought was OK. I was just a bit concerned because the distillate started to run fairly early, earlier than I expected (72-74 deg C).

Cheers,

Mr.Moonshine

Might want to read some of Rods posts in the related hardware section... He recently added heating element control to be able to properly run low wines in this same still. Seems like he was pretty happy with it... Without a way to lower the heat in the boiler, you will not be able to do a low wines run and get good seperation. This still is designed around running turbo yeast washes only and when you run higher % abv low wines you will have too much heat to separate the heads and hearts etc... They will all be mixed together. You could either dilute the low wines down to 15% abv and rerun making good cuts or better, add some electric element control.

What junkyard dawg said... You need to lower the heat input if you are only running 4-5 liters of wash... An element controller will allow you much greater control over the distillation process...

done a few runs with the heater element controller and I am very happy

http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8002

the last run I did not use carbon to polish as I did not need to

I am going to make a wash with a non turbo yeast , when I have room to store more finished product , limited space or need to drink more