Home Distiller

Starting working on a continous stripper to steam distill on the grain. I am currently redesigning the failed continous steam gen design. very early days and not much to report yet.plates a perf plates with 6mm holes on a 8mm rod so plate tree style. Its in a 2.5" section. Heres a couple photos

@bloverk I was planning to use a 50l keg for an interim continous boiler but only half full do you think I should add water to system straight into keg with 20ish litres volume or in a side sight glass like your setup?

I had the setup running at 4l/hr but only for 15mins before the steam generator refills and cools and the boil stops..

Thanks for these pics. This helps.

OK, so let me ask a few questions about its operation before getting too much into this.

The crossflow condenser at the top, you're using that to cool your low wines and preheat you beer? Same questions for your crossflow at the bottom. Is it an effluent/beer hx?


I think we should work out your steam gen first. If you dont have stable heat, the whole thing is gonna fail. The biggest problem Im seeing is that you don't seem to have enough headspace in the steam gen to not be pushing water out with the steam so that means you need to add more cold water to keep the system full which is using more heat energy on boiling the water rather than processing the beer.

The bottom one is spent beer cooler steam gen water preheater.

The top one is mash preheater lw pre condenser, for the small window it was stable it worked as expected.
As you said I need to get the steam gen sorted out first.

3600w power 1.5l/m max mash feed.

bluc wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 11:09 pm 3600w power 1.5l/m max mash feed.

bluc , did you not end up using the peristaltic pump ? I thought that thing maxed out at just over 500ml/min .

https://australianhomedistiller.com.au/ ... 50#p103828

bluc wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 11:06 pm The bottom one is spent beer cooler steam gen water preheater.

The top one is mash preheater lw pre condenser, for the small window it was stable it worked as expected.
As you said I need to get the steam gen sorted out first.

Thanks. Its more important that you get your beer preheated than the water. You're trying to run 5x the amount of beer than replacement water.

Per the good ole standard that we go by...
3600w ÷ 408 wgh = 8.82 gph or 33.3 l/ph
33.3l/hour ÷ 60 min = .555 l/min.

0.5l/min is the minimum speed I'm going to call acceptable.
We've seen a lot of smaller column pushing 350 wgh so .64l/min as a stretch goal.

Plumb your beer feed through the bottom of the PC HX then the top to the bottom of effluent HX then the top to the entrance to the column.

Plumb your water direct to the gen.

Now that you've redone the plumbing, can you try running this with the steam gen only? Set your water to run at about 100ml/min and let's see what happens

Yummyrum wrote: ↑Sun May 04, 2025 12:31 am

bluc wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 11:09 pm 3600w power 1.5l/m max mash feed.

bluc , did you not end up using the peristaltic pump ? I thought that thing maxed out at just over 500ml/min .

https://australianhomedistiller.com.au/ ... 50#p103828

Sorry yes correct yummy brain fart on my behalf.

At bolverk I will track down some more tube re plumb the feed..