Distilling wine into Brandy
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I ran 16 litres of wine and only produced 1 litre of Brandy. That can’t be typical. I heated it to 184 degrees. It took about 1 hour and 45 minutes. It started to produce a drip…. I ran that at 184 for 6 hours…… The drip was very slow…. About one drip per 2 seconds. Is that normal? Should I have continued with the run? It was my first run while I am waiting for my corn mash to ferment…. Help!
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Rebel-
Do you know what the starting ABV of the Wine was?
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I had to do some quick math- 16 liters is around 4.22 gallons
I would not focus on the temperature so much:
Here is what I do:
Crank the heat on the still until it starts producing
Once it starts producing turn the heat down until I have a 5-8 drips a second (just below a trickle)
Dump the first 150-300ml on a 5 gallon run as this will contain a higher percentage of methanol
Collect and label jars while making cuts during the runIt sounds like you were running really slow- I will run 5 gallons in about 6-8 hours with my clawhammer still. I also run my still until the product is at 20%. I will collect between 1-1.5 gallons of total product in 6-8 hours- this included heads,hearts,tails.
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From the blue (liquid) line on the chart,
http://www.kelleybarts.com/PhotoXfer/alcoholvaporCelsius.gif
you can see that a 12% ethanol/water mixture boils at 92C (about 198F), and that the vapor from that mixture boiling at 92C (red line) will be 57% ethanol. If you never got the wash hotter than 184F, you never got it to a boil, so you could take months to get any distillate.Don’t worry, trying to control boiling temperature on a potstill is so common that this had to be written.
http://www.kelleybarts.com/PhotoXfer/ReadMeFirst/MagicBoilingMyth.html
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