Zymurgy Bob
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Speed is not dependent on boiler size, but on heat input rate. Of course, when you start moving vapor faster, you need to go to a larger riser or column cross-sectional area, and of course the condenser must be big enough to condense all that new vapor, so mostly faster rate means larger still parts.
Also most folks run a stripping run way faster than a spirit run. My run last week was 16 gallons of ~5.5% corn wash, an I stripped it in about 3.5 hours (after the boil started). That with a Bayou Classic propane burner, which is a lot of heat.
I run an electronic thermometer right at the top of my potstill’s riser, and it gives me a pretty good idea of where I am I am in the run, and when to shut down (usually at 98 or 99C, and that’s probably beating a dead horse). I wish I had a sensor (and I’m working on that now) right in my wash, so I could more easily gauge when it’s about time to start collecting.
As far as what to do with that 174F number, if you’re potstilling all it means is you aren’t boiling yet (unless you’re starting with pure ethanol in your boiler, and that’s not likely, or even useful). Depending on the ethanol concentration in your boiler, you’ll start boiling at from about 180F to 205F (50% ABV or 5%ABV, about the extreme ranges of wash ABV’s).
If you’re running a reflux still, a head temp (NOT boiler temp) of 174F, if you can do it, is great for getting flavorless azeotrope.
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.htmlThanks for the great link, Richard. This guy is right on, and I like the way he really leans on the need for enzymes from malted barley, a point that the Wiki recipe missed completely.
Griffith,
There’s a much clearer sweetfeed (thin mash) recipe at:
For separating the grain from the liquid, the easiest way is to buy an elastic-topped paint strainer from your paint store. This fits inside a 5-gallon bucket, and the elastic holds it up by the bucket rim. I think they’re about 4 bucks.Griffith,
This guy is way way better than that Wiki recipe, but I do have a couple of points, which may or may not seem like quibbles. First, the recommendation of champagne yeast is a good one, and that yeast (Lalvin EC-1118 is another one) can indeed ferment a wash that has enough sugar in it to make a 17% ethanol wash, but if you only have, say, one pound of sugar per gallon in your fermentation, then the most ethanol you can get will be almost 6%, no matter what yeast you use. On the other hand, if you have enough sugar (2 pounds 14 ounces per gallon) to make 17%, many yeasts cells will burst with osmosis in that strong a sugar solution, or die horribly when enough ethanol is produced to kill whatever strain of yeast you are using.
Most sugar-wash fermenters don’t try for higher than maybe 12% ethanol in the wash, because the harder the yeast has to work, the worse the wash (and the liquor) tastes.
With some other distillers, we’ve put together a Read Me First document here:
http://www.artisan-distiller.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=8707
and this should answer a lot of your starting questions.While the sweetfeed recipe is a common one (I’ve never used it, so it’s all hearsay), but some good stillers I know like it. I do have another little quibble here, and it involves heating and holding the grain and water at 150F to convert grain starches to fermentable sugars. While it’s pretty close to right, there are no amylase enzymes in that mix to convert those starches (like no malted barley or no store-bought bottled enzymes), so an iodine/starch test after an hour of his heating, would show purple-black, showing the starches are still there. He may have soaked some flavor and yeast nutrients, and molasses out of that sweetfeed, but that’s all he’s done. As for simulating spring conditions for the grain, that is correct, but the process takes days and very specific conditions, and you can read about it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malt
While he accurately told us about coming up to the boil temperature and then creeping slowly up, he’s got it right, but his temperature numbers seem very low, as in a bad thermometer or high altitude. (he did mention something about his altitude throwing things off).
I don’t know where you live, but most places have a homebrew or winemaking supply store somewhere near, and they have all the supplies and instruments (you really should have both a proof hydrometer for distillate and a brewer’s winemaker’s hydrometer for measuring your wash before and after fermenting.
I hope this helps.
Oh, boy. Where to begin?…and I apologize for going long.
First off, that recipe is for a “thin mash”, where the only source of sugars for making alcohol is the table sugar you added 10 pounds of. In that recipe, the corn itself is not “mashed”, and the corn is present only for flavor and yeast nutrients, for which the corn does not need to be boiled. 10 pounds of sugar in 10 gallons of wash should give you a specific gravity of about 1.045, and if properly fermented, will yield a wash of about 5.6 % ethanol. 10 pounds of cornmeal is a helluva lot of cornmeal for a thin mash. For a common, popular and very successful thin-mash recipe, google “UJSSM”, Uncle Jesse’s Simple Sour Mash.
To demonstrate how the author of your recipe ignorantly conflated a bunch of stuff he didn’t understand, to properly mash corn, that is to convert the corn starches to sugars that the yeast can ferment into ethanol, you must first “gelatinize” the corn starch by heating it in water to about 170F, for a time dependent on how fine your corn is ground. You then need to cool it down to about 150F (at perhaps 165, you have killed your enzymes, and the whole process stops) and introduce amylase enzymes, either from malted barley or bottled from your local homebrew supplier. Over a period of anhour or two, these enzymes will convert your corn starch to sugar (google “iodine starch test”). Now you can cool your mash down to ~85F and introduce your yeast to ferment that sugar to ethanol.
At the low specific gravity this recipe produces, the author is right (for once); just about any kind of yeast will work fine.
Because cooked corn becomes the goopy, gluey mess you encountered, the thin mashes with uncooked corn are popular. Making “real” corn whiskey, with cooked corn, is a lot more work dealing with how to get the alcoholic liquid off that corn porridge. When the author says,”Strain the sour mash through a cheesecloth” after he’s told you to boil it first, he’s given you a fool’s errand, which you will only understand when you try to do it.
When he tells you that, “The liquid that comes out of the copper tube before the cooker reaches 177 degrees contains methanol, which becomes steam at a lower temperature than ethanol.” he is again displaying his ignorance. If (and only if) there is methanol occuring naturally in your wash, it forms an association with ethanol (the good stuff) called an azeotrope, and every bit of ethanol that comes through your still, has a tiny (and perfectly safe) amount of methanol in it. The real reason you toss the early, low-boiling distillate is because it smells and tastes awful, with lots of acetone, acetaldehyde, ethyl acetate, and other smelly compounds in it.
The fear of methanol, which can be truly toxic when added to liquor, as was done in American prohibition, came from the US government’s denaturing hardware-store ethanol (drinking alcohol) with methanol (the killer stuff). Not only were they doing this because it’s virtually impossible to separate the two alcohols by distillation, but they reasoned that if you were breaking the law by drinking during Prohibition, you deserved to die. The lesson on from this? Don’t pour methanol, or any other poison, for that matter, into your liquor.
Finally, when the author of the recipe says, “Keep monitoring the temperature and collecting alcohol until the temperature rises above 177 degrees or drops below it.” it tells me he’s never run a potstill (which is what he has you build). Any potstiller will tell you that you will boil your wash all through your still run, and that the wash will boil at one single temperature dependent entirely on what’s in your still and in what concentrations. Because you can come pretty close assuming that wash to be a simple mixture of ethanol and water, and because we know from that recipe that our starting wash concentration will be 5.6% ethanol, and we know from a boiling point chart that the wash will start boiling at about 204F, although you may have a couple of drops of really nasty stuff before that. Because the ethanol will come through the still faster than the water, at first, the percent of ethanol in the wash will slowly drop, and the temperatire will slowly rise for that reason. If you boiled your still until the boiler was dry, and we wouldn’t, the vapor temperature would get all the way to 212,F, the boiling point of pure water. Youe willsee tempertures rise slowly from 204 to 212F. At the author’s 177F, (the boiling point of PURE ethanol, not the mixture of water and ethanol that you really have), your still will not boil, and distilling that 10 gallons might take years.
Wow! Sorry to be so long winded, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so much bad information in one place, and someone needed to say something!
It sounds like you did a fine job, but now you’ve got the hobby distillers dilemma. You want to age it to perfection, but you have to taste it to know how it’s coming. By the time it’s perfect, it’s gone.
On a federal level, it’s completely illegal, except for 2 cases. One, you can get an alcohol fuel manufacturing license, but oyu can’t drink the product. Two, you can get a local license and register with the feds for producing potable alcohol and pay the going rate for proof-gallon tax, but you will have to comply with serious restrictions on equipment and buildings.
In either case, you have opened yourself up to regular federal inspection. Most hobby distillers I know just use fake names and keep their heads down. Of course, often in a particular location prosecution of private distilling isn’t an important goal to local law enforcement, but that’s a considerable gamble.
Along the lines of Beverage Commander’s question, I’ve tried allgrain corn (with malted barley in some cases) a lot of different ways, and have found it to be too much work (almost) for too little yield. However, when Sherman Owens, whom I’ve know online for maybe 10 years, put this video on utube, while selling the enzymes in hobby-sized quantities, I’ve had great luck, although I’m still improving equipment and process. At this point, I’d never consider going back to the “old” ways. The biggest single issue is absolutely no cooked corn-starch gunk. Here’s the video.
I’m not sure what kind of malt you saw on utube, but I think most hobby distillers use homebrew supply barley malt (malted barley grain, or liquid barley malt extract, or dry barley malt extract), both by itself to make an un-hopped beer to be distilled into malt whiskey, or (in the case of the malted grain only) for its enzymes to convert starches in other grains, to ferment into alcohol.
I’d second Richard Jr’s post and add a caveat. Where many people go wrong with sugar washes is three-fold. First, trying for too high an ABV in your initial sugar wash can introduce some bad flavors from tortured yeast. Most stillers I know don’t try for higher than 10% ABV. Second, because sugar has no real nutrients for the yeast, nutrition is very important to avoid stuck ferments and bad tastes. Third, and this may offend some, using turbos often can produce nasty flavors. A champagne yeast, like Lalvin EC-1118, makes sugar washes a slam-dunk, although other yeasts will also work.
Without the thumper, I’d tell you that you should never see any pressure in that still, but with the thumper there will be a small amount of pressure that you may have to deal with. If the liquid depth in the thumper got up to 12″, the still would have to produce a pressure of about .43 lbs per square inch to blow bubbles through it. If the diameter of that cap hole is 3″, then its area is (pi)(1.5)^2=~7.1 square inches, and with .43 pounds per square inch pressure, you’ll have a force of about (7.1)(.43)=~3 pounds trying to lift that cap out of the boiler.
Old timers using that design would put a rock on top of the cap to compensate for that lifting force, and you may need to do that, even though 3 pounds isn’t much. As WharfRat points out, if that clear thumper stops bubbling, you may have pressure that will lift, or even blow off, your cap, always a bad thing.
Zymurgy Bob, a simple potstiller
The amount of nutrients (a lot of ammonium compounds) in your wash is only half of the problem with the blue distillate, which is Schweitzer’s reagent, a copper-ammonium complex. The other half of the problem is a too-high pH. It’s the combination of high-pH and presence of ammonium compounds that cause the blue distillate. I can’t tell you off the top of my head what’s too-high pH, but if you had adjusted that first wash pH to maybe 5.0, with citric acid, for instance, or a ~5.2 pH buffer from your homebrew supply, you would never have seen that blue, or smelled the ammonia.
Just as an aside, the copper in that distillate is your copper still head being eroded.
I’d guess more home distillers use stainless boilers than copper, although if you are externally heated, copper has much better thermal transmissivity, which it allows it to move more heat into your mash with fewer hotspots. I’m not sure what you mean by “voter tube” but you will get cleaner tasting (lower sulfide levels) spirit if there is some copper in the vapor path, although Eastern European vodka stillers swear by no copper in the vapor path. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but everyone else wants copper in the vapor path.
My personal still uses a stainless keg boiler with all-copper riser and condenser.
