New Head For My Super Reflux

[Opus 27]

A few more photo's as we now have the parrot fitted, a temperature gauge and a valve to balance the water flow on the condenser outlet.

[Anavrin]

Now that's a nice looking peice of kit, I especially like the thermometer, I'm inspired to take a hacksaw to my boka and do some mods, when will you be doing your first run?

[Anavrin]

I've just had a look at your thermometer it has a 1/2inch NTP thread on the back, where did you get the fitting it screws into from?

[optic]

We really need an applause & thumbs up smilie on here, a well thought out and executed build Opus.

[Opus 27]

The boss for the temperature gauge has a 1/2 BSP parallel thread and is a perfect fit for the American NTP. The actual boss we turned from a scrap piece of copper.

Since posting the last set of photo's we've added a drain off tap to the parrot. We can now drain for a fresh reading between, heads, hearts and tails.

One last thing we're waiting on is a silicon sleeve to pull over the cap at the top of the column. We need to keep this as a removable lid for cleaning etc.

As for the first run that will be today. Initially a stripping run and then back for a reflux run.

This is the first Cornflake Mash we've done so the first batch won't be the best as we need to collect some Back set to add to the next mash. Anyway we'll keep fingers crossed for something palatable.

Probably will have a taste while white but plan on storing on some French oak. Just need to decide on dark or medium toast.

Hope I've answered everything, back soon.

Opus

[Opus 27]

OK it's been a case of success and failure. Did stripping run on 18 litres of cornflake wash/mash, it went well started at about 80% ABV finished at 20%.


By the second run though we realised that having packing in the column was not going to work in pot still mod as we couldn't get it below 96% ABV and completely tasteless.

Obviously even without cooling the column was still refluxing far more than we thought, so we shut down and removed all the packing.

When we restarted we got it down to 85% and by the time we got down to the middle run we were around 70%. The middle run carried on to +55% and we were into tails. We let the tails run to 30% and stopped there.

Throughout we collected in 150ml batches, tasted and checked smell.
We mixed the run as follows; 100% Hearts + 100% Heads + 80% tails. finished ABV was 60%. It's now sitting on some medium toast French oak.

I shall taste regular samples to see how it develops.

Opus

[optic]

Well that has certainly proved that its more than capable of producing high ABV output, will be interested to see how the cornflake whisky turns out, I did some a while ago and even after 3 generations it never developed much taste. Actually I've picked up a Kilo bag of frozen corn kernels to give a try to see if it will carry a bit more flavour, it will only mean the loss of 3 kilos of sugar and a bit of time if it doesn't.

[optic]

Optic, I will put parts list and costing later although a couple of bits have been machined by us from scrap materials including the packing in the picture below. There's about 1600 ml of packing not sure if its enough until we put it in.

Regards Opus

Hi Opus
How did you go about cutting these ?,should imagine it would be an extremely long job using a pipe cutter.

[Opus 27]

Your right, but it's called delegation, number one son ended up with a blister.

[optic]

Definitely not a job I would want to try and finish in one session .
Thinking seriously about having a go at building one of these columns, have sourced all the parts cheap enough from JTM plumbing.
Only thing I was thinking about using a 54mm to 15mm reducer at the bottom of the column so I could connect to the existing hole in the lid using a tank connector, only problem I could possibly see is it might be a choke point that could end up flooding the column?.

Cheers
Optic.

[Opus 27]

Just picked up a flow regulator ( the type you see on oxygen bottles) with a float guage. Going to connect it into the column flow. Also considering swapping the temperature guage in the column and putting the probe to our newly built temperature controller in its place.

Opus

[Opus 27]

Optic I take it your looking to put a tank flange through the existing hole from the underside.
As we had already decided that we would evetually replace the boiler for one with a tri - clamp collar we fitted the column with plate to fit a 2" tri - clamp. We drilled this together with the boiler lid and clamped the two together with 6 M6 screws and nuts and a silicone seal. When we replace the boiler we will run some solder in the holes in the tri - clamp plate.

hopefully that all makes sense.

Opus

[Opus 27]

A further mod to our reflux column. We've replaced the valve on the column coolant with a needle valve with a float gauge, the type used on oxygen bottles.

The 20 litre mark gives us a consistent flow of 700ml per min and the 10ml mark gives us 350ml per min.

Ran it today for a spirit run and found the 25ml mark (875ml per min) was spot on for our column with the element on full power.



Opus

[Anavrin]

I was tying to think of a way to use one on these as I come across them at work all the time, good idea to use it to measure the cooling water flow rate, I was thinking about fitting just the gauge part to the top of my column, (if that's even possible) to see if any vapour was escaping past my cooling coil