Neutral Still Day - With Pics

[Anavrin]

Hi Guys

I decided to do a diary of a spirit run on my boka with a few pics so people can see what I'm doing, how I do it and criticise / offer advice as I go along, I'm still fairly new to this so so I thought it would be a good idea just to put it on here and see what you guys think.

I started off this morning with 25.5 litres at 30% that I had watered down from 3 stripping runs done previously, I could have had more alcohol from the strips but that's a lesson learned for the future.

Here's my setup







It's a 50litre stainless boiler with a 3kw heating element.

The tower is 54mm copper tube that has 1 meter of 6mm ceramic raschig rings as packing with 1 stainless scrubber at the top under the slant plates, at the top I have an 8inch double wound 6mm condensing coil.

The temp probe is positioned between the two plates and the take off is an 8mm tube to a small valve.

I have a 15mm tube around the bottom 60cm of the take off as a Liebig product cooler.

I filled the boiler with the low wine this morning and added another 4litres of water just to avoid the level dropping anywhere near the heating element and switched it all on.




When it got up to temp I adjusted the power so it was just above the point where I was getting reflux in the colum and product was starting to come off.






I then closed the valve and let it stabilise for half an hour before I started to remove the fores and head.

I'm working on that 15% of the total alcohol will be fores/heads, so in my case that's the first 1.2 litres, and after this amount had been collected the temp in the column had stabilised at 82.8°c





I continued to collect the heads until I had 1.5 litres (in 500ml jars) and put then to one side as heads. I think most of jar 3 was hearts but I'm cutting it anyway, I'm now gonna collect the next 4litres as hearts in 500ml jars again, it's slow 45mins per jar but it stable and I know if I mess with the power or take off rate I'll spoil the product, that's where I am right now as I post this, I'll update throughout the day :-)

[Anavrin]

Just though I'd mention, 82.8°c seems to be my magic number on this setup, so I'm expecting it to stay there for most of the hearts collection, when it rises to 83°c it's time to stop collecting, I'm not interested in the tails or heads for that matter and like I said I'm hoping for 4 litres before it gets to 83°c

My theory is that 15% of the alc is fores/heads and 50-60% of the alcohol will be good hearts

I started with 25.5litres at 30%

This means I have 7.65 litres of alcohol

15% of this is 1.15 litres fores/heads, I've taken 1.5 litres to be sure

50-60% hearts is 3.8 - 4.4 litres

Just over 4 litres at 95% will make 10 litres of Vodka at 40%

At least this is my plan!

[Anavrin]

Update

Just tested the first jar of hearts, it smells lovely, like vodka but at 95%!

Think I could of cut from heads to hearts a little earlier but I didn't want to risk tainting the first hearts jars with any heads.

[Icefever]

Well done...looks like you enjoyed yourself....any chance of a sniffer??

[Anavrin]

I'm still enjoying myself as it's still running at the moment :-)

I've now collected 6 500ml jars but my temps risen to 83.1°c already! Surely I can't be into tails already as there's still over 4 1/2 litres of alcohol left in the boiler, maybe my assumptions on how much I can collect are wrong! I'm gonna keep going anyway and see what I get

[Capt-Cudellez]

Sounds like you are having fun.

Do you have any way of telling how much power you are feeding in? Also what is your takeoff rate in ml per hour?
It could be you are putting too little power in for the amount of product you are taking off.

BTW I usually see 0.2-0.3oC of an increase from heads to hearts, then it is rock solid until tails approach.

[Anavrin]

I'm starting to think something isn't quite right with my setup, the power controller can cut the power up to 50% I was running it at just past half way down so I'm guessing I'm reducing the power by around 25-30% so maybe 2kw.

I was getting 500ml every 45mins, so quite slow but if I take it off any faster my temp shoots up.

I found that half way through jar number 8 the temp had risen to 84.4°c and the take off was really slowing down, so I must have been into the tails already.

I'm disappointed with the yield from the hearts, especially when I've spent a month making and striping 3 sugar washes :-(

I have a theory that my condenser is not knocking down all the vapour, tomorrow when everything's cooled down I'm going to get technical, I'm going to measure the volume left in the boiler, it's % alcohol, and calculate how much alcohol was left in the back wash, add this to the volume collected and see if it falls short on what I had to start with!

I'm glad I posted this, hopefully you guys might be able to help me suss out what's going on here

[Easydrinker]

I'm glad you are going back to look at the numbers.
I don't feel I can offer much here.
I hope you achieve an acceptabble result.
Robert.

[Anavrin]

Done some numbers this morning, the backwash left in my boiler was 25 litres at 15%

Alcohol left in wash = (litres/100%) x 15%

(25/100) x 15 = 3.75

I collected 3.8 litres at an average of 94%

(3.8/100) x 94 = 3.72

Total 7.47

Looks like I haven't lost any due to inefficient cooling as the alcohol I figured I had to start with is pretty similar to what I collected and what's left.

I just don't understand why my temp went up so much and the output slowed down,
I checked the last 800ml I collected and it's good neutral.

I'm gonna run the leftover wash through the airstill, they're real handy for this sort of thing

[Capt-Cudellez]

yeah, something doesn't sound right. If your putting in 2kw you should be able to take off up to 1.5 L/h.

On my still, I like the results at 1.8Kw and 1.2L/h take off during hearts collection.

Maybe try a little less power and see how you get on.

[Anavrin]

I agree Something is definitely wrong and it felt some drastic measures were in order to rectify it, so not being one for half hearted tinkering I decided to chop it up and make the LM/VM hybrid I've been thinking about for a while, here's the start of it

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