StillSmart

3x25litre cider washes at about 7% stripped and then run slowly through the pot still....how much finished spirit when watered down to 43%.?

The density of your starting 7%abv was 0.99, the density of your final 43%abv spirit is 0.94.

75 litres *.07 *100/43 *1.05

12.8 litres of 43%abv spirit, from which you lose a bit left in the still after the two distillations and you also lose the fores and heads you discard. You could call it approaching 11 litres of finished spirit at 43%abv.

Just for future ref, here is an online calculator with all the calculations you should need for your distilling pleasure:
http://homedistiller.org/calcs/rad14701

vino-tinto wrote:Just for future ref, here is an online calculator with all the calculations you should need for your distilling pleasure

I would love to trust these online calculators but I see no reason to. That one, for example, gives 12.209 litres for this query which is correct except for the density change. The actual value, 12.8 litres, is noticeably different but if you distill it and dilute it as requested it's the 12.8 litres you'll actually see, not that online calculator value. 43%abv occupies more space than water, that's how hygrometers and alcohol meters work. The sum requires the conservation of mass, not the conservation of volume - the number of molecules of alcohol doesn't change.

I've yet to see any online calculator correctly convert %abv to % alcohol by weight, too. Every single one that I've found says 100%abv = 80%abw when it's blatantly obvious the answer has to be 100%abw. What they're converting to is plain weight, not the percentage.

All it takes is one website to have the calculations come out in line with physical reality. If anyone sees one, point it out.

thanks guys...my first spirit run and I collected only the hearts and what I thought was decent heads and tails....only got 4.5 litres,,,the rest went in the feints jar, a bit to cautious me thinks

Did you check the final SG of the washes?

spot wrote:Did you check the final SG of the washes?

yes the washes were 35% after the strip run, about 3.5 gallons into the spirit run.

The locals where I live would tell you it was the boggart took what's missing, but they're a superstitious bunch of rustics who enjoy winding up anyone who'll listen.

The strip run was fine then, you had all the alcohol in the 35%.

You should have had about 3 litres of water left in the pot still after the spirit run. If you had a lot more than that, what made you stop?

Spot.

I don't know how long you have been home distilling for, but there is nothing wrong with the calculators on homedistiller.org site for the everyday distiller.

This forum is to help people who are learning, not to post information taught in an laboratory that members quite honestly are not interested in.

You have just told someone who has asked a simple question that the online calculator I pointed to is not correct, but for years this calculator has been the one recognised by many as the best.

Why do you keep going off on one, it's like a university lecturer teaching 3 year olds to code in Linux before they can read.

My calcs and experiance would suggest that, off the 75 litres of wash at 7% you would get about 10.5 litres of strip @50% if you collected the strip into the output was 30% before stopping.

That 10.5 litres would be watered down to 30% for the spirit run, giving a boiler charge of 17.5 litres.

After cuts I recon you would collect about 3-4 litres of hearts, not sure of the ABV, maybe 60 - 70% ish

The secrets in the title "Just a guess please"

Fecking glad I didn't "guess" because [I normally do] I would have been fryed alive !

I was 0.5148431452685 litre out

vino-tinto wrote:I don't know how long you have been home distilling for, but there is nothing wrong with the calculators on homedistiller.org site for the everyday distiller.

I'm grateful for your point of view but, without wishing to be contentious, I'd quite like to know why you hold this opinion. The calculators could, if they were correctly configured, be accurate - that is, they could conform to the real world, they could predict correctly what happens when real materials are employed with real measuring jugs.

I can honestly see no reason on earth why they should instead use an imprecise approximation which (in the example above) gives an answer varying from reality by 600ml, or 5%. This isn't a rounding error, this is plain bad information masquerading as authoritative truth.

Either you think I'm wrong - I may be, who knows, but we can certainly check. Or you think the permanent inbuilt error (of 5% in this case) is unimportant. I can think of no third option. Why is this 600ml difference between answer and real life of no interest to the everyday distiller? And why, though you ignored the observation earlier, should "100%abv = 80%abw" be tolerated anywhere outside of an asylum for the bewildered?

Anavrin wrote:After cuts I recon you would collect about 3-4 litres of hearts, not sure of the ABV, maybe 60 - 70% ish

Hi Anavrin,

Your post made sense to me but does it imply your cuts add up to around 3.5 litres, about the same as your hearts? And if it does, is that usual? Or if it's different, what sort of volume are you expecting to set aside at this stage?

Hi Spot

I estimated that 3.5 litres off the total alcohol in the Still for the spirit run.

If your strip is 10.5 litres at 50% then it contains 5.25 litres of alcohol.

My general rules is expect half of that to be hearts, so 2.625 litres at 100%

I generally expect the first 30% to be heads followed by the 50% that's hearts, the final 20% is tails, collect it or leave it in the boiler, up to you.

That 2.625 litres will be maybe 3-4 litres at a lower percentage, just a guess, real life results may vary, other opinions are available lol

That's helpful information, I've never removed anything like that much. I'm aware that I have practically no sense of smell and my tastebuds atrophied decades ago, perhaps I should just eliminate by volume.

Mash wrote:I was 0.5148431452685 litre out

... and I do like that - it's the same precision as measuring an Olympic swimming pool to the nearest 0.0003ml.