I was about to do a cleaning run on my pot still after having done a few stripping runs on a whisky wash.
In the neck of the boiler was stuff like silver paint smeared inside. I rubbed my finger around the "paint" like substance and it was liquid to the touch, just like paint.
When I made the flange to go on the bottom of the column I used soft - plumbers solder as my map torch could not seem to handle the 2" copper drawing all the heat away. I figured because the solder was on the outside and not in the vapour path it would be ok. I use a silicon gasket between the keg and column.
This has made me shit scared that a vapour leak at the joint, maybe because the gasket had slipped, has reacted with the lead in the solder and contaminated all my product.
Would lead at the bottom of the column carry over in the vapour? The column is 1,100mm high.
I was just about to do a spirit run on 18L of whisky low wines, but now I'm going to cut the flange off and re solder a new one with silver.
Is it possible the low wines are contaminated with lead and that the lead would carry over into a spirit run?
I've been working on this whisky for about a month and it would break my heart to dump it all now, but obviously I don't want lead poisoning either.
I don't have photos of the smearing as I cleaned it off before I thought of taking any, but here is a photo of the flange.