Gday all, amazing forum.
Just wanted to chuck something up, been distilling for about half a year now and am loving the craft. I may have purchased a Turbo500 still, and i know there are a lot of bad things said about them, I was happy with the way it performed considering i dont mind drinking vodka. I had a setup with a 12v aquarium pump set up with a volt regulator and digital display so instead of using the needle valve to control the water flow i could get very accurate temp control with the voltage to the pump.
Since the first few batches of birdwatchers and TFFV, that went very well, i wanted to get more flavour through.
I have since raided the local plumbers scrap heap and soldered up (very badly) a good column and good size lie berg. Then attached to the T500 boiler head with the attachment from 5star supplies. had a bit of trouble with the ferrules as they were exactly the same size (inside diameter and out) as the 2" copper pipe. I think this was due to the K style copper piping (quiet old and thick walled) I got around this by annealing the end of the copper tubing, grinding the ferrules edge inwards (coning i call it) and banging it in with a wood block.
Neatened everything up that water in from the false wall in shed then exits through the side of shed and have a hose attachment to reuse the water on the garden.
I am currently about to do my spirit run on 2x25L gen 3 of nutrigrain wash. gen 2 tasting great after a couple of weeks with oak chips soaked.
After gen 3 i saved 10L of backset and froze for future gens. But used the carryover yeast starter for making "all grain" whisky from coopers LME.
Used 4 cans of amber LME, 5L backset from gen3 nutri and topped up with water to 25L in fermeter (1.073)
same thing with 4 cans of light LME...Going to strip them back and spirit run separate, then maybe blend afterwards.
About to start altering my still for a shotgun i've nearly finished, just thinking about water conservation :)
happy stilling everyone. keep it up