by Ondrayus » Mon Mar 23, 2020 10:34 pm
Well, that was interesting, fun, and potentially a bit dangerous!
Saturday morning I sanitised things then dropped the wash into the boiler and put everything together, powering up around 8:05pm. At 48deg (9:20pm) I put the water flow on by my cheat sheet (400ml/min), noting it made no difference...and temp blew out 90deg+ before I knew it!!!
Panicking, I kept increasing water flow (a crap tonne more than recommended!!) until the temp reduced and held to 80deg (around 9:45pm). That's when I saw my first output bottle splashing away with 240ml in it, so I swapped it out and marked it as poison, pity about the extra lol. I also noticed the inlet hose letting a water drop out every 30s or so.
At 10:15pm things were humming (81-82deg). Just a stripping run but swapping at 300ml to instill the habit and check cuts. On the 4th cut, content was 70 on the alcometer so I decided to stop cutting (not really sure what to check for, and running out of bottles!)
At 12:15am I swapped another bottle out which was at 60%, then at 2:30am I cut my losses and powered down, last bottle also measuring 60%.
Next day called my mate to update him. He suggested running the still out again to get the rest. Gave that a crack following night but in 2h15m the flow was slow, only got 160ml fore shot and 500ml at 60% so stopped again, not sure if I should have run it out again and with work in the morning needed sleep!
Mixed my cuts (mines the foreshots!) ready for the next run and got about 2.6L altogether. Didn't measure the final % as I'm planning another run before the spirit run anyway, but got heaps of notes (timing/temps/cut observations and problems) and think I learned a few things for the next run. Articles on here were great guides too, really useful stuff on here, thanks again!
Sorry for the long update that will possibly go unread haha :)
Last edited by
Ondrayus on Mon Mar 23, 2020 10:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.