G'Day All,
I'm Harry, from sunny Nth Queensland and have been a long time home brewer, I started brewing way back in 1994 with kit & kilo due to having a Mrs who was not working, well I suppose looking after three kids under 3 is hard work - but things were tight on one wage and I couldn't afford to buy a carton of beer some fortnights.
One thing led to another and I moved up to making my own beers from extract and then finally onto all grain mashes and boils. After many years my 3 vessel system is finally complete and I can knock out two 50litre back to back batches in about 8 hours including clean up - so yep I am pretty squared away with water chemistry, recipe development and fermentation control.
I have even played with reusing, freezing and culturing yeast & lacto for sour beers but that’s another thing all together geeking out on methylene blue, hemocytometer cell counting while staring into a microscope is not something that really floats other peoples boats.
I was finally talked into having a crack at distilling. Unfortunately I paid plenty of attention to the Methanol myth as spoken about with every second beer brewer and was too afraid of having a crack, after all my only experience was with mates who had used the Turbo yeasts 6 Kg of sugar a handful of liquid carbon and produced crap that smelt like nail polish remover until they filtered the stuff and then mixed it with some essence to hide the off flavours.
Besides that, every time I had drank the stuff that my mates made I would wake up feeling like I was recovering from an autopsy. :mad:
Then I had a go at one of my mates whiskey that he convinced me to mash for him on my 3 vessel rig – malt is malt and water is water so I mashed it boiled it to the gravity he wanted and then threw it in a couple of no chill cubes for him after a 30 minute boil.I had completely forgotten about it until he sent me a bottle of his whiskey that I had mashed for him and I was so impressed and after a conversation with him I was talked into giving distilling a try.
The Mrs was stoked as she loves a vodka so off to the LHBS to get some other stuff and we were sold a Turbo 500 – If only I had have done more research and found this forum first! - but it is what it is I suppose and for a relatively minor outlay it got me started. Its like Kit & Kilo beer it gets you started and you can always go bigger from there.
I am now in the process of building a 2” modular still – to be fair I was sold an absolute disaster as a boiler from the LHBS and after being told by my son about the dangers of plastics and solvents (he’s studying at Uni to be an industrial chemist) there’s no way I am comfortable with the advice I received from my local home brew shop – it’s clear the staff are blissfully unaware of the risks.
Anyway I have now got my first TPW in the fermenter, looks great, and I didn’t even have to put a bunch of liquid carbon into it or 1/2kg of yeast – it’s bubbling away with temperature control and it should produce something that doesn’t smell like paint stripper :D
Anyway, that's it for me for now, take care all, and thanks for all of the great posts on here.
Cheers
Harry