By the way, that inline reflux still needs some fishnet stockings and a lampshade…

Pulling off the heads is an easy way to remove these volatile alcohols that have a lower vaporization point.

Still, they have to be present in the initial brew that you are distilling. I watched a video of a professional distilling several hundred gallons and the heads only made up a few cups. At the size this guy is doing you wouldn’t produce enough to cause more then a bad taste and perhaps a headache.

@Geekman
That was supposed to be read as contrite self deprecating humour.

@Gabrielm
That was suppossed to be read as ironic dickishness in light of said contrite self deprecating humour.

Way to suck the buzz out. Now I’m a sad panda.

In principle you get better results with higher proof alcohol, so do the infusion with Everclear or Devil’s Spring vodka or similar, and then dilute (or not) to the desired strength. (unless there are some undesirable flavors in the gin ingredients you don’t want so much of I guess)

But: 100 gallons in a year? That’s 8 pints to a gallon. 800 gallons divided 365 days=2.19+ pints per day. No problem there.

Just today I drank two bottles of Tsingtao helping to replace a roof at 10th and Clement. After enough work, walked to 540 Club and had 3 pints of Stella with a friend. (soundtrack was Charles Mingus. . .), then when parking meters had to be fed and tools replaced: back to 10th, to the Front Room (PO) for a Final Final single pint of Red Hook ESB. -a perfect finish-

That’s 5 pints+, and frankly an average day. Not for everyone I realize. And 100 gallons is plenty.

But for a drinking person. . .that dubious threshold is easily attainable.

“OK, so put your hand up if you have been binge drinking in the last week”

Almost entire audience puts up hand.

“Now keep your hand up if you’ve had a binge this week, and then GONE OUT DRINKING.”

2) The open top column is very important – it’s better to have a bit of alcohol lost should something go wrong, than to have pressure buildup you don’t notice until something blows, one of your pressure-fit joints pops, and bits of copper plumbing go flying in all directions, possibly including toward your noggin.

If anything he’s overengineered his still, by having such a high condenser section. Probably all the condensation happens in the bottom 6″ or so of that chimney.

Given Australia’s huge and amazing boutique beer and wine industry I’m sure that we’d have some killer spirits (in the “yeah man that movie is killer!” not the “oh god you’ve killed him” sense) if the laws were relaxed a little.

The scrubbers provide surface area for condensation. You are correct that the impurities remain on the scrubbers, and in fact they must be replaced on a regular basis. The continual rising and falling – boiling and condensing – is known as reflux, hence the name of the type of still.

“It seems like there is still plenty of opportunity for the alcohol to evaporate straight out the top, unless the water is constantly kept extremely cold.”

The number of coils he’s running makes it very unlikely that any steam would be able to get past without dropping in temperature to the point of being liquid again. My still has half the coils and I never even see a wisp of steam come out the top – if you hold your hand over it, it is barely warm. But I use faucet cooling rather than recirculated water as he does.

Long ago in a galaxy far away I used to operate something similar, only with a scrubbing column going up, a U-bend and then a straight copper pipe with a water sleeve going down for a condenser. Result ~160 proof alcohol in abundance.

Awesome.

There are 6,000+ members on one home-distilling group I read, 4,000+ on another, and who knows how many other groups. Even with overlap, that’s a lot of people, and it’s obvious many of those people are really doing this. There are hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of posts, hundreds of recipes and instructions, and now several actual books. They ALL explain in detail how to get rid of methanol. Illiterate hillbillies (and semi-literate farmers, and pretty literate George Washington) have been successfully avoiding methanol for hundreds of years (without taste-testing, BTW, there are other methods). METHANOL IS NOT AN ISSUE.

Virtually all the stories of blindness, poisoning, etc. come from depression/Prohibition-era moonshining, when poor people would do anything to make a buck (including using lead-soldered car radiators as condensers), and sober people would drink anything. After Repeal, moonshiners had to start matching the quality of their product to the commercial competition. It’s also worth noting that virtually all reports of illness and death come from BATF reports. Surely a law-enforcement agency would never exaggerate the dangers of a substance they are tasked (and highly-funded) to eradicate!

As far as legality, well…I was amazed to see small, table-top size stills for sale in wine stores in Italy. In the US, laws proscribing personal behavior tend to fall into a) avoidance of tax collection, b) stepping on some powerful industries toes, or c) enforcement of some (specific) religious or moral code. Moonshining hits the trifecta, violating all three, so it must be evil, right?

Certainly Americans by the thousands would never violate Federal law just to enjoy imbibing an enjoyable substance…oh, wait.

Methanol is produced by the an-aerobic processes of several types of bacteria (not yeasts). If your beer, wine, or other starter material has any sugars left in it — or any simple carbs, oftentimes — and you get one or more of these types of bacteria into the bottle, or into the still, or into the mash, you get methanol in the end product — which is one very good reason to sterilise /everything/ /throughly/ /every/ /time/ /you/ /brew/, /bottle/, or do anything else with the substances.

Methanol, itself, does not poison you nor make you go blind; Instead, it gives your liver the materials it needs to produce formaldehyde, which is then converted into formic acid – i.e. ant venom. This produces metabolic acidosis and cellular hypoxia – your body stops operating at the cellular level for a lack of oxygen and a shutdown of metabolic processes.

The reason that moonshiners of Ye Olden Tymes let methanol-tainted product get into the hands of people who were poisoned by it, is because they ‘safety-tested’ the product on themselves … but people who have severe cirrhosis of the liver, or a failing liver, or severe hepatitis, don’t get poisoned by the methanol-formaldehyde-formic acid process; Their liver never metabolises the alcohol and it’s excreted by the kidneys. A lifetime alcoholic can more readily drink methanol without further adverse effects than someone with a fully functioning liver.

–

NaOH Jones: Be careful of red rot – it’s caused by acidic leaching of zinc out of brass, leaving behind the copper matrix. It can be a safety issue especially as you’re concerned about lead leach (it might be leaching but not leaving behind any surface lead, if the only thing left on the surface is copper), and it causes structural failure as well. If I were you, I would avoid lead in all parts of an apparatus.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I do love drink for the sake of drink. B&B or Drambuie are my favorites, and I can easily polish off a bottle of Asti in one sitting. However, frequency is a problem, and too often would leave me lethargic with a chest full of phlegm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm60Aw8YTQE

But no bourbon around though: I think I’ll have a wee dram instead.

There’s also these guys: infusing spirits in a whipped cream doohicky. I want to try the chocolate nibs in particular.

Someone in the earlier thread mentioned freeze-distilling, which was a pretty traditional practice for extracting applejack from cider in colonial America. People, don’t do this. Real, heat-based distilling gives the distiller the chance (requirement, really) to discard the “heads and tails” (acetones and fusel oils) driven out at the beginning and end of the process. Freezing fermented beverages (i.e. cider) to freeze the water and thereby concentrate the unfrozen alcohol products (“applejack”) gives no opportunity to remove the poisonous acetones, fusel oils and other dangerous by-products of distillation. “Apple palsy” and other colonial maladies were very real, and were created by just this process. Make your own, distilled apple brandy, or just buy Calvados in the liquor store (BTW, anything called “Applejack” in a liquor store is a grain-neutral spirit (a vodka), flavored by artificial apple flavoring, whereas a Calvados is probably a real apple brandy from France).

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-moonshine/

http://solarcooking.org/plans/barbeque.htm

and then this for cooling the condenser:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Solar-Cooler-in-a-Can/

As far as I can tell, the only real trouble lies in controlling the temperature, but apart from that, I think you could create a mobile solar distillery that could fit in your backpack.