Nice still.
Heres my old Boka...Produced 96%
Nice one.
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I seem to remember that 95 point something was the best you can do without distilling in vacuum and you need to watch the temperature curves when reading the % of spirit to ensure you compensate for the temperature of the sample. I always used an ice bath to bring the sample back to the calibration temperature but in reality who cares?
With my fractionating still, I can pick the purity and I found going past 92% added a few hours to the distillation cycle for no apparent gain in quality. Likewise, I found that double distilling (with the first run at 80% or so) was not worth the effort.
Ooops, I think I got to 95% but as I say who really cares....
For those beer distillers out there, you can buy a commercially made still at your favourite home brew shop but the column is under a foot long and there is a corresponding drop in purity down to about 80% but for me, half the fun was making the still.
So the recipe is to distill 8 kg of sugar to get 20% using the correct yeast, you can use 9kg of dextrose which is supposed to eliminate bad flavours but at this level of purity, the expense is not justified. eg. I could never taste the difference.
distill to 90+%, on my still, there is a coil of copper pipe running inside the cup with cold water in it to condense the vapours into a liquid that collects in the bottom "cup". Most is sent back down the colum via a needle valve and the rest is collected to the bottle. The ratio is about 4:1 (recycled : collected)
First off, you need to throw the first bit away as it could kill you. With a still like mine with a tap on it, you can turn the outlet off and leave it for quite a while so the bad stuff get to the top of the column before turning it on. Throw away the first 200 ml (probably could discard as little as 80ml) on these high purity stills. but lets be safe to drink another day...
The thermometer keeps an eye on things, It will sit on 82 degrees for a few hours
They say to stop collecting when it hits 84 degrees but I stop as soon as I see the temp rise. Keep the tails to 94 degrees and throw them in the next batch in case there is some good stuff in there. Think of it as deferring drinking this bit in the interest of quality!
dilute to 50%, charcoal filter it to remove any bad flavours (charcoal is not effective over about 64%
and it is pretty slow to do so we only filter as much liquid as necessary
Check concentration, dilute to 40%
Optionally soak on oak chips to smooth the spirit and then add the flavouring of our choice
As I said, A rewarding hobby! But I have not run this for 4-5 years.... must get onto it again!
