This contribution tells you how to distill liquids in your own kitchen.
Maybe for illegal liquor, maybe for purifying water.
! Drinking distilled alcohol may be harmful / fatal.
! Distilling alcohol may be illegal
! Drinking distilled water may be harmful / fatal
Maybe for illegal liquor, maybe for purifying water.
! Drinking distilled alcohol may be harmful / fatal.
! Distilling alcohol may be illegal
! Drinking distilled water may be harmful / fatal
Has anyone used this for purifying water? Thats what I am looking to do.
I've been using a home made pot still made from exactly the kind of aluminium pressure cooker pictured above. It works fine and can produce some very nice spirit with a bit of care.
Use copper or stainless steel only, anything else and your going to make something that taste bad, will make you sick or kill you.
Post your still if we can learn something / like it?
L
I would never use brass pipes or fittings where it would or could come into contact with the mash, vapor or any other part of you liquor! Brass is made from copper zinc and LEAD! That's a recipe for certain death! Even if you ran a batch through a still with brass parts one time throw it away it's poison! Even if you run it through a glass or copper still a second time to try and clean it up it's still poison! Once you get lead crystals in your alcohol It's lethal poison! DO NOT DRINK IT! I don't know of any way to remove the LEAD. The best metal for making a still is 99.9% pure food grade copper because it's non-toxic and the copper helps remove sulfites from the mash, Copper water pipe with lead free silver solder will work but even that I would clean it up good before using it. The next best thing is 18/8 304 food grade or 316 surgical grade stainless steel. Don't use cheap non food grade stainless steel because the cheap stuff has other metals in it that will corrode and contaminate you final product and stainless steel won't remove sulfites like copper does. Last but not least you can use lab grade borosilicate glass or pyrex glass But it's 10 times more expensive than the other two. To buy just a 5 gallon glass boiler pot you going to pay $1000. or more and that's not counting the class condenser and all the glass fittings to put it together. You can get a small complete glass still for about $500. to $1000. but it would be so small you could only make a pint or two of product at a time making it not worth it and again glass will not remove sulfites like copper does. My 15 gallon setup is all copper and food grade stainless steel and it took me about a year to get it all exactly right and cost me about $350. Take your time and do it right in the end it will pay for itself in one or two runs.
L
TL;DR: Methanol is poisonous, use a thermometer to boil it off first.
Nice big warnings at the top of the page, shame this method doesnt actually tell you to remove the poisonous methanol that can blind you among other things.
Basics you should know:
Alcohol is produced by yeast metabolizing sugars (grain,fruit,cane,corn etc). Methanol and ethanol are produced, methanol is poisonous, ethanol is what you want to drink. Fortunately methanol boils at(65°C/149°F) a lower temperature than ethanol(78°C/173°F) which boils at a lower temperature than water (100°C/212°F). Knowing this and by having a thermometer in your still/pot you can discard the vast majority of the methanol and the water (the first and last bits), achieving a stronger end product that won't blind you.
More stuff:
Wine and beer have small safe amounts of ethanol in them that your body can deal with, until you concentrate the methanol by distilling and then consuming.
For those interested methanol is metabolized into formaldehyde (used in tanning, wood finishing) and formic acid (will literally shut your cells down then blow them up giving you cancer) eyes are particularly sensitive to formic acid this is why blindness is strongly associated with methanol poisoning.
On a side note, definitely use ice in the water around your coil and it doesn't hurt to add salt.
Pretty cool!
Also, if using copper tubing, the tubing needs to be thoroughly cleaned and dried before and after each use, to avoid contamination by copper salts.
I can see that you know something about this. My father made grain and sugar shine in the 1940's and always told me, If your not going to do it the right way that's clean and safe don't waist you time.
So, in addition to taste, removing the first part (the cooler-temperature mix of non-ethanol + some ethanol) and the last part (the hotter-temperature mix of the last of the ethanol, + some high-temp non-ethanol) reduces the toxicity of the distillate.
You won't die if you you don't do this, but it sure won't make your hangovers (and life expectancy) any better. So do it. :)
L
L
You do know brass is made from copper zinc and LEAD don't you? I would never use brass. They have some new stuff they are calling lead free brass but even that has a small % of lead in it, it will make poison you don't want any lead at all in you still.
Clean it out with hot vinegar and lemon juice first or just go buy some new copper pipe, All that stuff built up in that old water pipe will go into your product.
L
Makes perfect sense.
Do you know anything about azeotropes ("it will not turn to steam until the ethanol is gone" is false), or how much methanol there is in a bottle of wine?
L
L
I don't speak German so I may have clicked the wrong thing but as to the amount of methanol in something fermented like beer or wine it's not very much because if it was people would go blind from drinking a six pack or a bottle of wine. I think what most people don't understand or see is that when you distill beer or wine your concentrating that little 5 or 10 %ABV to 5 times or more stronger than in the first place and your also concentrating the methanol that much more. The methanol in beer and wine isn't enough to hurt you but when you concentrate it 5 or more times stronger in a still then it becomes poison. Methanol in any amount is no good for anyone.
You need copper in your vapor path if you plan to be drinking what you're distilling, because copper absorbs sulfur compounds in the vapor which detract from the taste.
I wouldn't want chrome in the vapor path at all, because hot alcohol vapor is corrosive, and might pick up chromium from the fittings.
My boiler is 18/8 304 stainless steel with a FDA grade silicone lid gasket. My column is made from a 50 year old piece of 3 inch x 30 inch copper vent pipe and all the coupler fittings have red brass outside threads over copper unions with hand made silicone gaskets, the red brass doesn't come in contact with the vapor path. I took me about a year to put it together piece by piece. I was worried about the chromium in the stainless steel but 304 is plenty corrosion resistant for mash.
You need to stop the run when the temperature starts rising above 190F, or you begin getting propanol coming out, and alcohol content starts dropping, because at about 200F the water starts putting off vapor mixing in with the alcohol vapor.
You don't just boil out all the ethanol then start boiling the water at 212F. When the water starts getting close to it's boiling point, it's already giving off steam, to dilute the alcohol output.
It looks to me like you'd have to just guess at when to stop the distillation, or is there something I'm not seeing about where/how to put a thermometer?
On my still I have 3 Miljoco thermometers, One on the boiler, one at the top of the column and one on the condenser.