practical side of Smartstills (etc)

Pretty easy to poison yourself or go blind.

Almost impossible - but HMRC wouldn't like you to know that. You'll only get methanol if you ferment something which gives you methanol (ISTR Cherries can be dodgy). If you stick to the washes available you'll be fine.

You can ferment a 25l wash in 48 hours if you're really desperate. 5 days is more sensible. Once you have cleared the wash, it's 6 runs of 4l which produces 800ml of alcohol at 60% which you dilute down to 40% by adding

Once you've got the 40% it needs filtering. The Essencia 2-filter system is by far and a way the most effective.

Not in 5 years. AFAIK sales of stills are not recorded. I suspect they are suffering in silence on this one, to avoid the Streisland effect.

If you are interested, there are more sophisticated stills available. Check out the Essencia reflux range (The Smart Still is a pot still)

That's probably not too difficult to work out - basically the energy required to boil and then convert to steam however much liquid you have

• plus a fair amount of waste heat to the surroundings probably.

So a litre of water at 10 degs ambient, will need 90 x 4200 = 378kJ to get to boiling. Then another 2260kJ to phase change to gas. So call it about 3MJ to allow for losses. So a tad under 1 kWh which is 3.6MJ

Interestingly a continuous system should be more efficient - you can use fresh liquid coming in to cool the vapour, which preheats the liquid...

Andy

Indeed - a cross flow heat exchange basically.

I'm left wondering if a vacuum still makes more sense. At least an interesting project. A filter pump could easily get the bp of ethanol down to 42°C at 0.2 bar which should save some electricity costs.

It is, that's why commercial operations that want to make raw alcohol rather than liquor use column stills.

Much of what makes a pot still interesting is reflux and I have never used a Smartstill so I don't know what the situation there is.

--scott

The finished alcohol comes out at c. 60%, and needs diluting (distilled water, naturally ;) ) down to 40%. Because of the nature of a pot still, it can still carry some hints of the brewing medium (makes it taste "cardboardy", so I've been told). So a good filter system is really important. The original SmartStills used a "teabag" of charcoal which you dripped the distillate through, as it ran. These were pisspoor, and occasionally they'd clump, and the distillate would overflow. They then changed this for a system where you had a charcoal cartridge you fitted to a receiver, and let the 60% drain through that.

However, Essencia sell a filter which has a ceramic *and* charcoal filter. As long as you replace them when needed (after 50 washes for the ceramic, 5 for the charcoal) the polished alcohol is completely tasteless.

Carrying hints of the brewing medium is important! The whole notion of just randomly adsorbing everything through charcoal is horrifying. It will remove all vestiges of flavour.

That sounds horrible. Why would I want alcohol that is completely tasteless? If I just wanted raw alcohol I'd buy it in a shop.

Indeed, if you just want to make flavourless crap alcohol, a column still can do it cheaper and faster than anything anyone could do in small batches. The reason why you distill in small batches is to make bespoke brandies, gins, and whiskeys.

--scott

Ah, but you're not distilling whisky (or whatever). You are trying to get a pure (ish) alcohol to add flavourings to.

Yes, granted, it won't be as good, or nice as a properly distilled whisky. But then one costs c £3 a litre, while the other can cost £30 (incidentally IMHO the £3 litre is still better than the supermarkets £12/ litre offerings). Now the £30/litre is better, but 10x better ???

FWIW when I have offered people a dram of homemade scotch (without explaining it's origins) no one has ever called me out and said "that's home made". I'm sure there are connoisseurs who could though.

You wouldn't want to drink the stuff that comes out of a still for any whisky. Virtually all the taste comes from the barrel it is aged in not from the alcohol.

If you want to make cordials or liqueurs, that's fine. But to be honest, I can't imagine it will be any cheaper to make your own in a pot still than to just buy column-stilled grain alcohol (Everclear or the like). Grain alcohol at least here in the southern US is very cheap.

I don't know, there are an awful lot of people making properly distilled whiskeys at home. Not as many as there once were, but a surprising number.

Was it in fact Scotch or a liqueur?

--scott

Actually, most of what happens in the aging process is that flavours are removed. There is adsorption going on with the barrel, with heavy stuff being taken out in the same way the activated charcoal drip mentioned earlier does. Now, there is stuff added (especially if you're using old sherry or port casks), but a lot of that is just tannins. By picking the barrels you use and how much you toast them, you can get some crude control over the degree of both these processes.

--scott

One of the mots important things is that the actual alcohol content goes down.

I left a glass of brandy for a day and drank...well coloured brandy flavoured water.

Actually, I've never read such a load of old tosh in my whole life. I've tasted Isle of Jura raw spirit and virtually everything you say is wrong.

I would expect that unless its denatured, it will attract significant excise duty here in the UK, so it won't be cheap.

This can happen with conventional barrel aging because the alcohol evaporates faster than the water, yes. It takes a long, long time to have much effect but it can indeed have a serious one.

Yes.

--scott

Well, believe me or not, as you like.

But, you'll notice that the raw spirit is not exactly... smooth. You'll notice that barrel aging takes the edge off that. How do you think that process works?

--scott