I purchased a still from a friend withoutdoing any research (hey cheap booze sounded good)
Its the pos that only has a single marble in the column.
Since I got it I have run 5 washes using turbos. 1 of them has been drinkable. Not sounding very cheap so far is it? the others have all been bitter or had a very yeasty aroma and taste.
Now I have been lurking for a couple of weeks and yesterday tried some things I've seen and some things the LHBS suggested.
1. Was taking upto 12hrs to run (2.5ish to get up to temp and start getting product). It was connected through a long extension cord. I moved everything (a 44 of cooling water is heavy) and connected straight to the wall. Btw original element swapped for 2400w.
2. Previous runs involved taking first 60ml (100ml in later runs) as fores. Temp would settle @ 86-88c and I would run until 92-94c. This gave from 76abv to 71abv at end of run. This was with thermometer bulb @ bottom of offtake. HBS suggested raising thermo to top of offtake.
3. Cooling water is a 44gal drum and a water fountain pump from bunnings. Was previously running pump full speed (prob only 4-5lpm) HBS suggested dropping to 1-1.5lpm.
Now yesterdays run was 5l of 72abv from previous runs with 2l of 40abv shit that had been flavoured and was undrinkable, topped up to 20 something litres with tap water.
in addition to my magic marble i added as much stainless scrubber as i could fit into the column (could still blow through quite easy)
Brought up to 50c and turned on water @ 1.5lpm, thermometer bulb at top of offtake. temp settled at 78.
takeoff was a much faster toothpick sized stream compared to the usual 2-3 drips per sec. (took only 1.5hrs to get product so the move to the power point has helped)
discarded first 100ml as fores. collected in 250-300ml lots in jars. towards the end of every jar i would get a couple of drops on a spoon and mix a few drops of water, all except the middle 3 jars had vicious biting kick to them. first jars came out @ 60abv (?) down to 40abv for the last collected. was getting very frustrated by now so killed power and water, rerouted water to cut out RC and turned everything back on and try salvage some of the alcohol lost in the boiler. pulled that till was only getting 30abv and decided fuck it. entire run time was down to 4hrs maybe.
left all jars to air over night covered with paper towel. spent a good 45min this morning mixing samples on my spoon, spitting them out. there was maybe 5 jars that didnt taste like the back of a monkeys nut sack, the 3 in the middle and the jars 2 out from those:
ie bad bad good bad good good good bad good bad bad
tossed everything back into a demi to rerun.
can anyone help me get something i can drink out of this piece of molded dog turd while i save to build a boka or a bubbler (undecided yet). i currently have a TPW down that i will run during the week if possible.
Thanks
Tim