Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Hi everyone,

Just joined the distilling community after lots of reading before stumping up some healthy ponies for a small bubbler with a Carter head (arrives next week). Managed to get a TPW healthily gurgling away in the laundry after a few small hiccups. I used an online calculator that didn't work properly and told me to throw 3g of yeast in a 60l wash, wasn't doing much so I figured out what went wrong a few hours later. More yeast and away it went. I also used a 60l calculation for a 60l fermenter, oops, forgot to account for the space taken up by sugar etc.

So, guess you'll be hearing from me as I keep messing up.

Best way to learn is to mess up :-B
Welcome here

Welcome mate good luck with the bubbler. :greetings-waveyellow:

Welcome :greetings-waveyellow:

We all stuff up along the way. The best thing I've found about distilling is that it is pretty forgiving. It's hard to go too far wrong and if you do just throw it back through the still again.

Best way to learn is by experience :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Welcome mate! :greetings-waveyellow:
One of the many great aspects of this forum is the eagerness of everyone to share their experiences.. what works doesn't work ect. So just keep reading and you will learn heaps, might even save a stuffup or 2. Like WD said though, we've all been there.

Welcome mate, if you mess up bad enough you might get to post in the “tell us your fuckups” thread :D

Welcome to AD mate.

Cheers,
Prof. Green.

Ok. So this baby arrived today.

Thanks for the welcome. Didn't expect so many replies. Of course I'm in Taswegia all weekend so I won't get to fire it up till next week. Looks like the wash will get some extra time to ferment.

What baby ??

Hi Stig, tried to post a pic but didn't work.

Gday mate, the pic has to be less than 1mb

Thanks Doubleuj. Let's try this.

Learnt some new stuff. Don't run the take off of water through the dephlegmator and condenser into a single pipe as a newb. I'd put a needle valve in backwards or it had crap in it but I couldn't control the flow. Having them separate means you can see the flow rate of both. Second bit of advice is flush the system before collecting valves to get any crap left from manufacture.

Vinegar run done!

Nice rig mate!
A pic says a thousand words.... :handgestures-thumbupleft:
The quickest way to learn is get your hands dirty, just make sure you follow all the safety advice on here.

Time for an update. Have learned so far:

1. Too much power to the coil pushes the reflux to the top two bubble plates and not enough leaves reflux on the bottom two. If it's just right, all four plates bubble.

2. You have to slowly increase power to keep all four going (which makes sense). ABV is inversely affected.

3. Bubble plates leave flavour in. The harder you run the dephleg, the higher the ABV and the lower the flavour. I start at about 92 and it falls off a cliff at about 82 on a good run. Water through the dephleg at about 150ml/min.

4. You can get friends very drunk on this stuff.

G-day mate,most peeps plumb the inlet to the bottom of the gin basket and have the shotty exiting from the top port.And I would certainly not put a valve on the end of the shotty regardless of the breather holes above.And the hot water should exit the top of the RC,with adjusting valeves on the inlet side of both RC and PC.cheers hillzabilly ;-)

Ok. So I'm getting less newb as I go. Have now run a heap of gin and have settled on a botanical recipe with lemon myrtle. I've got a some neutral from feints and ran up some rum from molasses, some of which is on oak and some with coconut. I've taste tested it on my staff (haha) and they loved it all. I feel like it's time to try a whiskey.

I'm glad to hear it's all going well mate. It's a great little hobby :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Sounds like you've been busy!

I'd love to hear more about this rum that's aging on coconut.