G'day folks,
I'm on the West Coast of this Beautiful country of ours (Australia that is). Discovered distilling through a mate o' mine which set me on a long course of reading a bundle of material. Not wanting to sit around twiddling my thumbs, and having quite a bit of research under my belt, I built a Nixon-Stone type reflux column and mounted that on a salvaged 50l beer keg fitted with 1 x .9kw and 1 x 1.35kw elements.
I learnt v-e-r-y quickly that I knew so little. Now after nearly 3 years of bubble and boil and further extensive googling and reading, I'm happy to be able to say that my batches are "doing good". I ferment 9kg dextrose on 48hr Turbo in 21 litres of (sometimes) filtered water. The boil off is consistently producing 3.5 litres of 95% abv approx., of slightly sweet neutral spirit. Something I'm happy with. I'm conservative in what I keep. 100ml of fores go into the fuel jar for the fish smoker. 3.5 ltrs of mids are kept, and what dribbles out as tails up until about 82degrees is kept as feints for the next batch.
And I'm hoping to learn a lot more so that's why I'm here.
Cheers