Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

For neutrals most people use 5 plates and a 500mm packed section. My assumption is this is done for reasons of economy. From what I have read on the HD site, for scrubbies, 130mm is the equivalent of a theoretical plate, so a packed section would be the equivalent to just over 4 plates. So running 9 plates would be about the same result? A packed section costs less than just one T complete. Is there any reason you couldn’t run all plates? The height is not much different.

Nothing wrong with plates mate, I personally found them better than packed section although I do still use one, I just run 6 plates with it.

I know some commercial blokes use upto 10 plates so if you like the idea I say go for it :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Err no 500 mm pack section will do a shit ton more scrubbing than 4 plates, 40 maybe. One plates get a bit of passive entrainment carrying flavour through where as a packed section properly refluxing does not and re-distills many times. What's going on here is the plates are delivering a high abv but full flavoured product to the packed section for reflux rectifying. By rights if your RC was to get full knockdown you could actually collect from a regulated ( valved take off) point just below the packing via a collection cup or slant plant if collecting dripps is your thing and that would very likely be an absolute neutral azeotropic ethanol but just about no one does that. Instead some of the scrubbed vapour passes over the Lynne arm and is collected like any other plated column spirit. Now because its an open still it will be much much faster than an actual reflux still and therefore might not be azeo every time but some times it will be and either way will be damn close. Having tried ten plate vodka I can assure you its not the same product a packed section will deliver.

Sorry Peter,
I may have led you astray there. Thanks for clearing that one up crow, makes sence :handgestures-thumbupleft:

I should explain my situation better,

I tryed 4 plates with 500mm packed section and it just wasn't doing the job for me, very slow to get high% and clean spirit. So I built an extra 300mm packed section to whack on top of that but that still didn't really get my abv or takeoff rate up so I put 2 more plates in that 300mm section and that seemed to do the trick. I now run at 96% at 2.5lph no problem with single runs no stripping and spirit runs. It is possible that I stuffed something up while I had the extra packed section on like bad wash (strong flavors like wine. Can't remember sorry), wrong packing (ss scrubbies and copper off cuts) or even bad run technics (not enough reflux, low power input)

Sorry for the confusion.

Every still is different I found an extra plate (5 plates ) and around 550 mom packed worked for me.

crow wrote:Having tried ten plate vodka I can assure you its not the same product a packed section will deliver.

Thanks Crow. Theory is not the same as practice or maybe the theory is dumbed down too much. One extra question if I may. Is there a significant difference with packing your tube with stainless steel scrubbies versus copper wire? I am not talking about sulphur compounds as there is other copper in the system just in terms of performance?

crow wrote:Every still is different I found an extra plate (5 plates ) and around 550 mom packed worked for me.

:text-+1: 4 plates and a packed section just does not cut the mustard IMO :handgestures-thumbupleft:

@ peter others will have to answer that mate, over never had copper in my section so I'm not qualified to give an opinion, only ever ran structured copper in a reflux still. Personally I liked the results I got from scoria, I got pretty much azeo using coking coal but I can't recommend it as it doesn't seem to be quite neutral and there are just too many grades of coke to qualify exactly what I used. Scrubbies work well to but I probably preferred scoria as I think it stands up better, just my personal opinion. A lot of guys when first running a plated packed section column for neutral tend to run them a bit hard. You are basically running a CM reflux still and as its open ya really got to slow that shit down, its still going to be a damn sight quicker than a traditional reflux still .