Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Hi Guys,

I have a BrewPI Spark that controls my fermentation (FV) heating & cooling on my fermenters I use for making beer, the system has the ability to control a 12v pump that pumps glycol through an internal coil in my FV, once the temperature is reached the spark will turn off the pump, it can also turn on a heat pad to do the heating, it has a mechanism that stops both cool/heat being on at the same time, the system has the ability to control heating elements for mashing, boiling etc.

I reached out onto their forum & asked the question could the BrewPI spark be used in a distilling situation, the inventor of the sytem & another member have both commented that it should be possible & are looking for an ideal control scenario, then the inventor will look at putting a system into place to see if its a viable solution.

I hope I am allowed to post a link to the topic in question & would appreciate anyone who has some insight into getting the iddeal control scenario mapped out, a link to the brewPI system & one to the actual thread.

https://www.brewpi.com/introducing-brewpi-spark/

https://community.brewpi.com/t/distilli ... spark/4282

Thanks for any input

If your talking about controlling distillation by temp not a good idea it will smear the output. Whats in the boiler dictates what comes out the spout. Amount of power to boiler dictates how fast the liquid comes out condenser..temp can be used to calculate abv of vapour but should not be used to control distillation..

:text-+1:

You are much better off using that beer pi logic to hit a wattage and not a temperature. Power voltage cycles up and down a fair bit for me during a run and having a dead stable amount of watts applied would help column stability no end

You will find you tube vids of people running stills by controlling temp, this stuff needs to be put into the urban myth category. What you can't tell from those vids is the taste of the product or as bluc said, the smearing evident

Ethanol and the other 30 odd Alcohols we deal with do have different boiling points, but they wont just boil off perfectly in order by setting the temperature. Some are bonded to each other, some form as other components dissapear of get broken down. This is what a reflux column is for, the constant phase changes up and down the column let the different components separate for us to draw off slowly and manually seperate by cuts

I suppose if you kept notes religiously and always ran the exact same wash you could set it so the elements are set to run on a certain power for a certain time.

Sort of like an auto cut off, instead of running the still automatically.

scythe wrote:I suppose if you kept notes religiously and always ran the exact same wash you could set it so the elements are set to run on a certain power for a certain time.

Sort of like an auto cut off, instead of running the still automatically.

I have found no one run is ever the exact same even with same recipe, procedure etc, always other factors at play like ambient temp, cooling water temp, voltage supply (depending where you live) etc....