Gday
I'm Max, the not-so-proud owner of a Keggomax CM. It was secondhand, it has 'max' in the name, the price was right, it came with a heap of extras like a 50L electric keg boiler, pump and carboys, and having spent the last few weeks browsing this site it's probably not what I want or need at all. I figured I could remove the column packing to run the unit as a pot (I'm primarily interested in American moonshine and corn whiskeys) but apparently that's not a great way to go. I'm determined to make the best of my uninformed impulse buy, though, and for now that means getting some decent neutral for diy bitters, macerations and liqueurs. It's probably better to crawl with neutral for a while before I learn to walk with whiskey anyway.
I'm an experienced all-grain brewer so I'm comfortable with yeast ranching. I'm about to do a 20L FFV for my first wash. Temps are low down here so might have to get the aquarium heater out. I've got plenty of commercial nutrient blend on hand but will run with the DAP / Epsom / multivitamin combo as written to minimise variables.
I gave the still a test run yesterday to check the pump operation and look for leaks. Not sure what element is in the boiler but I assume it's a certain retailer's standard 2200W unit. It got 20L of water from around 13oC up to a boil in under an hour which seems fine. Turning on the coolant dropped the temp at the top of the column from 99.99oC to about 26oC in under a minute. The pump (a Rio 1700 submersible, which I just dropped in the bath) seems to do about 8L a minute, which might be a bit much when combined with our icy tap water but we'll see. From there it took an hour to get back 34oC, another hour to 47oC, and after another 45 minutes it'd hit 60oC. No leaks or pump issues so I shut it all down. The water in the bath had risen from 13oC to 41oC over this time. I have no idea whether that's good, bad or indifferent (if it's bad, no real drama to open the plug for a bit and top up with cold), or whether I'll need a controller to get the pump flow down. I'm rarely in any sort of rush so as long as it gets to temp eventually it should be fine.
Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for the forum - it's been informative and entertaining reading over the past month or so. I'll post some updates and pics in the other bits of the forum as I get going.
Cheers
Max