Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Yeah so I had a bit of a barney the other week.

I was in the shed watching the still do its bit and muggins forgot (got me buggered how!) to set the thermal alarm (usually set at 78 deg C) so I was watching the still and im looking at the collection thinking "geeze i must have had more feints in that i remember".....nope when I went to check the thermometer the probe was reading 94 deg (cooling water was on).

SO besides giving myself an uppercut for not checking the temp earlier and doing a bit of ranting and raving and learning a lesson to triple check the thermal alarm my question is what I did collect would it be safe to do cuts with after doing a double distillation or have i just made a bulk batch of metho to put into my ultrasonic cleaner? That batch is in separate glass bottles atm.

im still pissed with myself but i feel wiser for making the stuff up and learning a lesson.

The spirit will be fine mate just re run it.

It's all well and good to have technology but be careful not to rely on it too much.

Based on how my still works (entry level kit) I don’t have a choice.

I normally check regularly but this one time...../administer uppercut

woodduck wrote:
It's all well and good to have technology but be careful not to rely on it too much.

Just do you guys don’t think I’m a complete mug,(I’m not saying people are pointing fingers) I normally double check EVERYTHING (temp set, water runs when tap is turned, correct glassware for the job etc), and I watch my still like a hawk.

I fully take onboard the quoted sage advice/friendly warning about technology and complacency. Nobody is going to be harder on me than me. I realize the inherent dangers of our hobby and treat it like accordingly

At the start of the run is when you collect foreshots and heads which give you all the problems of nasty chemicals. So in your run this has already been dealt with. The long section of the run where the temperature is steady given all other conditions are constant is where there is sufficient alcohol present to distill off at a constant rate. You still need to evaluate this for smell and taste as there could be heads at the start and perhaps tails at the end depending on factors in your wash and your still. When the temperature starts to rise is when the amount of alcohol in the boiler gets too low to maintain a steady vapour rate and your are probably going into tails. This is not necessarily totally bad as some distillations have interesting things in the tails and they are generally not an issue for chemicals but may have undesirable odour and flavour. If you collected separate bottles you can still do cuts. If not and you don't like the taste and smell then run again or add as feints to the next run. No big deal. I do my neutral runs to 25% abv and it hits near 96 degrees. Not all of it goes to feints. I detect tails by smell not the vapour temperature.

Not really an issue, nothing bad happened. Just dump the tails back into your boiler next run and do it again. If you run a thumper, cut them back to 25 or 30 pct with wash and use that as a thumper charge.
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