Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Wow bluc,
That looks impressive. This may put a bit of pressure on the lemon trees to up their production.

So more on this found this post on instructables.


So is that accurate info and if you can make methanol that way would heating would in ethanol lower extraction temp. Will adding wood to ethanol then heating it produce methanol? :scared-eek:

Wouldn't there be some sort of fermentation process to produce methanol?
IE you would not be able to just add wood chips to boiling water to produce methanol?

I have no idea. I have read multiple times that "they distill wood" to produce it...never read of fermenting wood..

Yeah a quick read about methanol production involves no fermentation.
Sometimes they will use a digester to produce methane from vege matter.

There are a few ways to produce it and a small amount is by fermentation. Normally when folks talk about distilling methanol they are talking about destructive distillation which is a dry distillation. That is you heat (in this case wood) in a virtually sealed container with a take off and likely a condenser depending on what you are collecting. During WWII they had fuel rationing so my grandfather had a drum of coal with a burner in such a set up to run his truck on coal gas, this is destructive distillation and it would be virtually impossable to achieve a similar result with liquid distillation but it ia likely where a lot of missunderstand comes from :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Thanks crow :handgestures-thumbupleft:

bluc wrote:So more on this found this post on instructables.

Screenshot_20200105-214946_Chrome.jpg

So is that accurate info and if you can make methanol that way would heating would in ethanol lower extraction temp. Will adding wood to ethanol then heating it produce methanol? :scared-eek:

Methanol is present in fresh wood. Aged oak, as in timber that has weathered or dried properly (or cherry, apple or other wood) should have very little methanol content and toasted and/or charred will have less again, possibly none. There should be almost no methanol left in any wood that we use for aging so long as we use wood that is properly prepared. If we age in freshly cut wood then we'd be introducing new methanol into our product, directly from the wood. So as far as I can see, distress aging with properly prepared wood should yield no more methanol than normal aging, that is, aging without distress heating.

Ok cool i have 3 lots 900ml uj with virgin american oak sitting in a water bath that I want to use to spruce up my 20l barrel with "new oak" flavour. :pray:

Spruce is fine for a washback but a bad idea for a barrel :geek: :laughing-rolling:

So couple notes uj style sour mash 70abv (up from 65 it entered barrel) 25g new virgin oak 900mls. Heated to 65c in water bath (anovo sous vide) held for 4 hrs lids tightened allowed to cool in water bath. Next day obvious vacuum formed lids popped 8n. 1pint Ball mason jars used.
Before: spirit spent 3mnths in 25l oak barrel


After 4hrs



Spent night under vacuum aprox 18hrs


Thoughts: not lot happened flavour wise. But smoothed the spirit like crazy. Dangerously easy to drink on ice at full strength. At 40% is like water..round two is happening now :dance:

Much red-der after a night under vacumm as opposed to dark brown straight outta bath..