Essencia Still Mod experiment

[Icarus]

Having used an Essencia Express still for a number of years, and a number of others given to me to try, I could never achieve higher than 89% ABV with the Essencia, and it sometimes was often difficult to control, depending on conditions.

So off to the forums and the net for some serious searching for info. The links to some good info on how reflux stills work, and a range of mods to improve the performance of store bought stills were found. Links to these are posted below.

The Esscencia Express is a Cooling Management type reflux still. This is a very common design. The cooling management still features cooling of the column before the product takeoff by means of a water jacket.. This condenses a portion of the vapour and sends it back down the column as reflux. It is controlled via the manipulation of cooling water to the reflux condenser. If water flow is reduced, the reflux ratio drops and output increases. If cooling water is increased, the reflux ratio is increased. It is possible to completely stop output by increasing water flow (total reflux). The CM designs has a lot of variations.

In light of the info I read and the suggestions made in them, I made the following mods. A 300mm extension of 50mm copper tube to match the Essencia still was made and two adaptors were machined for the ends and silver soldered into the tube, one end female to take the Essencia still head and a male one to fit the retainer nut for fixing to the boiler lid.

The head was repacked with an Essencia packing kit as shown on YouTube as per the link below. The column extension was packed as follows:
A small wad of stainless steel wool was inserted into the end of the extension piece that would be the bottom of the column that fitted to the boiler lid. This was followed by 10mm ceramic saddles to within 45mm of the top. A packet of copper saddles was placed on top of the ceramic saddles and a wad of stainless steel wool was then inserted to fill the remainder of the extension to the top and hold all the saddle packing in place. The extension was then screwed to the base of the already re-packed Essencia still, and the whole assembly then fitted to the boiler lid. The extension section wasexternally insulated to a height of 250mm from the base of the extension piece.

The existing cooling water tubing was was removed from the still inlets and outlets and then changed to provide two separate cooling circuits, a cold inlet and hot return for the condenser and another cold line and return for the reflux column jacket. The cold line to the reflux jacket was fitted with a needle valve to give finer flow control. The initial flow settings for these were 3 l/m for the condenser, and 2 l/m for the reflux jacket.

The result. Condensate flow commenced right on 64C with the column vapour take off temperature rising slowly thereafter. Minor adjustments were made to the reflux cooling water needle valve to allow the column to stabilise and the first 150 ml collected separately. With the column at a stable 77c, the column produced at a good rate, just over 2 litres per hour with only extremely small fluctuations in vapour temperature in the range +- 0.1C until towards the end of the run when flow slowed, the temperature started to slowly climb and reflux cooling water flow needed to be increased for the final 500ml

Temperature corrected, the final product was a very clean 93%. ABV. Hope this info might be of interest and use.

Repacking the Essencia Express Still: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe2sIWr12Os
How Reflux Stills work: http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13360
Essencia Express Reflux Still modifications: http://www.homedistiller.org/forum/view ... 27&t=16073
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... 17&t=25732

I have some other mods to try now that a baseline for operating it has been established with the changes.

cheers
Icarus :D

[R-sole]

You would get an improvement in purity and taste if you used all copper mesh as packing in your extension column. ;)

[Icarus]

I spent some time trying to track some copper packing mesh down for this experiment. :? Wasnt able to get any easily. Seems that it is readily available in the states, comes on a roll.

Would you know of a source in Oz? I would like to try it out on one of the next experiments.

cheers Icarus

[R-sole]

I supply it to the distilling community here. Pm me if you like.