Home Distillation of Alcohol (Homemade Alcohol to Drink)

Designs & Plans

Check out the Photos of Stills section to at least see what they should be constructed like.

Both Pot & Reflux stills are relatively simple and both produce liquor. The difference is just that for a reflux still you have a packed column before the condensor, and you get some of the vapour to condense and drip back through the packing. You do this if you want to make clean/pure/tasteless alcohol of around 75%-96% purity for adding flavours to, or making gin/vodkas etc.

If however you just want to make straight forward whiskey / schnapps etc with some flavour, you can use either a pot or a reflux still.

An interesting note is that some copper in the vapour path is benefical. See the Materials page for more details why. Some people who have built all-stainless steel stills have found there to still be some smell +/or odour in their neutral spirits, which goes away when they put some copper in (usually replacing the scrubber packing with copper scrubbers).

Reflux Still Designs

For neutral spirits you want a reflux condenser, so that the falling precondensate washes the rising vapour, reducing the water and impurity content, giving a cleaner, safer, and higher purity product. The more contact you can achieve between the liquid & vapour, the cleaner and purer the product will be. To do this, increase the reflux ratio (the ratio of liquid falling to vapour rising) and the surface area that it is occuring over. A reflux can be made by packing the upper section of the column with inert packers (eg marbles (OK), rachig rings (better), or best - stainless steel pot cleaners (the ones that look like little springs, NOT the fine weave ones, or God forbid, those already soaped ready for use)), and cooling them by wrapping the cooling water hose around the outside, or passing a couple of cooling lines through the top of the column. Even better is to have either a separate condensor above them, or best - totally condense all the vapour above the packing, divert some to keep, and return the rest to the top of the packing.

Plans for Reflux Stills

Pot Still Designs

There don't seem to be many instructions around for how to build pot stills. I guess this could be because there are just so many ways, and it really depends on what you have available to you. One factor to consider is the angle of the lyne arm. Even with a pot still you get a little bit of vapour condensing on the head & arm, and running back down into the pot as a bit of reflux. Depending on how much internal reflux is going on, the flavour will vary. An upward sloping arm will cause much to run back into the pot, thus cleaning & lightening the vapour more, whereas a downward sloping arm will send all the vapour towards the jar, and you'll collect a heavier flavour. See my Photos of Distilleries page to see what variations in this are around in commercial distilleries. Some also have a bulge in the head. This constriction then expansion causes some of the vapour to drop out, and again increases the reflux, and lightens the spirit.


Wal elaborates ...

Plans for Pot Stills

Regarding using pressure cookers, Jack cautions ...
Below is a diagram of Harold B's pot still. Very cheap and easy to make. Harold suggests that you should adjust the heat so that the lower end of the condensor can be touched. The reason for this is that you can see water vapour if things are too hot, but you can't see the alcohol vapour.




Walter describes his pot stills ... "Volodia's Samohonka 1&2"
MooNShiNeR describes his 75 gallon pot-still, doubler and shotgun condenser below. See Moonshine Still Photos for a couple of photos of it. A. Nonimus suggests ..

Thumpers, Doublers & Slobber Boxes

Some moonshine stills have a "thumper" or "doubler" between them and the condensor. This is a jar of sorts, half-filled with liquid (water, mash or tails). See the Moonshine Photos for examples of them.


Thumper

This acts as a simple second distillation stage. Once its fully saturated with alcohol (hence better to start with something already containing alcohol), and up to temperature, the vapour leaving it will be doing the equivalent of a second distillation (usng the incoming vapour as the heat source) (see the wee applet in Reflux Design ... set it to 2 stages .... so the vapour leaving a 15% wash will be coming off at 65%, after going through a second stage (the thumper) it will be at 85%).

How does this work ? I'll try and describe it ...the main pot heats up, and begins giving off ethanol vapours (say at 40% purity at 96 ° C off a 5% wash)... these get passed into the thumper and try to bubble up through the water there. But because the water is cold too, the vapour will all condense if given the chance (e.g. small bubbles & water deep enough). A bit later on, the thumper water is starting to heat up and increasing in ethanol content .... soon the thumper is at say 84 ° C, and the ethanol content is around 40% - gees - that sounds like a second pot still doesn't it ? So the ethanol starts coming coming out of solution, though this time it will be at around 75-80% - hence the second distillation occurring - all for free, no additional cost or heating involved. Of course all this depends on how effective the thumper is at knocking down the incoming vapour - e.g. bubble size, depth of immersion etc, but you get the basic idea.

Look at the energy involved ..

Heat of Vapourisation/Condensation
Water = 2260 J/g
Ethanol = 855 J/g

So an incoming stream of 40% ethanol will give up about 1698 J/g, whereas to vapourise a 75% rich vapour needs about 1206 J/g. Then given that the flowrate of the 75% product is going to be only just over half of that entering, you have HEAPs of energy left over, to first heat the liquid there during the inital phase, then to superheat the vapour once the thumper is up to temperature. So the stuff coming in can more than happily look after itself in terms of redistilling itself.

To make the thumper effective you want For sizing a thumper, Ted suggests ..
Note that thumpers aren't the same as slobber boxes (although they look fairly similar. The inlet in a slobber box doesn't extend down into the liquid, so no bubbling & hence further distilling takes place. Rather, it just provides a place for any rubbish (ie foam, mash etc) pushed up the neck of a pot still to settle out before entering the condensor. They sometimes have a small drain cock on the bottom of them to help empty them while the still's running.


Slobber Box

Gin Heads

David writes .. UPS adds .. Ted also adds ..

Condensers

I have done a wee interactive calculator to help with sizing condensers.
Andrew advises ... A good design, utilising this is Tom's version, used in a Nixon-Stone settup - see here for his diagram.

If you're wanting to make a condensor coil, like the Nixon-Stone style ...

Paul offers .. and John ... You just need to evaluate if the extra cost is worth the extra quality.

Jack suggests ..
Another approach is to air cool the distillate. "Vonmantik" writes .. Homer has a diagram of how he has fitted the coils into his reflux column. Click for a larger diagram :


Walter describes the "gattling gun" condensor ...

Vacuum Stills

Using a vacuum allows the use of lower temperatures, and can attain higher alcohol concentrations, eg at 42 mm Hg (cf 760 mm Hg = atmospheric pressure) the column only need be at 35 C (ie just use hot tap water to heat with). The azeotrope (the point where distillation ceases to work because the vapour and liquid purity are the same) moves towards 100 % as the pressure is lowered; below 0.1 atmospheres it disappears, allowing you to distill all the way to 100% alcohol (provided you beef the reflux ratio up to >20). They can also be more energy efficient, and allow for a greater capture of the available alcohol. The lower temperatures also mean that they're use a bit in the distillation of essential oils (which would be otherwise be broken down at higher temperatures).

The graph below shows the reduction in temperature. I'm not quite happy yet with my calculations for this (the Textbook & 1 Atm lines should be the same), so don't go and design from it, but you can see the basic principle at work ...


There are several problems with Vacuum stills though: Often the vacuum can be made by using a "Venturi" or "Vektor" which uses the cooling water, and causing it to go through a small nozzel increases its velocity. This causes a corresponding decrease in pressure, and hence can "suck" vapour from the still. However, this ejects the vapour out of the system. If using a food-grade vacuum pump, you can plumb it so that it is inline with the outlet (eg before the condensor), and hence not lose the vapour.

The heating can be a simple water jacket around the pot, using hot tap water.

What can also be confusing is when the mash begins to boil, the vapours will expand into the vacuum space, and your gauge may go back to zero. This doesn't mean you've lost your vacuum, but if you can have some of your still appliance in glass or plastic so you can see what is going on, this helps so you know you have some action and not a leak.

One of our visitors is in the process of working on an improved vacuum still design. We'll keep you posted once he's happy with the results (including maybe a photo, design, info, history & performance.)
Atm = kPa = mm Hg (mercury) (torr) = mm H2O (water)


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