BUBBLE PLATES AND DISTILLING

bubble plates to bubble or not to bubble i guess that's the question now i'm at the very end of this process here i've tightened up all my uh or i've snugged down these uh retaining rods for my bubble plate now i had this apart earlier because i thought it would it was a good time since i hadn't used in quite a while to clean all of these copper down comers and um so let me show you that real quick i just wanted to show you a comparison um real quickly here i have my 551 mixture um that's that cleaning solution we did a video on that briefly 500 milliliters of water 50 milliliters of hydrogen peroxide and one ounce by weight of citric acid and uh that just it cleans copper it it does a great job of really making it shiny now here's what i'm going to show you these two close up this is about 15 minutes of time uh from this to this with no scrubbing whatsoever so i've got those out i've disassembled this and you can see i got pieces all over the place but when we come back it'll be assembled and we're going to get into the anatomy of a bubble plate so you can see that that now i've got them all clean and i've got them reinstalled and reinserted and remember yes there is a right way and then there is a wrong way of course you've only got a 50 50 chance of getting this wrong or getting it right depending on how you look at it but you're you should have one single down comer per plate and you'll notice that in here in the other three stick up so i guess we call them up goers i i don't know i really they're called downcomers uh but in my mind i look at the difference in direction one's a downcomer the other one's an up-goer big deal uh and that's the way that this thing is designed now what this allows you to do which is interesting here kind of begs the question do you really want to use a bubble plate well remember every time you have an opportunity to do a separate distillation in one run you should take advantage of it what does that do uh well that makes your run more pure which increases your uh percentage your proof dramatically uh why wouldn't you do it if you had the opportunity um again that's also if you're trying look if you're going to make a bourbon you're trying to make a really good backyard whiskey um or you're trying to mimic something that you grab off the shelf um this is probably not the answer for you okay because we know that in a pot still and if you do if you're judicious and run that thing correctly that's where you get the majority of your flavor your characters your aromas and all those things when we're using a bubble plate um this is more of an adaptation towards a reflux still it's an addition um you gotta follow this because this is really really unique and it's interesting a lot of people get it confused and that's okay but what we want to do is we want to have separate distillations take place at the same time yes that it so in this particular case now there is a formula to work out how many theoretical plates you have but in this particular case we have at least four physical plates so we know that we have initially we have exactly four separate distillations happening all at the same time all right now there are other influences that either increase or decrease your theoretical plates as an example that g still has 72 theoretical plates and that is the differences between packing distance physical uh plates it's all those things together but in this particular case we know we have the four to start with okay now in each one of these you'll see that you've got three of the downcomers that stick up and a lot of activity takes place in each one of those so see now that's where we start working towards our theoretical numbers which telling us that we have more than just one distillation happening right here on this one single plate because they're happening separately in three different locations and then you have this down comer and this down comer allows whatever bubbles up in this top plate to work its way down and fill up the second plate now in the second plate you have an additional three what am i getting at here right now i've got three times four one is three three three and three i've got at least 12 theoretical plates initially after my four so i've got four plates and i've got three on each one so that's what 16. so you see where that see you see how we get to that right now i'm going to work with and i'm comfortable saying i've got 16 theoretical plates in this one small portion of my column all right now that i've totally lost most um that's okay please don't get wrapped around the axle about theoretical plates physical plates and all that all you really need to understand is that we have multiple distillations taking place at the same time now how does this actually work the the beauty behind this is is the separation of the process on a stepping stone level or a stair step level you'll have the top plate that will start to fill first and as it does and starts to drop down to the second place this one starts to bubble there go the name bubble plate and then it fills the next one now as all of these get full and they all start to bubble and relatively violent in a sense they violently bubble what's happening is is you've got all of your vapors that are traveling north up okay they're traveling up and they're passed through to each one and as they start to rise and get higher and higher you have a deflagmeter and your deflague mater see that's this one has a bunch of tubes in the center of it that we run cold water through it's a pre-condenser this has to be located here otherwise none of this can happen okay no none of this can happen without one of these now we this is a reflux chamber better known as if it's individually attached to it stuck to it it's called the deflagmeter uh a deflagmeter or a reflux chamber the terms are really interchangeable uh there is some history behind what a real deflagmeter is and we'll leave that for another video uh but this has adopted that name as well but i and i've had too many folks call or write in and their challenge is is they've got one of these and that's great that's great and then they run run it right off the top into a condenser and but they say that it's not bubbling it won't do anything it won't fill well it can't recall that it the only way that it can fill up is if it has something running back down in this direction where does that come from it comes from the deflect mater so we pre-condense not fully condensed we pre-condense which means that the vapors that travel into the the flag mater start to pre-condense and the heavier substances the water that is also going to attract some of that ethanol is going to drop it's going to pre-condense and drop back out the most volatile substance being the pure ethanol is going to continue to travel out in through your condenser now as it drops out it stops and meets on every one of these bubble plates what happens is is it starts to revaporize but it re-vaporizes at a much pure state so it revaporizes pure here and that vapor rises the excess drops off it does the same thing here the excess dropping off all the way back down until in the very bottom what you have left here is you have such low ethanol content that this just drops back down in the bottom back into your kettle it never makes its way into your condenser so what you have is you start having more pure more pure more pure and more pure ethanol continuing to flow out through your deflag mater and into your condenser thereby giving you the higher proof that you are trying to achieve now i pulled up an old video of one that i did i ran this right here as a matter of fact so let me show you watch this because this will kind of open up this will explain exactly what's going you'll get to see it all right well i've got my chiller working in the background so you'll hear that i hope that doesn't interrupt you but now you'll see that when i've got this oriented right you notice how this plate fills and it fills that plate it fills that plate it fills that plate now what look at all this bubbling action that's taking place now i'm going to turn my deflect meter down just a little bit because i've got what i have is full condensing going on right here and i just want that to dance and then start to produce now you now it's pretty it's pretty obvious to watch this now you can see how each plate is loading um and i've got a separate distillation that happens at each level if you'll notice this but take this one for example everything that's right that has risen and risen through this plate and hit the deflag mater is dropping back down and it's re vaporizing here and that's all those bubbles it's revaporizing and all that's just water and it's dropping back down to the next plate and it's doing the same thing as it works its way down and anything left over that i don't want is dropping back down in the column i mean if you look close you can see it actually dripping right out of the flag meter and it's keeping those plates loaded so we're just going to allow that to run i've got this thing set at 175 degrees uh right now it's 155.1 i'm just going to let it run so you see how how precise that becomes um it's not as precise not even not really complicated when you think about it remember we were controlling the water flow that goes in here and comes out here so that is separate from the condenser itself and that's why we always say that you run your condenser just full board just let it go your deflagmater or your reflux chamber you have to meter the water so you control the water flow in order to create this downstream that fills your bubble plates and causes them to flood and by just us and you'll you'll even notice on that controller that i had there you'll notice that when i change the temperature when i change the flow you'll notice that the temperature changed slightly that's all in effect so there's that there's a delicate balance between temperature and water flow that allows you to draw out the most pure spirit that you possibly can that's where we get our 95 96 percent um alcohol by volume into our spirit jar that's how we get that otherwise we're we're struggling and struggling and struggling to get there but when you finally get that balance um it's a beautiful thing so i'll just in review now so remember that if you've got a bubble plate these things are amazing they are not that difficult to operate but you must have some sort of a pre-condensing chamber that actually causes that down flow and that fills and floods your plates these come in three inch model four inch models two inch models you can get them just about anywhere uh this these are this is a four physical plate those probably my limit um yeah i've seen them with as many as 12. uh can you imagine you're not you're only going to get so pure remember that scientifically you're only going to get so pure because we have what's known as an azeotrope in that azeotropic blend of ethanol and water uh is greater at the bottom but when you get to the end of the run it actually meets itself at that one point which is called the azeotrope itself where you have equal amount of ethanol and an equal amount of water and that is not going to exceed a little over 96 i hope that explanation makes sense to everybody but until next time yes happy distilling

Channel: Barley and Hops Brewing

Views: 55,623

Keywords: neutral spirit, sugar wash, barlerandhops, hops, home, Sugar (Ingredient), sugar mash, distilling, barley, corn sugar vs cane sugar, corn sugar mash recipe, making a wash for distilling, running a still for the first time, first distillation, using yeast, mooshine, whiskey, making rum, making vodka, bourbon, baby step bourbon, making bourbon at home

Id: 8xll9xA1SHU

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020