How to Build a THUMPER For Your Pot Still!!

[Music] shy [Music] sorry thumpers dune couldn't resist okay moving on so if you don't already know a thumper is basically a secondary reaction vessel for your still they work by piping the vapor in from your boiler into this tube all the way down to the bottom so when the vapor comes through it's going to be forced through some liquid that you have down in the bottom of your pot when it hits that liquid it bubbles and it thumps into the name and that vapor cools down slightly and condenses inside the thumper until the heat that's being pumped in from the boiler brings the temperature of the entire system up and once it gets up to heat it's going to maintain that heat and start to re-distill the liquid in here turn it into vapor then that vapor climbs up and goes out this tube to your product condenser basically a second boiler without its own heat source and speaking of product condensers i did a video recently on an easy product condenser build i'll put the link right up there for you if you need it as far as the liquid inside your thumper it could be fruit juice water alcohol some faints lots of different choices and we're gonna get into that in future videos but you don't really need more than about three inches of liquid because as they run thumpers can actually start to fill up especially if you're running too hot so you need to make sure you keep some serious head room in there and don't put too much liquid in thumpers were initially added to stills in order to act as kind of a temperature control for wood fired stills they act kind of like a hand brake to slow things down if you get too much wood on the fire but since we have adjustable flame propane or adjustable electric elements for stills the temperature control feature doesn't really factor in anymore the other feature about thumpers is the fact that it's actually a second distillation i was talking to jesse the other day and he compared it to adding a single plate like a bubble plate with a really deep liquid level and honestly i think that's the best way to think about it because it does increase the abv of your output but it's not doubling despite some myths and it's not a huge amount if your normal output is 60 you're not going to get 90 with a thumper 10 to 15 i think that's fair but to me the most important feature is the flavor enhancement that you can get on your final product and the fact that having a thumper allows you to do different things that you can't do with a straight pot still but that is a huge topic and this is a build video so we're going to get into that stuff in future videos i don't mean to tease you with all that stuff we're going to get there but it's too much for this video so let's go ahead and get on to the build all right so the basic structure of any thumper is going to be pretty much the same you have a vessel some pipes some sort of gasket material and then some sort of way to connect it to the boiler side where the line arm comes in to the inlet and then another connection point where it connects to the outlet side that goes to your condenser and i recommend that you do something like this with kind of a modular design with connection points on it so that you can take it on and off you're not going to want to use a thumper on every single run and honestly if you attach it so that it's permanent then you have to use it and also it makes it a huge pain in the butt to try and clean the thing now to have an effective thumper you need to have a reaction vessel that's between half and a third the size of your main boiler so if you have let's say a five gallon boiler then you need to have a reaction chamber on your thumb earth that's between one and a half gallons to two and a half gallons and it should definitely be made of stainless steel or copper not glass there are tons of pictures and videos out there of people that have made thumpers or even a series of thumpers out of glass mason jars and they look really cool and it's fun to watch the liquid dance around in there and everything don't do that don't don't do that the problem is that they're incredibly dangerous it's kind of like having a glass hand grenade on your still they're just not made of the same stuff that like a distiller's grade sight glass would be made out of so the possibility for catastrophic failure is very very real and honestly having something that looks cool on your still is not worth it considering that it could shatter and spray you with glass and boiling hot flammable alcohol especially if you run a propane burner so you remember what i was saying about the size thumpers need to be bigger than this so not only is this dangerous as a thumper it's just not very effective and you may be saying well what about plated columns you know sight glass columns with a bubble plate in it it's basically the same size as this yes but the liquid in here goes in and then out on a plated column it goes up and then down over and over and over and over and over so a plated column is way more effective than this so you need to compensate and have something that has an appropriate size reaction chamber so that you're actually getting any benefit from having a thumper in the first place and you'll be safer because it's made out of the right materials so start off right and make it out of the right stuff you guys are gonna do whatever you want but don't say i didn't warn you so this pot is a two gallon stainless steel soup pot that i got from walmart for about 14 bucks and it did not come with these clips if you look at the lid here it's not super great it doesn't fit that tight but for what we're doing and the modifications we're gonna make to this it's fine the main thing is to make sure that it's stainless steel or copper or some sort of non-reactive metal since we need a way to secure the lid down i got these spring-loaded clips from amazon these things are actually strangely hard to find if you just type in spring-loaded clips because the way they label them is a little bit convoluted so i went ahead and put a link for these right down in the video description not only do you need the clips but you need a way to secure them now if you know how to weld and you get a welder just tack weld them on i went to home depot and i got nuts bolts and washers you need to make sure that they're labeled as stainless steel not zinc and not brass zinc and brass can both leach harmful crap into your distillate you need to go with stainless steel because it's again non-reactive so i did some uh bolts flat washers some of these little uh spring washers and some nuts and that's pretty much all you need so when you attach these clamps you need to make sure that you account for the gasket material what i did is i just took a little piece of the gasket material and i put it between the pot rim and the lid and held it in place and then set my clamp on and measured how far down that was between the top of the clamp and the the bottom of the pot then i just went a tiny bit lower like one millimeter lower when i was actually setting these holes for where i wanted them it takes a little bit of fiddling but uh you'll figure it out so because the clamps are spring-loaded they're actually kind of difficult to work with you're gonna need to open it up in order to mark the holes on the sides of your pot i knocked loose the spring tensioner so that i could open the the clamp freely and i use that one clamp to mark all of my holes so once you do that and you figure out your depth go ahead and mark the screw holes for four to six clamps evenly spaced around the pot when you drill the holes out try to use the same size drill bit as the screws that are going to go in there so there's not a lot of play and slop it makes the holes a lot easier to seal up when you go to tighten them down then install the clamps using some of your gasket material inside the pot to prevent leaks followed by a flat washer a spring-loaded washer and your nut get those all tightened down and now it's time to install the pipes so i'm just using half inch copper pipe some elbows some t fittings and some copper unions that correspond to the one on the condenser and the one on the line arm before you solder them on make sure you got them in the right spot these t fittings are not actually part of the system but i needed them to make a solid brace in between the inlet and the outlet pipe to make the whole thing a lot more sturdy and to protect it from any sort of lateral stress that may come from either side remember this thing's going to thump a little bit so it's better if you've got a little brace in in between there to keep things nice and solid so these things have little metal stops on the inside that prevent you from sliding them all the way down the pipe so that you know if you're if you're using them the way you're supposed to they only go over the end of the pipe so if you want to use a bracing system like this you're going to have to grind them out and i just use my dremel with a little stone grinder on it you grind out the stops that are on the inside so that the t fitting can slide all the way down so once you get that done you need to measure out your inlet pipe you want there to be at least a quarter to a half inch gap between the bottom of this pipe and the bottom of the pot so measure out however far that is mark a line and then decide how much you want sticking up above the pot i went with 12 inches for your outlet pipe it only needs to protrude about a half an inch about a quarter to a half an inch because this is where all the vapor is going to escape from so add that little tiny bit onto whatever extension you're going to have above the pot lid so i didn't record this next part but basically you got to figure out where you want the holes to be in the top of your pot lid mark them i used a stepped bit in order to drill them out and i i went really slow to make sure that i got the holes as close as i could to the diameter of the pipe the tighter the better because if you have too much sloppy gap around these uh joints it's going to be a lot harder to solder them up so if you have to kind of tap the pipes into place that's fine so fit your tubes into the holes where you want them and double check your measurements so that you're positive you got them exactly where you want them add some liquid flux if your lid material is super thin like mine was it's better if you focus most of your heat on the pipes because the lid will heat up on its own once you get the solder on there make sure that it's it's flowed down into that joint and you can see on the first attempt for me it kind of beaded up that's because i didn't have the pipes hot enough i had the lid really hot but not the pipes luckily it was an easy fix and i just had to apply heat straight to the pipes and then the solder flowed down into the joint really well and you can solder both sides both the top and the bottom like i did but just be careful that you don't apply too much heat and drip all of your solder out from the bottom while you're trying to do the top so once that's cool just slide your tee fittings into the position that you want them then measure the space in between your tee fittings and cut a small piece of half inch pipe to fit in there make sure all the solder points are sanded before you put it together then flex it and go ahead and solder it on the top and on the the support bridge you don't really need to bother with soldering the bottoms because it's not sealed it's not connected to anything soldering on the top is fine it's not going to go anywhere so after that you just need to solder on your elbows and your copper unions and a little pro tip that i forgot about while i was soldering and then remembered after i finished a lot of you guys gave me some excellent advice in the comments on my other build videos and uh i forgot about it until after i'd finished but basically you keep a wet rag nearby so as soon as you finish putting the solder on one of your connections you can just take the wet rag and wipe the excess off because you only need the solder that's on the inside of the joint you don't need any on the outside so i had to go back and reheat some of them that were gloopy and and wipe them down but it worked out so once you get your soldering all done just take some super fine steel wool and clean everything up get it all nice and shiny now you got to install your gasket material because we need a way to keep liquid and vapor inside the pot and inside the pipes not steaming out the sides that would be bad i used some of this ptfe joint sealant tape this is basically the same kind of thread tape that you normally put on your pipe threads but it's been expanded it's big and chunky and it's a little bit squishy cool thing about this stuff is that it cold molds you don't have to get it hot if you cut off a little square of this and squish it with your pliers it makes a perfect gasket to go on your screw holes on the inside when you put it around the rim and then clamp the lid down it'll uh you can kind of see that ridge in here that just forms and it stays there the frustrating thing about ptfe tape is that it does not melt together you will not be making a solid contiguous gasket out of this stuff it will not melt together like normal rubber or normal plastic you can't do that with this stuff ptfe doesn't melt it burns it chars you may be wondering why did i go with this stuff instead of like silicone i did a lot of research on gasket material silicone will break down under acetone and acetaldehyde two chemical compounds that are found in the heads of any distillation it can potentially leach chemicals into your distillate that you don't want in there when it comes to stuff like this the best thing to do is look at what the commercial industry does generally they're gonna use ptfe gaskets you can get ptfe gaskets made for for tri-clamps those are easy to find but when you need something custom size this is what i found so since you can't form it into one piece i've got an end here so what i did is i cut little lap joints so that the the pieces overlap each other and then i put them in place so where the seams were right here and right under here this stuff shreds apart like regular ptfe tape so i shredded some up and just laid some of those threads into those little joint connections and it worked great i had no leaks it's a little fiddly it's not perfect we'll see if we can get to perfect at some point but right now we have good enough uh if you want to try this i'll put the link for this down in the video description it's between 20 and 30 dollars for like 15 feet of it the main thing is for your gaskets don't use bathroom silicone caulking or automotive silicone gasket maker don't do that don't do that that stuff is full of chemical solvents that are needed to make that stuff cure and that it's just going to leach horrible into your distillate please don't do that the words you need to remember are non-reactive non-reactive components whenever you're building a piece for your still if you don't want to use ptfe you can use cork at some of the craft stores they have cork sheets cut out a gasket and use that and that will do you just fine or flour and water paste make a flour and water rope put that on top close it up the thing i like about this is if it does develop a leak then i just put a little flour paste dab on it no big deal but i don't have to scrub a huge chunk of flour and water junk off of here uh every time not a perfect solution but still pretty good if i find something better it'll make a new video on gaskets all right so now that we got this thing all done and we got our clamps on got our gasket material on you need to check it for leaks so fill it up with water tip it upside down you know tip it sideways roll it around and make sure that it's not leaking if you find some leaks keep those in mind maybe mark them with a little pen or something so that you know where you may end up having to put some flour and water paste do a water check do an air check where you blow through and you listen for leaks see if you can find any uh you can spray some soap and water around the rim and the joints to see if you get any bubbles forming anywhere when you blow through the pipes and then obviously after you do a vinegar run and a sacrificial alcohol cleaning run to get all the the flux and junk out of the inside of the pipes once it's clean go ahead and do another leak check just to see if you developed any during the course of heating and cooling i didn't think about that until now so aren't you glad that i'm getting all these mistakes out of the way for you that's what i'm here for all right before we go over everything i just want to say a huge thank you to my patreon supporters you guys have been a tremendous help in keeping my new schedule going and i could not be doing this without you so thank you guys so much and if you would like to help support my channel and get behind the scenes access for the crazy shenanigans i get up to around here check out the link to my patreon page in the video description so you may already know this but adding a thumper to your still increases the level of risk quite a lot because when you add a thumper you're closing that boiler off you're making a closed system for that boiler because your outlet tube is under water so because there's that new layer of risk there's some decisions you need to make on how to reduce that risk to protect yourself and your equipment so if you're still pukes let's say you get it's it's foaming up it's frothing up you got a bunch of grain sediment in there whatever it pukes and then it gets lodged somewhere in your system now you've got a blockage in there so since it's not an open system anymore you've created pressure in your boiler and if your boiler has pressure you've basically got a bomb and on the other side of the coin when you turn the heat off the liquid in the air is contracting quite a lot and it creates a substantial vacuum inside your boiler now if you're not running a thumper there's no problems but if you are running a thumper it's sealed over here underneath the liquid so it's going to pull a strong vacuum on your boiler you may think that that's not really a big deal it'll just suck up and drain the the liquid from your thumper yeah maybe but then again maybe not so here's my buddy george with a perfect example of what i'm talking about matter of fact check this out what do you think that still was one day old assembled and started up he was just using water in it he's just trying to get the feel for it and had it running to temp and everything was fine decided he'd okay i got it turned it off walked out of the room to go make a sandwich and at the during the time it took him to make a sandwich when he came back this is what he found yeah a big crushed beer can so my point is if you're gonna add a thumper you need a way to vent pressure and vacuum immediately and there's a couple of really easy solutions for that so don't freak out first you can add a pressure relief valve like this one this one's only a 5 psi valve i'm going to put a link for it down in the video description if you want to check it out so if you build up pressure that valve will pop and it'll let the pressure off and it's also got that pull ring on it so that when you turn off the heat just go up and pull that ring and it'll release any any vacuum that's starting to build up in there the other option is if you have a rubber stopper or a cork that you're using is a thermometer port for your column just take it out you know if the pressure builds up it's going to pop out on its own but um when you turn off the still and you need to vent that vacuum pull the cork out simple actually speaking of thermometers they're kind of pointless when you add a thumper to your system the temperature of your vapor path in the still column is not going to be indicative of what's coming out of the spout because now you've got this big contraption in the way and it throws things off and it creates a lot of lag between what's going on over here and what's coming out over there george goes into a lot more detail about this kind of stuff in his thumper videos so i highly recommend you check him out lots of good info in those okay so now that we know that thumpers add a layer of risk we need to talk about how they change the process because they add a layer of complexity to your process that you may not have anticipated and because of that my recommendation if you're just starting out in this hobby you haven't bought a still you're not you haven't built a still yet don't add a thumper yet for some of you i'm sure that is exactly the opposite of what you want to hear because you want to either do it the way the old-timers did it or you want to increase the abv of your final product i get it but trust me it's smarter and you'll make better product quicker if you learn how your still works without adding a thumper in so you can get good at just distilling so give yourself the advantage of time to learn how to do it to make good spirits consistently and then upgrade you'll likely be doing this hobby for years because quite frankly it's awesome so save yourself some room for upgrades in the future because honestly that's part of the fun but you're gonna do what you're gonna do take my advice or don't i'm not a cop okay so let's get into some specifics about how adding a thumper actually changes your process so if you normally use a pid controller and you're used to making cuts right off of the still based on whatever temperature is on here adding a thumper is really going to mess your day up you can't really make cuts that way anymore as i said before the temperature in the column is not what's going to be happening all the way through this complicated process of redistillation to give you an expected result on the other end everything it went through over there it now has to go all the way through that again so your temperatures are going to be off just go by your eyeball and and do it that way and you also can't really make cuts off the still you're going to have to collect in jars 200 mils and line up your jars cover them with paper towel let them sit overnight for 24 hours and air out if you're not used to making cuts based on your senses then you definitely need to let them air out for 24 hours because that helps all the volatiles to kind of off gas and it makes all the transitions a lot more distinct and easier to find you got to go old school so no matter what you use to control the heat on your still propane a pid an scr power controller it's going to take a little bit of fiddling to get that flow rate just right and the adjustments that you make you need to give them some time to settle in before you keep making changes because everything has to go through this whole process before you see any sort of reaction down at the other end so take your time okay the last thing you need to make your thumper work really really well you need a way to diffuse the vapor that's coming out of your outlet pipe because the more the more you fraction those bubbles coming out the smaller they are the more the heat is going to disperse through the liquid but also your vapor is going to spend more time in contact with the liquid inside the thumper that will help to increase the distilling efficiency for what you're doing my suggestion is very simply get some copper scrubbies and you can just take a piece of copper wire throw your scrubby up against it and tie it on there and if you get copper scrubbies from the grocery store instead of buying like copper you know rolled copper scrubby material make sure it says 100 copper on there because normally these things are steel that are coated in copper and that's kind of garbage because those will rust all right so that is my thumper build in a nutshell probably a big nutshell feel free to let me know of any changes you might recommend that i make to this and if you've built a thumper yourself go ahead and give us some design details down in the comments because i have a feeling we're going to have a lot of people looking through the comments to get ideas for their own personal builds so help out the community give us some details that would be really helpful for everybody including me all right so if you like this video do me a favor and hit the like button because it lets youtube know that you're enjoying this kind of content so it can show it to more people and it has the added benefit of making me feel better during the holidays if you enjoyed this kind of content you want to see more of it do yourself a favor hit the subscribe button right over here and the little bell icon right next to it that way you get notified when i post new content you know i had a christmas wish to get a hundred thousand subscribers so i could catch up with george and jesse this year that ain't gonna happen but uh every little bit helps all right thanks for watching talk at you later anybody notice this bubbling in the background it has something to do with next week's video

Channel: Bearded & Bored

Views: 106,047

Keywords: Bearded and Bored, how to build a thumper keg, how to build a thumper for a moonshine still, how to build a thumper, how to make a thumper keg for moonshine, how to make a thumper keg, home distilling, hobby distilling, george barley and hops, popcorn sutton, moonshine thumper, pot still, how to build a thumper for your pot still

Id: be5Vq5RhW3A

Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/sometimes_interested]

Do we have wormsign?

Great video! :)

[u/dadbodsupreme]

"I will not make glass thumpers. Glass thumpers are the eye-killer."