Is It Really Worth Running A Pot Still Slowly?

does changing the speed that you run a pot still at changing the amount of energy that you're putting into the pot does that actually have any effect on the distillate and if it does how can we use that to our advantage this video is sponsored by squarespace how's it going chases i hope you're having a kick-ass week i'm jesse and this is still it and today we're talking about pot stills specifically the speed that you run them at you see all over the place on forums and so on and so forth uh you've got to run it at a slow drip it's just it's going to be going drip drip or no no no you've got to run at a at a pencil stream that's that's the place to run it at all these things are kind of talking about the speed that you're running the pot still out how much energy you're putting into the pot the vapor speed moving through the pot still that's what all these things are talking about and to be honest looking at the the speed of off-take there's a really easy way to judge this but every now and again i see an argument to the opposite side of this saying essentially that a liquid is going to boil at the temperature it's going to boil at there's nothing you can do to change that so running it faster or slower isn't going to change the abv the product coming off the still so today we're going to do a super basic test just to show exactly what does happen when we change the speed of a pot still to demonstrate this i'm going to use the most basic pot still i have which is the t500 with the alembic dome i filled it up with eight liters of 38 abv spirits and i just plugged the thing into the wall for those of you that have used the t500 before you know that there is absolutely no way you can adjust the amount of power going into the pot still with the t500 itself so that thing is running full tilt so this thermometer has been sitting in here for about a minute and a half two minutes now and it's been steady at 22 degrees celsius i'll keep it on the screen so you guys can see that uh while i'm talking but obviously with anything like this it's smart to take temperature and adjust using tables or calculation or whatever it is you want to use because uh temperature will affect the density of the liquid obviously because we're running this still at two different speeds i'm guessing that the two different samples are going to be at slightly different temperatures that would make sense right so this is exactly 80 according to the hydrometer and 22 degrees celsius and this is the first sample the one that we ran hard and fast i want to bring in today's guest today's phone a friend that i've got today's uh sauron today sauron is sauron from 1919 distilling why are we talking to sauron well for starters he's just a wonderful human being second of all he runs a commercial distillery up in auckland that makes some top-notch spirits and number three he's just finished building himself a dirty great big pot still he's been doing a lot of testing on it obviously he's trying to get that thing into production seemed like a smart guy to talk to and we get to get some nice little sexy videos of the new still as well [Music] all of the range that you get in a pot still based on the amount of energy you're putting into the pot is essentially coming from the interaction of vapor and condensed liquid yeah i kind of think like that's your primary interaction so you you've got a volume of liquid and you need to boil that volume of liquid if you've got something for it to condense on that's going to help cool it down so the more power you put in the more vapor you're going to create so even though you still might get the same amount condensing you're still going to be putting more vapor through so it's going to come out faster out the other end but if you reduce the amount of energy put in you are going to be able to create less vapor so the vapor that is rising is going to rise slower it's going to condense more and there's going to be less vapor coming out the end as spirit and because there is less it's had to work harder it's condensed more it's going to be cleaner yeah so it's essentially all about the ratio of how much vapor is condensing and falling back down and how much is going all the way through past the point in my return you know the whole point of this conversation or this debate is does increasing the power make a difference to the abv or the outcome of your pot still so if i want to increase that reaction time i can switch off half of the elements so we've the way we've wired up are still is we've got it split into six different zones each of those zones are four kilowatts um feeding in so i can control the the heating quite precisely so if i want to slow down that spirit i want to give it more reaction time more time with that copper if i kill half of the power while i've still got the same amount of boiling surface area i've still got half the amount of energy going in you know we're 1800 liters if we put half the amount of energy in that vapor is going to rise a lot slower it's going to take a lot more heat to boil that alcohol so that vapor is going to move slower throughout the still and have more reaction time with the copper as a beneficial consequence or a negative one depending how you look at it that will increase your abv so uh so now we know the theory of why this might in practice affect the abv or the product coming off the still let's do it for real and see what actually happens so all of this sample that i collected for the first time i have taken the measurements on it and recorded those we're going to throw all of that back into the still no i'm not measuring it all to be exactly eight letters again now i'm not measuring it exactly to be the same abv we've just taken all of it and put it back in assuming that that's going to be pretty close if it's not close we are going to be losing alcohol not gaining it we can't be more than 100 efficient with this and if it has a slightly lower abv in the pot that is going to push these two things together we're expecting that the second run is going to be at a higher abv if we've slightly lowered the abv and we still get a higher abv we know we're golden i'm not that worried about it so everything goes back into the pot we heat the pot back up again but this time instead of plugging it directly into the wall we're plugging it into my little power regulator and we're running roughly at about half power i can't tell you exactly because i've got nothing hooked up to tell you exactly the current of voltage going through that thing but i pretty much just ran it visually slowly crept the power up until it started producing at just a drip and we're going to collect the same amount of spirits 200 mils measure it take the temperature and uh see where we stand all right team our second sample the one that i ran much much slower is ready and it doesn't seem like much of a big difference right now it is only reading 82 abv but keep in mind we haven't taken the temperature yet uh what we got here waiting waiting waiting just giving a just giving it a sec to get a true reading all right 16 degrees celsius yeah that's going to change things all right team so by my calculations these are the adjusted numbers that we should be looking at the first run we did much much faster we ended up with 80 abv as per the alka meter at 22 degrees celsius which comes out to 79 abv on the other side we have the sample that we ran much slower this one came out with an abv of 82 abv at 16 degrees celsius and adjusted that ended up being 83.5 degrees celsius now you might be saying to yourself that's not a huge difference between the two of these and yeah i i can kind of agree with you but it is a difference right you do need to take into consideration and remember that the alembic pot dome by still spirits is quite a basic pot still shape there's not any additional surface anywhere or any great height off the still that's really going to lend itself to more vapor and liquid interaction there's really nothing different happening here compared to a reflux still is there yeah so i mean the overall concept and the overall principle is the same i mean i could make a pot still that would make 95 alcohol all day long my neck on it might just need to be 32 meters tall i mean i could still say it's a pot still is just with a really tall neck i mean and you have to run it real slow there's still stills in scotland that have tall necks um the only difference is when you you know you switch to a column still or a hybrid still then you're you're adding in an artificial influence or you're increasing that copper contact area to help you know increase that abv so it's all about trying to slow down that vapor condense that vapour so depending on the design of your still a lot of stills a lot of pot stills have the onions in the neck and the whole point of that onion is increase that surface area so you're doubling the surface area you're creating more space for that alcohol to cool down which is going to give you an increase in abv once the still is running you can pretty much assume that the entire inside surface area of the still is covered in liquid if the surface area is greater you're going to have more interaction between vapor and liquid and you're going to have a cleaner slightly higher proof spirit so i feel like now we can pretty comfortably say that yes running your pot still slower turning the power down turning the gas down putting less energy into the pot however you want to talk about it all of those things are pretty much the same thing if you do that yes you are going to get a different product coming out the end of your stool yes it is going to change the abv and that is going to be more or less influential depending on the shape of your pot still but why on earth should you care why would you want to mess with this why is this even worth talking about for a distiller we're going to talk about that in just a second with sauron again but i need to say a huge huge thank you to the patreons thank you so much patreons i get to do this stuff because of you and i don't know man i feel like the luckiest guy ever so thank you thank you so much patreons for our stripping one we run it as fast as we can we put as much power as we've got into it and run it as hard as we want for our spur run depending on the spirit profile we want to make we will reduce the power and that's going to give the effect of more sort of artificial reflux and help us achieve a higher proof so when we're stripping we can bring out sort of anywhere from 40 abv when we're doing a spirit run depending on how much power we put in there we can bring anywhere out from 60 percent abv all the way up to 80 percent abv this is it's almost like an artistic decision for you at that point in time the speed that you want to run it at being a pot still we are definitely trying to create a pot still style spirit so full of body full of flavor but just because i'm creating a pot still rum is what we're running at the moment doesn't mean i necessarily want it to be quite a low abv full of heaps of flavor um you're going to get more of those oils coming through so the last one we did one of my goals was to sort of get that abv as high as possible so heated it all up got it all running started coming off at 70 percent alcohol uh by volume and wanted to see if i could get it a bit higher clean it up just a little bit get those heads through a bit earlier on so i ended up dropping the power by 50 and i was able to raise the the abv by 10 then sort of depending how we go throughout the run once we get through all of our heads we might speed up the run a little bit so we'll increase the power again i'll drive through that section of the hearts for then reducing the power once we get to the tails um which means we can pull out a little bit more of the hearts again that abv is going to rise a little bit it's going to give us a bit of a cleaner product separate those tails out before we end up shutting it down or i guess stop collecting the the desired product we want yeah cool so you've got this constant sort of balancing act between speed and efficiency between the the flavor profile that's coming off and the end abv you're going to end up in terms of what's going into the barrels and the the proof that you're going to be maturating it yeah absolutely i mean it's it's all well and true and wonderful if you say you've got a pot still and my pot still comes out at 50 abv i finished my my heart's 40 abv while the product might taste great it's you can still barrel it at that strength but depending on the barrel strength you go into you're going to extract different vanillas different caramels different tenons so you might want a barrel at 65 abv you might want to barrel at 50 or 40 depending what you're trying to extract so we kind of need that ability to to pull out a higher abv as well as a lower abv if people want to track down your products and check them out where should they find you in best space places our website which is 1919distilling.com we are available in new zealand and australia with another country coming on board shortly but if you're in new zealand hit up uh glengarry's liquorland uh or any good liquor store and ask for us by name if you're in australia uh boozebud or dan murphy's online have you covered thanks a bunch sauron i appreciate it my dude if you're in new zealand australia and you can get your hands on a bottle of his product i can personally 100 vouch for the fact that it is damn good stuff so it's worth picking up it's worth giving it a taste and it's worth supporting a cool dude like that who's happy to you know give back to the community and the way he does pretty awesome anyway i hope this video has perhaps uh given you a little bit more of an idea on why or how you might want to influence the abv of your product coming off a pot still the reasons to do that and maybe just maybe if you were one of the people that was kind of thinking i mean there's no way this can actually do something maybe this helped you out and gave you a little bit of a reason to think and understand that it totally does anyway team if you enjoyed this video help me out hit the like button down below youtube loves that it helps me out a whole bunch i would appreciate it and if you're not subscribed yet and you enjoy this kind of content and you want more popping up in your feed hit the subscribe button as well and and i'll catch you next time guys keep on chasing the craft see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 85,368

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Id: vhKZW3wgqaM

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021