REVIEW OF THE STILLMAN X DISTILLER (PART 2)

[Music] welcome back to barley and hops i'm george the channel that dares to unlock those mysteries at home distilling and other things we're so glad you're with us today this is the second video on the stillman x that we got from dr gratis and that's dr gratis.com now we're going to put it through its paces as we told you and so this is the first run we're going to run this i'm going to do like a strip and run i put 8 gallons of sugar mash in here or sugar wash and a little a little bit over 8 gallons and i'm going to run this through this 3-inch column with this 2-inch shotgun condenser now i've got these thermometers all over the place and the only reason they're there is because i can that's what i put them in there for because i have places to put them otherwise i would really only be tracking that temperature at the very top because uh that is the key temperature where we want to make sure that we have the vaporization point of ethanol coming across into the condenser okay uh and if you so for those of you who understand that process what we've got several videos out there that will expand explain the vaporization point of ethanol and why you actually track it there now um in addition to that i've got of course oh we'll get to that in just a second that's my air conditioner on the cooler that i use to chill water my homemade water chiller i've got a half inch mason jar with this tube i'm going to use my parrot and in this parrot of course i have a proof and trail hydrometer and in the bottom of that pair i've balled up a little bit of uh i don't have it laying around any longer i balled up a little bit of let me lay that down uh there it is of copper mesh and i only put that in the bottom of the pair the only reason it's there is it's sort of like a little buffer in case i drop that hydrometer in there that doesn't crash in the bottom and break because you know as well as i do that these things are droppable only once if you own one but for some reason if you own a bunch of them you can drop it like 40 times before it breaks i don't understand that but that's that's the case so i just dropped that in there so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to use the pulse width modulator i've got one here my 240 volt pulse width modulator because i'm running a 3000 watt element in the kettle and i'll be able to control the output uh by percentage so i'm going to do that and here in a second i want to give you a close-up because i've got that water chiller and i've got a lot had i've had a lot of questions about it i've been running that thing it looks like ass but let me tell you it's it's consistent and it's been working now for over two years um i'm really probably about two years so i use it all the time right now my water temperature is 57 degrees fahrenheit and i will convert that to celsius in just a moment we shall return well as you can see here i've got my uh i've got the water return line that goes in into that slot and i've got my water in produce here with my submersible water pump that's located inside uh this is a just an old 5000 if you have 5000 btu air conditioner that i was getting ready to toss out and if you can recall the way these things are designed the evaporator coil sits about right here and there's a squirrel cage that blows air across it so i just bent that down and that is inside this hole and you see we are at there we are 14 degrees celsius or 57 degrees fahrenheit and i'm going to drop that i'll turn it on and drop that down to about 51. you don't need to get any colder than that right matter of fact where it's at now is probably just fine so that's my oh by the way the heat exchanger on the back side you know that's where the fan just blows the heat off of that exchanger that's all there is to it now that you've gotten a run-through of what the water chiller kind of looks like i'll just plug it in and let it run there we go and that'll just continue to run until of course i unplug it um the next thing i'll do is i'll plug in the pulse width modulator uh turn up the power and let this thing start to heat up and we'll be back as soon as she gets pretty warm yes it's always good to do a quick update it's been about 25 minutes 20 25 minutes or so and i've been running it about 80 percent uh power right now we're at 127 and climbing rather quickly and that's in the kettle uh but what i'm interested in is i'm at 84.5 fahrenheit 29.3 celsius and that's at this bottom column and i can feel it starting to warm up but when i get up here i'm 79.8 or 26.6 so um yeah that tells me something it tells me it's just i'm not balanced yet my column is not we're not warm enough hot enough yet in the kettle to transfer all that thermal energy we just gotta wait it's gonna take some time wow if you would have heard me a moment ago i used a couple of swear words uh this thing got by me i was busy doing something and it started running so uh you can see here that we are have collected probably oh i don't know maybe 300 400 mils uh milliliters and my kettle temperature is 189. there we go 87.5 celsius 189 i'm at 186 in the bottom of the column 178 here 178 as in 81.4 celsius and my head i'm at 174.3 or 78.9 celsius and i've got it turned down to about 25 percent now the the drips have stopped so i uh and to me that's plenty uh for my four shots and so i'm going to turn it up just a little bit more and get a little bit of because i like to draw twice the amount out in order to consider that heads uh now the heads cut is a very precise cut that takes place uh in the the only real way to know the slight difference between the hearts and the heads uh and this is a lot of it's opinionated but the fact of the matter is is that uh while you're collecting as soon as your proof drops dramatically by three or four points or proof points you have just gone from heads to hearts so you'll start off usually without your highest alcohol proof at the very beginning in your four shots and then in your heads but as soon as those head as soon as that proof drops you know that you've just ended your heads and you can make your cut at that point uh the only challenge with that is is that you've got to find a way to to to measure that um and if you're measuring that with a parrot you know you've you're mixing so you're getting not instantaneous readings you're getting readings in general so that's why people use the taste the feel and the smell test so i'm gonna let that run a little bit and we'll collect our heads and then we'll go right into the uh hearts collection and i think i'm gonna skip the parrot because i know that i'm gonna run this hot i just wanna i'll find out what the proof is later one thing i'll show you while i'm here someone sent this to me a while ago and this is a turbo pump it's battery operated and it's pretty neat i'll tell you it's really good for transferring washes or mashes not good if you've got a lot of solids so but if it's a liquid this is really good because it'll pump from anywhere to just about anywhere the only thing is that just got to make sure you keep this thing really really clean you can find these online for 20 30 bucks but they're really neat but you got to be really really judicious about keeping these clean so every time you use it just make sure you run some water through it some soapy water clean it and then sanitize it but this thing will last you a long time and it's really really comes in handy keeps you from having to move those big fermenters around where you're trying to siphon and you know what i'm talking about all right let's uh i got to turn the chiller back on and we shall return when we get a run going we are at all almost two hours and so i've these are my results so far i've got one full gallon of 120 proof and again i'm running it a little bit hot right now it's 199 degrees fahrenheit and 93 degrees celsius um most people already know what my cutoff is 204. but what i've got in the top of my kettle which is the base of the column is 93.6 degrees celsius or there we go 200 degrees fahrenheit now um i'm still on we're still collecting i've got plenty of chilled water this is running really good we're over another leader here a little bit more than a quart though so um we've we've made a pretty good collection and i'm really i'm satisfied with the time it takes and with the quality of how this thing is running uh because it's running basically on its own i've done nothing but set back and allowed this thing to run um the jury's still out but you know it does what it advertises it will do and i'm quite happy with this and at some point i'll shut it down and take this and we're going to go to the next step which is try to run this using that vapor management uh system and uh see what we get out of that now one new tidbit that i've picked up is that if you can track the temperature at the base of the column um what that no what that can tell you is when you're running out of alcohol in your kettle um and the theory behind that or the science behind that is is that as the temperature starts to increase up to the boiling point 212 fahrenheit or 100 degrees celsius well then there must be no alcohol left because you haven't achieved that azeotrope it is a data point it is not a clear-cut point of measurement if it is a good data point and right now we're at 200 degrees uh fahrenheit oh come on there you go 93.7 degrees celsius so we're just about out of alcohol which means that this will start to boil off as just water alone that's why we're starting to get tails oh more to follow we've got another run to make with this um but we're trying to run it through all of its paces and we want to share that with you so until next time yep you know it happy distilling

Channel: Barley and Hops Brewing

Views: 11,825

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: NLlN5AyOjxw

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021