Show Us Your Dragon

Smaug

@Brandedhearts said: -A larger drainage hole in the bottom of the kettle. This double boiler technology allows you to keep lees, bits of pulp from raw sugar sources, and grain inside the kettle because it is evenly and indirectly heated. However, if you can't drain it out, it is not of much avail.

Hi Ryan, Many pumps are set up with 1.5" and 2" tri clamp for moving suspended solids. Having said that we have moved to make a 4" outlet our default size on the larger kettles.

Thanks for chiming in. Your still looks beautiful.

Brandedhearts

The Baine-Marie is not the most responsive technology. Unlike steam, fire, or direct immersion electric, the addition of a heat transfer fluid will slow the reaction time if adjustments are made during the run. If for instance power is cut to the kettle, the mineral oil will have to cool and then the liquid in the kettle will have to cool in turn. It could take up to 10-15 minutes to see the result of a power adjustment.

All in all though, I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I love having the ability to cut the power to a minimum and let the distillation run ride on the heat it can hold in. We are not making neutral spirits and our philosophy is one pass-maximum flavor transfer distillation. We didn't want to have 7 or 8 plates and create too neutral of a spirit. Our attempt with this project is to split the difference between modern bubble cap and old school pot still distillation. The tri clamp spool/expansion chamber effectively beer strips the spirit and the column rectifies it in one pass without stripping out too much flavor.

Brandedhearts

Distilling low and slow is the name of the game. If you want to make dense spirits made to drink at high proof, my setup might be something to look at for inspiration. Or to run away from altogether if purity is your aim.

Harry

Bigger, better drain system. Kothe.

SDeurope

A bigger drain is not a problem, 4" would be the way to go for larger boilers. We have even seen one with a pump directly built into the drain. No need to go for a Kothe because of this. ;)

grim

Holy cow @smaug, a 4" drain? Who is making the grappa?

A good PD pump will have no problem handling a 2" outlet, even with the most viscous, solids laden spent waste. In fact, finding anything larger than 2" means probably spending tens of thousands of dollars on pump and hose. Hell, a 4" tc ball valve is easily $750 bucks. 2" is easily good for 150 gallons a minute with a strong pump, not sure who needs anything larger. I could probably pump ground meat with my PD.

Those huge drains on the German stills are nice, but nearly every one I've seen has had them reduced to 2" to be able to pump the spent waste away. Not sure what the point of the picture above is, where the drain just goes to the floor. What are you supposed to do with that? Looks like a mess of disastrous proportions. Open that 4" drain and it's a tidal wave of boiling wash and goo all over the floor.

It's not even as if you can just position that over a floor drain. Nobody is dumping the kind of heavy solids waste down a floor drain, it's another nightmare waiting to happen.

We need to pump our waste about 45 feet from the still to waste holding tanks where it is co-mingled with other waste/wash water. 4" is nice, but you are going to be reducing it to pump in nearly every case. Unless you think the best way to deal with this is bucket brigade.

Brandedhearts

I agree with @SDeurope:

That little Kothe still would not yield any finer of a spirit, cost 5 times as much, cannot be altered to the extent of a SD setup once built, and would necessitate a boiler which costs tens of thousands of dollars and require its own instillation, permits and partitioned room.

Our ancestors did not have access to 304 stainless steel. Consequently, they worked with what they had, copper. Copper is not needed in the kettle or the structure of the still (our ancestors also didn't have access to modern biochemistry and engineering). You only need copper for the vapor where sulfides bond with it during distillation.

Harry

You misunderstood me. I never meant for anyone to BUY a Kothe. I was merelydemonstrating a much better, more versatile drain system that could be utilized on the StillDragon boilers.
The large drain can handle liquids, and solids like marc (via the manway) and no pump necessary (pumps are a potential fire hazard). But that's jmho. Your mileage may vary. :)

Moonshine

Well said,@Brandedhearts! :-bd

Brandedhearts

I'm not saying people who buy these setups are not good distillers. Lots of good product comes from these apparatuses. I'm just saying a boiler and accompanied permits could run 50-80K. My heating elements and mineral oil ran about 1500 bucks, needed no floor space in my warehouse, and do the trick just fine.

Harry

Seems like every time I post any suggestion there's always an immediate 'get yer back up' reaction. Never mind, I won't bother.

grim

I want a manway large enough for my fat ass to crawl through.

Your contractor is smoking something (or thinks you are made of money) if you get a 50-80k steam quote.

Brandedhearts

@grim said: I want a manway large enough for my fat ass to crawl through.

Your contractor is smoking something (or thinks you are made of money) if you get a 50-80k steam quote.

Even if you have a smaller setup and its only 20 grand that is still too expensive. The other thing is safety. With boilers you are dealing with a complex machine that is creating immense pressures. Heating elements are remarkably safe. I couldn't vaporize mineral oil with a 475 degree flash point if I tried.

grim

@Brandedhearts said: and would necessitate a boiler which costs tens of thousands of dollars and require its own instillation, permits and partitioned room.

Hey! I like my boiler room.

Smaug

@grim said: Holy cow @smaug, a 4" drain? Who is making the grappa?

I don't know?

We have had several requests for bigger drains from various customers. The added cost is a relative none issue so we will default to the 4" on anything 1000L or more.

As an aside,I find that tiny kettle with the massive manway and huge drain to be hilarious. The base elevation of that manway makes for ???? liters of beer?

punkin

@Harry said: Seems like every time I post any suggestion there's always an immediate 'get yer back up' reaction. Never mind, I won't bother.

It'd take a smarter man than me to figure out why that is.

grim

Allegedly, a Pan Am 727 flight waiting for start clearance in Munich overheard the following -

Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?"

Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English."

Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"

Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody war."

Kapea

Hey, I was on that flight! The German pilot then turned to his copilot and said, "No body loves me... Everybody hates me! I'm gonna go eat worms."

Anavrin

@Brandedhearts said: The tri clamp spool/expansion chamber effectively beer strips the spirit and the column rectifies it in one pass without stripping out too much flavor.

Can you explain in anymore detail what's going on inside that big ball when you say it effectively beer strips the spirit, I'm assuming it's empty on the inside and can't quite get my head around how this works.

I just wondering if there's a smaller scale version we could build to achieve a similar result.

Smaug

The added surface area contributes to a higher (passive reflux) attenuation.

But remember this chamber is old school technology.

It is an inefficient way to add efficiency compared to running your dephlegmator at it's intended capacity.

And this is exactly the point. A whiskey maker is trying exploit the inefficiencies of the equipment to make a flavorful and yet clean product. But also take advantage of any usable efficiency to help realize the benefit of added yeild/profit.

Brandedhearts

To piggyback on @Smaug with regards to the expansion chamber:

Water wants to dissipate as a vapor. In its vapor form, water takes up 1600 times more space than it did as a liquid. This is the secret behind such technologies as the steam locomotive where steam is used to create immense pressure and convert that pressure to energy.

Understanding Steam @ Flow and Control Engineering

When water and ethanol evaporates into the expansion chamber, it naturally dissipates and finds the outer edges. The steel in the outer edges of the chamber because of the expanded surface area are far cooler than the conditions inside the kettle. Water and other heavier impurities re-condense when it hits the cooler steel and gravity takes over and makes it fall back into the kettle. Ethanol, having a far lower boiling point, makes its way to the column and begins the rectification process.

When we use a flashlight and look inside the expansion chamber during distillation, the sight glass and outer edges of the chamber looks like a window in a house on a rainy day with water copiously streaming down. We can also see a nice mist swirling in a counter clockwise manner. I have no Idea why it spins that direction, the science of why is lost on me. Perhaps someone on this forum can enlighten me.

Were the column directly atop the kettle, the first two plates would be flooded with water. Only the third or fourth (or fifth or sixth, etc) would offer any meaningful contact with the ethanol to fortify it and bond with sulfides. In my opinion, a plate is a good thing so long as there are not too many of them.

We wanted to distill in one pass for both the sake of energy and time efficiency. We just didn't want to use 6-8 plates to do it. We don't believe in creating a more neutral spirit and then using water to proof down. Water breaks the bonds in your finished product of acids and ethanol molecules which create wonderful flavor esters that give you those flavor notes ranging from apples to pears to floral bouquets.

We think most of the best spirits are double pot distilled. First distilled or "Beer Stripped" to about 60 proof to get your low wines and then again to achieve a proof ranging from 120-130. Most Scotch distilleries distill this way as they have for centuries. The Irish tend to take it a step further and triple distill to a higher proof.

Therefore, the expansion chamber effectively gets our spirit to about that beer stripped strength of 25-30%. The column takes over and rectifies it higher. our copper has more contact with the ethanol and less with the water sitting so high above the kettle. By the time we collect our heads, we are at about 170 proof. We discard them and collect between 155-160. Depending on how much flavor we want to let through, make our tails cut at a lower proof point towards the end of the run.

Because of the added height of the column sitting atop the spool and the chamber, by the time the ethanol gets to the dephlegmator we really don't have to add any water at all to create any active reflux. Instead, we just cut the power and let the boiling point do all the work.

grim

3 or 4 plates above?

Brandedhearts

4 plates. One expansion chamber, one pass distilling, overall proof of approximately 120 when all is said and done.

punkin

@Brandedhearts said: To piggyback on Smaug with regards to the expansion chamber

Thank you very much. There is so much intimate knowledge and experience in this one post it makes my last 10,000 look like the dribble they are.

I'm very glad you are with us.

Myles

@Harry I like the idea of the bigger drain, and even more so if your boiler is on the 1st floor of the building with the waste disposal services on the ground floor. Discharge waste straight into a truck or trailer for removal from site.

Anavrin

Thanks for the explanation @Brandedhearts, I only run a small hobby scale still and I'm often busy with at work or with the kids, I was wondering if my 4" torpedo section could be used in a similar way on with my 2" column, but I think due to the small scale it wouldn't be effective enough.

Im going to try my torpedo bubble plate mounted on my boiler, have a dephlagmator directly above it and the rest of my plates sitting on top of that with a VM take off at the top with another cooling coil to provide reflux for the main column plates.

An inline stripping section below my column, to save time and run straight from a wash, obviously the dephlagmator cooling will also control the vapour entering the column, it will be a balancing act and I'm not sure what collection rate I will achive but that's one of the beauties of using SD gear, being able to create new configurations and experiment :-)

grim

The counter clockwise swirling is made by the whiskey fairies, whose tears of joy you can see running down the sides of the chamber.

More likely though, a bit of serendipity and the reason why those old scots were so obsessed with the shape of their stills. When the wash boils, the volume of vapor is tremendous, which also means when that vapor condenses, it's just as explosive. When it flash condenses, it causes a tremendous amount of turbulence. Like you mentioned above, when that vapor collapses, the liquid now occupies 1600x less space than the vapor did, and since nature abhors a vacuum, more vapor and some uncondensible gas rapidly moves into the space it previously occupied.

You can imagine, vapor very quickly moving into the expansion chamber, slowing as it enters an area of larger volume, then immediately being subjected to pushes and pulls of flash vapor condensation on the walls, and then finally being pushed straight through the top. It's probably much more chaotic than the vapor droplets would indicate. Each time you have flash condensation, little vortices would form, and together, these vortices would add up to motion.

Now, I slept through all of fluid dynamics, the whole semester, I probably didn't make it to a single class, but something is making me think this is kind of an induced whirlpool effect (likely the aforementioned fairies whispering in my ear). The rotation of a draining tub is somewhat random, something to do with the initial angular momentum of the water in the tub. This has nothing to do with the Coriolis effect, but the shape of the vessel. Back to the old scots and their obsession with shape, maybe rightfully so.

I would think the induced whirlpool is highly beneficial to forcing even greater vapor/liquid contact at the interface of the wall.

Anyhow, glad to see another 4 plate single pass whiskey guy - agree wholeheartedly - I think you can create a superior product in a single pass process.

grim

Interesting shape of Harvard's new BBQ Smoker design, notice any similarities? They claim that the hourglass shape creates a cyclonic motion in the cooking chamber that's beneficial for smoking.

Using science to create the perfect brisket

TheMechWarrior

Now I'm hungry!

grim

Do not put brisket in your still. 16 people, 220 pounds of brisket, that's my kind of ratio.