Variations

Remember, alcohol is highly flammable and can be explosive if mixed with the right amount of air and ignited with fire or a spark. You want to treat this process with a lot of respect, and do it in the open air away from burnable building, etc. Ran into a documentary on TV on distilling in the everglades once. Was showing a large steel still with steel tubing wrapped in a circle from top to bottom of a water barrel. The water barrel was filled with water to do the cooling.

The alcohol vapor went in at the top. Alcohol liquid dripped out at the bottom. It was being said to pour back in the pot the first bit that comes out. Cleans the tube. Also if the distillation process gets to fast you can get what was call "puking" where the liquid foams up inside the still and gets into the distillation tubing. If this happens you cool it down a bit, and after clean alcohol is coming out you pour back this bad batch back into the still. The still they had was made with a small weighted sealed top so that it could pop off if it got too hot and also became the place for pouring in the source fermented liquid.

For making the heat exchanger used to condense the alcohol after the pole shift, the following items are possibilities. Car heater, car radiator, car gas line wrapped into a coil, and copper tubing coiled. For the container to heat and evaporate the alcohol one could use a modified pressure cooker, old hot water heater, metal garden sprayer, empty propane bottle, or paint sprayer 2-5 gal pot. All of the above would need modifying for proper in and out flows.

Offered by Mike.

Just about any metal container will do, usually what can be found around the farm or junk yard. Many have "rolled their own" using sheet metal or a modified a pot belly stove. 5-6 gallons is a good starting point if you're serious about making building a Still and alcohol.

Offered by Steve.