Jump to content

Southernhighlander

Vendor
  • Posts

    1,811
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    83

Everything posted by Southernhighlander

  1. I call the device an Open System Pressurization Module (OSPM) Basically the OSPM uses water column to maintain pressure in an open system. Your still's current baine marie heating system heats water in the jacket. The OSPM is connected to the jacket. The water column in the OSPM holds pressure that is created by the immersion heaters creating steam in the jacket. If the rated pressure of the OSPM is exceeded, then a little water is pushed out of the OSPM into your drain, so the system is very safe. Since the only thing between atmosphere and the steam in the jacket is water, it is technically an open system and therefore, just like a baine marie still, it does not fall under the rules of a closed pressurized system. We have 2 OSPM designs. One operates at 6 PSI max and the other at 12 PSI max. The metal thicknesses of your inner pot and jacket dictate if your still can be utilized in this way and if so, which OSPM is best for your still. If your still pot is constructed of 304 stainless the jacket and pot walls must be at least 3mm thick for the 6psi model and at least 4mm thick for the 12 PSI model.
  2. The device requires no power. To learn more email me paul@distillery-equipment.com
  3. We suggest vegetable oil for our baine marie stills. We also have a device that allows you to convert your baine marie still to a self fired electric steam still. Basically the device allows you to create steam under pressure in your heating jacket while maintaining the jacket as an open system.
  4. I'm sorry, I didn't realize that you were in the UK. In that situation I'm sure that Stilldragon Europe would be the best way to go because of the incredibly expensive shipping costs for us to ship to the UK. Also Silk's advice is very good and may be the best way for you to proceed considering that you have already purchased the still.
  5. Before you make a final decision, you should check out our products and do some comparisons in price etc. https://shop.distillery-equipment.com/ If you want you could email me paul@distillery-equipment.com and I will put a package together for you. We have packed column sections in stock as well as everything else that you need + we actually have complete American made electric heating systems with controllers. We also have agitators, which unlike the ones on Chinese stills, have American made UL listed explosion proof agitator motors. We also have ASME rated American made safety valves. Typically the Chinese use non ASME rated safety devices that are not up to code in many situations. The Chinese typically use CE listed motors that say EX on them. CE is not up to code in the US, so many times the Chinese CE listed motors will not pass electrical and or safety inspections. Also if you will be running Vodka in an electric still, a jacketed pot for running 50% low wines is safer. We have 100 liter jacketed still pots that are inexpensive compared to our competitors and we sell American made heating systems with them.
  6. needmorstuff, Below is a picture of one of the many stills that we have built for customers with height restrictions. This 300 gallon Ultra Pro Vodka Still with Gin Basket is less than 9 ft tall. The still is easy to operate and runs as smoothly as any 20 plate still. You can run any individual plate column and any number of individual plates in the system or bypass the bubble plate columns altogether with a turn of a handle. The dephlegmator and final condenser coolant flow is semi automated using a single thermostatic valve (not shown). The gin basket can be bypassed with the turn of a handle. Unlike certain continuous bubble plate columns, which must be torn down to remove plates to disengage them and then reassembled, no tearing down is necessary to reconfigure our Pro Series and Signature Series stills. Just the turn of the handle is all that's needed. Our fastest stills put out 75 gallons of white dog per hour and cost less than any new continuous column still that we have seen with the same output. This still can also be used as a mash tun if needed. If you would like a quote for a still that would be designed specifically to fit your needs email paul@distillery-equipment.com and we will set up a phone conference.
  7. The pump setup, as silk describes it will work fine, However, I would lower the columns to the floor, add a 3rd pump and have 20 total plates. We have dealt with similar height restrictions in this way with great results.
  8. Your retort should be at least 1/3 the size of your still pot for the best results.
  9. Okay I gotcha. I didn't realize you were referencing backset. You said the stillage was screened. Generally stillage means spent mash but I've seen some that use it to mean mash in general. Not knowing your background I thought that you meant the latter. Now that I understand, you gave a nice explanation.
  10. What big distillery was that? With corn based spirits it's best to ferment and distill with the solids left in, which is why Jim Beam, Jack Daniels and the other big distilleries do it that way. Our mash tuns, stills and fermenters, for grain bills that are mostly corn, are all set up for on the grain mashing, fermenting and distilling and that equipment is in around 300 distilleries. On the grain is best for Bourbon and other corn based distilled spirits because it is so much easier and less time consuming than trying to remove the solids. Also many of my customers sell the grain in, spent mash with the liquid left in to hog farmers. One of the main reasons that the vast majority of corn derived spirts are done on the grain is because the corn for corn spirits is not malted. You can put 500 gallons of cooked bourbon mash above a false bottom screen and you may drip out 10 gallons of wort. The only way to get penetration with a sparge on corn mash is to add 20% rice hulls which is a huge waste. It is so much easier to just do it on the grain. For spirits distilled from malted grains such as Barley and Wheat etc, fermenting and distilling off of the grain works great.
  11. SlickFloss I'm glad to sell you a little still however I do not promote any illegal distilling activity. If you would like to order a small still by phone: call 417-778-6100 and ask for Kathy. If you would like to speak to me directly call 417-778-6908. The below is on all of our small still listings: "These products may not be legal to operate in some areas. Affordable Distillery Equipment, LLC strongly discourages any unlawful use of these products and is not responsible for any damage or injury caused by the misuse or unlawful use of these products. Any person or entity that uses information or equipment provided by Affordable Distillery Equipment, LLC does so entirely at their own risk and accepts all liability concerning the use of the aforementioned equipment and information."
  12. We can add a 5 psi pressure relief valve for $55.00 We have German Helmets and Scotch Columns for the 26 gallon, but they are not listed on the web site.
  13. Bigstickdistillery, Adam's right, those stills really are crap. They've been around for a few years now. Here is one of my basic starter stills https://moonshine-still.co/collections/moonshine-stills/products/5-cwc The still pot is 14 and 16 gauge 304 stainless and the column is 16 gauge copper. This still will last a lifetime or longer. You can hand it down to your grandson some day. Here is a better option made from 16 gauge copper https://moonshine-still.co/collections/moonshine-stills/products/8gckc We have sold around 10,000 small stills since 2012. If you want something that you can really do something with then I suggest this one: https://moonshine-still.co/collections/moonshine-stills/products/26-4b6pc Each of these stills comes with a book that tells you everything that you need to know to get started, including mashing, recipes, how to do cuts and how to operate a still and lots of distilling history including many humorous tales about moonshiners.
  14. I grew up in the Great Smokey Mountains in Eastern Tennessee. There was a guy we all called Big Stick (because of what the girls had to say about him). He always wore a flop hat with a sharpened coondick poked through the felt. https://theevolutionstore.com/raccoon-penis-bone/ I remember seeing him stand in line at the bank using his coondick as a toothpick. The other use for a coondick is to place it in the output tube of your still with the curve pointed down so that the ethanol stream goes strait down into the collection jar, which is why many of the old moonshiners would have a coondick stuck in their hat.
  15. The only reason to monitor the pot temp is so that you know when the operating temp is going to be reached so that you can back off the heat input so that you don't cause the still to puke. If your still had a head or column, the most important place to monitor temp, during operation, would be at the top of the column or head. Aside from the boiling point increase throughout the run that Silk mentioned, if you were to try set point temp control in the pot, your pot would reach the set point temp and then the heat would turn off and as soon as the heat turned off, you would have zero ethanol output . It would take minutes for the temp to drop to the point where your heat would come back on and then you would only have output for a few seconds until the set point temp is reached again and once the set point is reached, the heat would turn off and you would have zero output again for several minutes while the mash cools. In a direct fire still like yours, no heat input means no ethanol output.
  16. Sounds like the baby boomers and Gen X except it was weed, LSD and Quaaludes back then.
  17. Slickfoss, you make a very good point. I would never have my ethanol storage tanks indoors because outdoors all I need is a UL 142 listed tank with TTB approved padlocks. It's a huge savings compared to storing indoors. Some don't have the appropriate outdoor space for outdoor ethanol storage tanks but many do and for those that do, outdoor storage is the way to go. For barrels I would use a traditional rick house that is completely ventilated and on the side of a hill if possible. They can be built cheaply from rough, air dried, pallet grade, sawmill lumber and cants. Storing barrels inside a building with only a small amount of ventilation is a bad idea. Whiskey barrels should be exposed to all of the daily and seasonal changes in humidity, temperature, atmospheric pressures and wind. Everything except for the sun and rain.
  18. I just want to say that the Louisville Kentucky ADI Distillers Conference was great and I want to thank ADI for a job well done. We look forward to the 2022 ADI conference, which will be in our home state of Missouri at St Louis.
  19. The oldest millennial are now 40 years old while the oldest of the Gen. Z generation are 24. Are there any stats on what Gen Z thinks about alcohol?
  20. I was just looking over my notes from the testing. It appears that we did have some surging in the final condenser itself when we ran with colder coolant however the surge suppressor on the final condenser compensated for it, for the most part. Best operation for vodka was with the final condenser coolant going in at 53 F and coming out of the final condenser going into the dephlegmator at 120F. In that situation the system self balanced after the initial phase of loading the plates and compressing the heads, which was done manually using the bypasses. This is what Alexander was talking about when he mentioned the system balancing itself when plumbed this way. In fact it will self balance with up to 3 dephlegmators fed sequentially from last to first. We have never tried to run more than that. Alexander designs large commercial and Industrial continuous column stills and vacuum stills for a manufacturer in Ukraine. He has a deep understanding of continuous column and vacuum still design. He has worked for me on several projects, some of them very large. He holds 2 engineering degrees and he was a Naval officer. I've seen his resume and it's very impressive.
  21. Silk, You are welcome to visit any time, just give me a heads up a week or two in advance. That's a good design. Better than most. I bet your still runs really smoothly without swings with that set up.
  22. Silk, During testing we ran all scenarios including really cold coolant, really warm coolant etc. Without adjustable dephlgmator bypasses we had all of the issues you would expect from the things you mention above, however once we added adjustable coolant bypass control at the dephlegmators there were no issues and everything worked perfectly as one would expect. Warmer coolant up to 74 degrees F caused us no issues running sequential condensers. We simply increased coolant flow to the final condenser so that the final condenser output temp was the same as with the lower temp coolant and we adjusted the dephlegmator coolant bypass so that the dephleg had the exact same flow and temperature as it did when we were running 52 F coolant. It's that simple. Let me know the next time you are down this way and I will set up a prototype still in my equipment testing lab and you can see the results given above. We'll run both kinds of coolant designs so you can see the difference. I have lots of fun toys in the testing lab right now including a really fast vacuum stripping still and a subcritical CO2 extractor that operates at 1600psi without a pump of any sort.
  23. Hi Everyone, The first still that I saw with athe condensers plumbed in series was a Kothe still that we did some work on. It also had a thermostatic valve to partially automate the coolant flow. The Ukrainians, Russians and Germans all run their coolant from their final condensers to their dephlegmators for the reasons that Alexander gives below. We have tested both methods thoroughly here and the method of running coolant from the final condenser to the dephlegmator or dephlegmators before it, works the best hands down. In the many test runs that we did we used less coolant running the condensers in series than separately. We had better control and smoother output running in series and we were able to maintain higher proofs during Vodka runs. We also found that we could run much colder water to the final condenser with absolutely no issues, when plumbed in series, Though I generally recommend condenser coolant be around 50 degrees F. I see no issue running 42 F coolants through a tube in shell final condenser. In testing we found that even lower temps are okay as long as the coolant flow is reduced so that the condenser output temp is the same. Of course you must run at lower flow with lower temp coolant so that the condenser output temps are the same otherwise you will get chugging. Our vacuum stills run coolant as low as -40 F through the final condensers with no issues however that is a different situation The German, Russian and Ukranian still builders got it right. They all run the coolant in series from the final condenser back through the dephlegmators from the last dephlegmator to the first. I don't know their standard recomendation but every Vendome column still that I've seen had their condensers plumbed in series as discribed above. We partially automate the coolant control of up to 3 columns and the final condenser with one Danvos thermostatic valve and we have done it many times with great success. This has enabled us to have 300 gallon Vodka stills with 20 plates that stand less than 10 ft tall. None of our competitors are doing that. Our 300 gallon Vodka stills with fit in spaces with ceilings as low as 10 ft. I have over 500 of my stills in distilleries and I can say with absolute certainty that Alexander's statement below is correct. Below Alexanders statement is a pic of stills in one of my 3 assembly shops. All 3 shops have stills under construction at all times. The still in front is a 105 gallon Standard Series Vodka Still with gin basket and CIP. The huge still pot back and to the right is part of a Paul Hall Signature Series 2,500 gallon Ultra Pro Vodka Still. When running Whiskey it will put out up to 75 gallons per hour. This pot is waiting to be jeweled. My employees will put several thousand swirls in the stainless to form a fish scale pattern. Each swirl must be done perfectly and no mistakes can be made. It's all done using smal pnumatic drills running 2" sanding pads. It will look amazing when it's complete and it;s condensers will be plumbed in series and will be controlled with one thermostatic valve. It will have 2 dephlegmators and one final condenser "The role of the condenser-alcohol cooler and the reflux condenser is different. It is important for the condenser to turn all the alcohol vapor into liquid and cool the alcohol. For a reflux condenser, it is important not to condense all the alcohol, but to do just partial condensation. If you supply very cold water to the dephlegmator, you run the risk of disrupting the normal flow of the process. Why? because there will be a very large temperature difference between cold water and alcohol vapor. If you supply water to the dephlegmator after the alcohol condenser-cooler, this water will be heated to 30-40 degrees Celsius, this will not cause a "condensation shock" in the dephlegmator. You will get a stable dephlegmator performance."
  24. Knowing what I know now. I believe that it is always best to pass the coolant through the final condenser before it passes through the dephlegmator or dephlegmators. This gives you a much more stable output and better control. It also allows you to run lower coolant temps to the final condenser with no issues.
  25. I'm not an engineer but I can tell you that you would not risk cracking a tube with that temperature differential, as long as everything is well made. It would not bother me a bit to have greater temperature differential. I have mash cookers out there that have been in operation for almost 10 years that utilize a single jacket for both steam heat and cooling. The steam temps are around 243 F and the coolant temps are as low as 36 F. It never worried me a bit to design them that way because I had already designed, and had my employees build, steam injection boilers with temperature differentials of over 1400 degrees, between the fire box and the inner boiler with no issues. My current mash tun design has an internal crash cooling coil. I only changed the design because the internal coil has a great deal more thermal exchange surface area than the inner part of the jacket did.
×
×
  • Create New...