richard1

How did you go about degassing the BEER. Partial heating and excessive agitation prior to distilling ?? Gas within the beer results in excessive foaming and flooding of the column.

Hey it's a different and novel approach, but I can not see it working efficiently in that you will not reach acceptable / comparable extract. Basically you are trying to simulate a mashtun and lautertun combination. With beer you agitate the mash and heat for the various conversion steps. Post that it would pass to the lautertun and then onto the wort kettle. So in your case there is no mash for agitation because it has been left behind in the extractor. Also there is no real bed to drain from / through, nor is sparging possible. Ultimately there are going to be terrible losses to contend with. Worst of all, there is is a tonne of spent grain to remove from the extractor. But a great effort and you won't know it until you try it. I have often thought about this and I would have performed all in the kettle and then considered placing a strainer post the kettle whilst pumping / transferring to another vessel for spent grain removal and prior to cooking (wort kettle) and then transferring back to the kettle. That's my sixpence worth.

I can relate to this in South Africa. I got caught with a similar scam selling Chinchona bark. Telephone numbers worked, had a fictitious address. Everything was peachy until my money was gone and no delivery.

Another side to this. YES to easier operations for distiller and I agree to the concept of unattended still operation, but here's another angle. 1 Desperately important to make the same product 100% the same next time. 2 The ability to tweak the still performance for improved operation. And most importantly of all, the process can be left to an underling of less capability. +1 million % important. It becomes a tool of production. Having our cider plant Kegging and bottling totally automated, has resulted in serious quality improvement. This too will shortly apply to our fully automated distilling plant which is also on the LM concept..

I would personally not want to automate this still, specifically because of its small diameter. It's like asking something small to do something really big and this is when things start costing lots of money. My two cents worth would be change to a LM type of collection with dephleg on top and collection below, flowing out through a needle valve to a PC. So the the only items being controlled are the heat and reflux control with the needle valve. Far simpler.

Best way to fatten up your beef herd.

Looking at this from a slightly different perspective, if you have copper in the hot vapour path column prior to condensing, is this still an issue or is it only a problem with cooled liquid product.

Interesting one because you need to barrel at 60%. You have not indicated your wash ABV. I think it is a big ask on a four plate column. Additionally there is going to be a high reflux required which potentaially will be stripping flavour.

I would seriously suggest that you look at Istill.

My only comment is that you potentially will get a huge product loss at end of filtration due to prodcut remaining with the filter frame. I personally would have used a cartridge filter. Here you would also be able to achieve a more precise filtration.

Bloody nice. I have sent you a PM with my email address. I would love to chat with you.

Can you show diagrams / pictures ??

I bought a 30A 3 phase 380VAC, phase angle power controller the other day for my continuous column still that I am busy building. Nice because it has both 4-2mA input control as well as a manual pot control. Of note is the size of heat sinks that they come with and also the air flow requirement for panel cooling and this then all relate back to large panel sizes /volume.

I would call for yet another opinion...... Not a good looking box. Besides you only have a single SSR. Your elements have all been connected together for single phase operation. So unless your SSR is big enough for two elements, I would re-examine the build.