mrjayce

9 hours ago, Southernhighlander said:

Due to the thinness of the copper in your still your still pot may not be able to stand up to the torque of an agitator over time.  In this situation you can use a pump that will handle temps up to 200F to circulate the mash around in your still.  You would need an input port and output port on your still pot.

 

We are planning to do precisely that with an air pump. We ordered some high temp rated hoses to set this up.

We talked to Paul at Distillery Equipment and he agreed that putting an agitator may not be a good idea based on the HOGA design.

We did a trial by manually stirring every 3 minutes today (through the manway) and we shaved a significant amount of time on the initial heating so we know that mixing will help.

We'll keep on optimizing in the next couple weeks. We very much appreciate everyone's help and suggestions.

That was our first thought, we had made a flat face gasket but we are not getting a good seal because the lip on our Hoga copper pot is hammered over the lip of the manway and is very uneven. I called every gasket supplier in the distillery, winery, brewery world and haven't found a good solution. It would help if someone knew what Manway manufacturer Hoga uses. I am suspecting it is Zorzini but would like a confirmation before I try to use my poor german skills

Much appreciate all the suggestions.

It sits inside the lip of the manway instead of inside the door like most manway gaskets would. 

It s an unusual type of gasket with a large lip at the top and a smaller lip at the bottom

So we have a worn out manway gasket on our Hoga 500l still. I reached out to Hoga to buy a replacement but never received an answer. I tried gasket companies in my area but none of the solution seem to work ...

the gasket wraps around the fixed portion of the manway instead of the traditional way of sitting in the door.

Any advice on how to get a new/used gasket that fits our specific still ?

thank.

Ben.