Can You Also Distill Water With My Moonshine Stills? Yes!
Distilled water, blue gold, is safe to drink and easy to make, out of the dirtiest water imaginable. Some countries are being forced to buy water from their government and not allowed to collect their own rain water. Things like fluoride cannot be filtered out with a supermarket water filter, you need to distill it. Distill then add some salt or squeeze of lemon, to add minerals back. You can desalinate ocean water. Take the radiation out of your water in event of nuclear meltdown such as Fukishima. These also do everything else and can also make tinctures and vodka infusions.
Question: I’m a distillery, planning a small-scale production for rum (molasses), whiskey (corn), cachaça (molasses), vodka etc etc, you name it…. This is my plan. What still pot (gas power) configuration would you suggest that has enough flexibility for this purpose?
Answer: 100 and a 50-gallon boiler along with the The 4″ Alchemist Still with the 4″ Pot Still. The 50-gallon boiler and still will be for your spirit runs, making vodka and flavored gins even going into whiskeys, and the 100-gallon Still will be your workhorse, that is called the stripping still or the pot still. For a set up like this, is around 10 grand, give or take depending on shipping, this set up will produce a min of 65 gallons a day of a finished product like Vodka.
Essential Oils Question: Why do you use both propane and electric
at the same time when you are distilling essential oils like Lavender?
Answer: I use this when I have to do whole farms and they bring me a lot of product and I have to do as much as I can in a short amount of time.
You need alot of energy to boil water because it increases the speed of the vapor. If you are running steam on a 210,000 BTU (British Thermal Unit) burner it is pushing steam through 4-inch hole going through plant material. And in the 4-inch column. It is traveling at 25 feet a second. That means I am removing oil through the plant material in under 5 minutes, and you have filled a quart jar with hydrosol.
Now we are going to do 10,000 BTU’s Now the vapor traveling through the 4-inch column through plant material is only traveling at three feet per second. Now because it is traveling a lot slower, it is now going to take you over forty minutes to receive the same amount of oil and hydrosol. Its going to take that amount of time to fill a quart jar. Now the quart jar, when you smell the hydrosol, it smells a little burnt and earthy. That is because the plant material has been in steam for a longer period of time. You will get a lesser yield of oil too. To produce highest quality oil, I recommend lots of BTU’s going through the plant material. I call this Direct Steam Contact.
Answers to Heat Control Questions:
1) Are there any safety features?
(auto shutoff at certain high temps, timers,
interrupts, external sensors that can be used etc)
Answer: Yes there are several features built into the standard Still Troll. The first one is that if you have an open wire sensor, it will fault, turn off the heating elements, and display that on the front operator interface. Second as you are heating up, and the still is getting ready to ramp up into production mode, there are a couple of things that happen. First of all when the temperature in the vapor chamber passes 120 degrees, a light/alarm horn will sound. This light/alarm will sound for 20 seconds. This is a monitoring alarm letting you know in case you are not around the still when it enters into production mode. Another feature which is jumper selectable is to have multiple elements being used to quickly heat up the pot and then drop the additional heating elements out when the production set point has been reached. This is done several different ways. There is a multiplier inside the controller that can be changed. It is factory set for 5 percent. What that means that if the option jumper is installed, the secondary element will drop out once the temperature reaches within 5% of the production set point. This will maximize the precision to hold a real tight temperature around the production temperature. If the jumper is removed, then the secondary element will follow the primary element and turn on and off every time it does. Even with the jumper in place, if the production temperature drops below 5 percent, then the secondary element would re-engage and add additional heat to the pot to get back up to temperature. There is an additional over-temperature monitor that is built into the system as well. This is factory set to 20° Fairenheit, but can be changed using the operator interface on the front of the still troll. Therefore if you were running a production temperature of 175°F, and the troll reached 195, it would shut down. This protection is used incase a water cooling line breaks, leaks, ect.
2) How can we best interface it with heating elements,
and what voltages/wattages (single phase/triple phase) are supported?
Answer: Currently, the standard still troll will handle almost any standard heating elements and voltages. All of these are based upon being single phase. The standard still troll is designed to operate using one or two heating elements. The maximum voltage per heater is 240VAC. The maximum recommended current is 25Amps. Each heater has its own power cord, as well as leads that would goto the heater. This gives you flexibility to use multiple power sources to power different elements. The control power that runs the still troll is taken from the power that you supply on the first input power. It can be anywhere from 100-250VAC. Therefore without modifying the unit, you could run (2) 5500W, 240VAC elements and have a current draw on each circuit of 22.91 Amps. If you used one power source for both elements, then you would have to tie both power leads from the still troll into a 50A, 240VAC circuit. But another example is where you could use (2) 1500W, 120VAC elements and they would draw 12.5Amps per heating element. You could simply supply two simple 15-20A circuits and run the unit completely on standard household currents (based upon being in the us) European countries typically have 230VAC, 16A for a standard household circuit. Therefore if you hook the unit up in these countries, you could use (2) 1500W, 230VAC elements and use (1) standard 16A, 230VAC circuit to run both of them. That current would total 13.04Amps.
3) Is there any warranty behind it? What happens if I have problems?
Answer: Typically, all of these units are fully tested before leaving the factory. We can offer email, skype support if you need to. We anticipate that if you have any questions it would be on how to modify internal parameters to make this unit work uniformly with your still. That is the beauty of this unit, using the operator interface you can access all of the parameters that are in the program that runs it and manipulate it to make it do what you like. Yes, if there is a problem in the first 60 days, we will support and send you parts. But we stock all of the parts, therefore it would not be a problem to get spares or replacements from us. Typically on larger systems 50-100-gallon systems that use 3-4-inch column towers, we offer an Ethernet option. This is additional cost, but as long as you have a standard high speed internet connection, if you have any problems, or need modifications or troubleshooting, we can log right into your still troll while you are production and modify the program, troubleshoot, and also track the data over time for charting. This feature also opens up here in the future the expansion of our unit to use the web interface to record, control and monitor your complete still troll actively live on smart phones, and computer web interfaces. (coming in the future).
Is this disclaimer on the shopping cart when people make orders?
“As these are custom orders, all sales are final no refunds. However we are able to offer service on these items for the first 6 months after purchase. Just ship your product to us, we will analyze the issue, repair, or offer a replacement at no cost if there was an error in manufacturing then ship the item back to you.”
Unanswered Questions?
If you did not find the answer to all of your distilling questions…