Since this seems to be the only community for distilling, I’ll try and see if we can get some content going here. I’ve had this still as a pot still only for the last eight years. Decided I wanted to do some column distilling, so asked a welder friend to do some adjustments to the boiler head. He added two tri-clamps for me, one facing up for a column, one facing sideways for pot distilling.

Last weekend I cleaned it for a final time (rinsed it in phosphoric acid), and yesterday ran the first batch. Started with 5 liters of 40-ish % alcohol mixed with 4 liters of water, ended up with 1,75 liters of 93 % alcohol. It was actually a bit more, but the final 0,25 liters were of lower alcohol content so I put them in the feints yar.

All in all I really liked running it like this. I wanted to make it a bokakob style column at first, but decided to make it a VM because I didn’t have all the parts for the slanted plate section. I might make this part later, but so far I’m quite impressed by the performance of the VM setup. I also loved the fact that it shuts down production by itself, as soon as the alcohol is gone from the wash, the yield slows down to a few drips.