copper Liebig condenser, attached to a stainless steel kettle lid. lid has a black RTV gasket on it. Lid is held on by pinch style office document clips. liebig head is held onto lid via a 1/2 slip fit x NPT male thread adapter. use an electrical conduit nut to hold it in place.
Liebig head is made with 1/2 copper pipe, sleeved with a 3/4 pipe "water jacket". water jacket has two, short 5/16 reefer tubes soldered on, top and bottom. use these to attach water lines.
coolant water is supplied by a harbor freight aquarium/pond pump. don't recirculate your cooling water. fresh, cold in, hot waste down drain, or into water storage for later use after cooling.
sorry for the vague answer. I've never made a still, don't own one, or have any idea how they function, or what they are used for.
Ideal id use the "waste heat" for the house or fire wood kiln. But this is real help, thanks. Only improvement would be a price list. Do you think there is any value in depressurized version?
Do what that guy said but you don't need fresh cold water, it's better, but it's not a hard requirement. A 60L reservoir in a suitably radiative container with, if need be, a bunch of copper wiring at the water line to radiate the heat out works too. Most pumps will die if the water temp goes above 40C for a sustained period of time so keep an eye on it.
I have a big ole piece of sheet aluminum. Two downdraft cooktop volute fans, box fan or course. I've gotten this Imusa stock pots at the sure market several times, and they crack from BOILING WATER. A GIANT tea kettle seems ideal. Why there aren't giant flat flange or slightly beveled pots for silcone gasketed lids commonly available, I'll never know....
you're gonna hate your life if you go for a cheap design and it winds up taking 15 hours to make a single batch
get a portable induction stove, a large 10-15 gallon stock pot thats compatible with induction, drill a half inch hole in the lid, attach a liebig condenser to it (much cheaper and less of a pain to deal with than a worm), and run vinegar through it
thats my method, and it only costs around $150 (almost all of that price is the pot itself), and i built a dettachable system to hook up a beer keg to use as a thumper but its not necessary
and DONT buy a cheap ass vevor still, i bought one and it sucks Black person aids, plus it has brass which will give you lead poisoning
I'd like to make water only really, unless I can bank alcohol for fuel. I might have access to a HUGE canning, high quality stock pot. That liebig is a very cool, money saving build. Worm is picrel?
i also forgot to say, but clamp the lid down and seal it with flour paste
i just used binder clips
Stationary clips, is the term. Flour paste? Wondering what all these pics were using. Thought it was chewing gum.
That's why you do a vinegar run, rinse it out with water + baking soda, then do a run of the cheapest vodka you can get at your liquor store.
At least that's what you should do when prepping a still for making essential oils.
I did ask didn't I? But a good reminder non the less. Survival stich SHTF, we will probably have more materials than a boy scout.
Do what that guy said but you don't need fresh cold water, it's better, but it's not a hard requirement. A 60L reservoir in a suitably radiative container with, if need be, a bunch of copper wiring at the water line to radiate the heat out works too. Most pumps will die if the water temp goes above 40C for a sustained period of time so keep an eye on it.
My only problem with that is getting a fan that spins slow enough for a small room
I have a big ole piece of sheet aluminum. Two downdraft cooktop volute fans, box fan or course. I've gotten this Imusa stock pots at the sure market several times, and they crack from BOILING WATER. A GIANT tea kettle seems ideal. Why there aren't giant flat flange or slightly beveled pots for silcone gasketed lids commonly available, I'll never know....
. I have the downdrafts, but they are noisey and maybe too small. Even a 240mm PC case fan might be enough, as I can turn the boiler back to to sure low.
Won't work because it doesn't allow you to take cuts. You end up with the foreshots, heads, and tails all mixed in with the hearts. This doesn't matter when you're distilling water but it's essential when distilling alcohol.
In homebrewed spirits there is close to zero chance of you ever get in touch with enough methanol to kill you. This is an american schizo theory, we have distilled booze in europe for decades without any problem. Either way ethanol is the antidote for methanol, so even if you have, by some miracle, a high methanol content, it won't do shit to you.
this is good to know. I wanted to distill some liquor but the warnings scared me away. Now that I know you can use everything and don't have to discard any I will give it a try.
You'll need to consume enough ethanol to keep the responsible enzymes blocked until you've excreted all the methanol, otherwise methanol poisoning via contamination of alcohol wouldn't occur.
If you look at the metabolic pathways for most brewers yeasts, or other commercially sold yeasts then you will see that the production of methanol is either eliminated entirely through genetic modification of the yeast, or reduced highly. Even naturally occurring Saccharomyces cerevisiae doesn't have a problem with methanol production, mostly because the methanol is more toxic to the yeast than ethanol is.
Just look it up.
The following is a very good paper regarding methanol accumulation by brewing with high pectin fruits. Because of enzymatic conversion of the pectin to methanol, not directly due to the ethanol fermentation pathway. This is all mitigated by using a yeast without this enzyme, either naturally or genetically modified.
https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/26/9/2585
It also gives a nice overview of distillation, and clearly shows how the LAST fraction of distillation has considerable higher methanol content than the first fraction which people say are so dangerous in the USA.
Mostly due to azeotrope between water and ethanol/methanol.
A note though, if you use natural yeast, as in from letting the brew collect yeast from the environment, you can get many types of yeast. Usually this is safe too since you don't get that high alcohol content but it's worth noting that this is different from commercially produced yeast cultures.
My best tip is to read primary sources, not some guy on youtube or a blog or even a guy on tv. This goes to show for most food related chemistry, just like seasoning a cast-iron pan, polymerization at different heat levels for different oils and their breakdown temperature, thickness and everything, there is a paper for it. Maybe not directly related to seasoning pans, but the chemical process is the same. Just look at quenching metals in oil, exact same process although probably not using food-grade or safe oils.
It's so funny when rural Americans think they're the only people in the world who distill their own liquor when like every single European country has a bunch of regional moonshine equivalents that people have been making for like 400 years
My old roommate made one along the lines of this with an old beat up pressure cooker. It was the single most Black person rigged contraption I've ever seen.
It didn't seal right and the mash anyways leaked out a bit. Cleaning that off the stove was like chipping away at concrete. The thumper was surprisingly a lot louder than I thought it would be.
Still never trusted his brew because he's moronic, so I never did try it
Good thread with decent advice.
I'm really interested in stills and not paying taxes, but totally not interested in drinking booze.
I vividly remember the lost Saturdays after heavy drinking on Friday evening as a teen.
No fricking thanks.
I'm lucky nobody ran me over as I was crawling home like a 3 legged, short sighted moose
Frick that's unlucky.
Hope he managed to get to the world with some big breasted elves.
Two villages to the west some poor lad froze two death while being shit faced. Temps were not even below freezing and the guy was close to houses.
Mailman found him the next morning.
Sometimes the human body withstands incredible abuse and sometimes you're simply gone.
Stay safe while drinking pals. I might switch to Weed, but I never smoked and the last time I tried it, my lunch celebrated a reunion party
Making heat do as much work as possible while it escapes to eternity is an moral imperative. You can irresponsibly heat your house for. Just your little body
OR
You can have heat do work (like bank chemical fuel as alcohol), and then heat your little body.
Well you can tell yourself that but the TTB disagrees with your interpretation of federal liquor laws and will arrest you for producing without their permit regardless. If your belief were true there wouldn't be a huge warning on their FAQ saying that yes you still need a permit even if its only "fuel alcohol" and thus not drinkable or taxable.
Look up the foxfire magazine. It's a book published by some apalatchian highschoolers. It has a tutorial on how to make one out of a couple copper sheets.
I read somewhere (so it must be true) that the dangers of Prohibition era moonshine was mostly from using car radiators as condensers and getting lead in the mix.
copper Liebig condenser, attached to a stainless steel kettle lid. lid has a black RTV gasket on it. Lid is held on by pinch style office document clips. liebig head is held onto lid via a 1/2 slip fit x NPT male thread adapter. use an electrical conduit nut to hold it in place.
Liebig head is made with 1/2 copper pipe, sleeved with a 3/4 pipe "water jacket". water jacket has two, short 5/16 reefer tubes soldered on, top and bottom. use these to attach water lines.
coolant water is supplied by a harbor freight aquarium/pond pump. don't recirculate your cooling water. fresh, cold in, hot waste down drain, or into water storage for later use after cooling.
sorry for the vague answer. I've never made a still, don't own one, or have any idea how they function, or what they are used for.
Ideal id use the "waste heat" for the house or fire wood kiln. But this is real help, thanks. Only improvement would be a price list. Do you think there is any value in depressurized version?
Do what that guy said but you don't need fresh cold water, it's better, but it's not a hard requirement. A 60L reservoir in a suitably radiative container with, if need be, a bunch of copper wiring at the water line to radiate the heat out works too. Most pumps will die if the water temp goes above 40C for a sustained period of time so keep an eye on it.
This but your kettle is a beer keg. If you're running cleared washes you don't even need to cut it open.
It's cheaper to buy shitty vodka and run it through charcoal than to start distilling. Gear is spendy and it takes time you could use to earn money.
shoplifting.
I have a big ole piece of sheet aluminum. Two downdraft cooktop volute fans, box fan or course. I've gotten this Imusa stock pots at the sure market several times, and they crack from BOILING WATER. A GIANT tea kettle seems ideal. Why there aren't giant flat flange or slightly beveled pots for silcone gasketed lids commonly available, I'll never know....
you're gonna hate your life if you go for a cheap design and it winds up taking 15 hours to make a single batch
get a portable induction stove, a large 10-15 gallon stock pot thats compatible with induction, drill a half inch hole in the lid, attach a liebig condenser to it (much cheaper and less of a pain to deal with than a worm), and run vinegar through it
thats my method, and it only costs around $150 (almost all of that price is the pot itself), and i built a dettachable system to hook up a beer keg to use as a thumper but its not necessary
and DONT buy a cheap ass vevor still, i bought one and it sucks Black person aids, plus it has brass which will give you lead poisoning
i also forgot to say, but clamp the lid down and seal it with flour paste
i just used binder clips
I'd like to make water only really, unless I can bank alcohol for fuel. I might have access to a HUGE canning, high quality stock pot. That liebig is a very cool, money saving build. Worm is picrel?
Stationary clips, is the term. Flour paste? Wondering what all these pics were using. Thought it was chewing gum.
chew-ing gum?
You are ancient or comedy nerd or both for that. Jesus.
Old Chevy truck radiator, just like the pros in Missouri do when making authentic shine, adding antifreeze is optional
Just don't drink the first batch.
That's why you do a vinegar run, rinse it out with water + baking soda, then do a run of the cheapest vodka you can get at your liquor store.
At least that's what you should do when prepping a still for making essential oils.
Cheapest, but not best.
Wouldnt this melt the plastic wrap? This design is for distilling salt water.
I did ask didn't I? But a good reminder non the less. Survival stich SHTF, we will probably have more materials than a boy scout.
My only problem with that is getting a fan that spins slow enough for a small room
. I have the downdrafts, but they are noisey and maybe too small. Even a 240mm PC case fan might be enough, as I can turn the boiler back to to sure low.
Won't work because it doesn't allow you to take cuts. You end up with the foreshots, heads, and tails all mixed in with the hearts. This doesn't matter when you're distilling water but it's essential when distilling alcohol.
doesnt matter for a drunkard
>w-what about methano-
shut up moron
In homebrewed spirits there is close to zero chance of you ever get in touch with enough methanol to kill you. This is an american schizo theory, we have distilled booze in europe for decades without any problem. Either way ethanol is the antidote for methanol, so even if you have, by some miracle, a high methanol content, it won't do shit to you.
>it won't do shit to you.
this is good to know. I wanted to distill some liquor but the warnings scared me away. Now that I know you can use everything and don't have to discard any I will give it a try.
You'll need to consume enough ethanol to keep the responsible enzymes blocked until you've excreted all the methanol, otherwise methanol poisoning via contamination of alcohol wouldn't occur.
If you look at the metabolic pathways for most brewers yeasts, or other commercially sold yeasts then you will see that the production of methanol is either eliminated entirely through genetic modification of the yeast, or reduced highly. Even naturally occurring Saccharomyces cerevisiae doesn't have a problem with methanol production, mostly because the methanol is more toxic to the yeast than ethanol is.
Just look it up.
The following is a very good paper regarding methanol accumulation by brewing with high pectin fruits. Because of enzymatic conversion of the pectin to methanol, not directly due to the ethanol fermentation pathway. This is all mitigated by using a yeast without this enzyme, either naturally or genetically modified.
https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/26/9/2585
It also gives a nice overview of distillation, and clearly shows how the LAST fraction of distillation has considerable higher methanol content than the first fraction which people say are so dangerous in the USA.
Mostly due to azeotrope between water and ethanol/methanol.
A note though, if you use natural yeast, as in from letting the brew collect yeast from the environment, you can get many types of yeast. Usually this is safe too since you don't get that high alcohol content but it's worth noting that this is different from commercially produced yeast cultures.
My best tip is to read primary sources, not some guy on youtube or a blog or even a guy on tv. This goes to show for most food related chemistry, just like seasoning a cast-iron pan, polymerization at different heat levels for different oils and their breakdown temperature, thickness and everything, there is a paper for it. Maybe not directly related to seasoning pans, but the chemical process is the same. Just look at quenching metals in oil, exact same process although probably not using food-grade or safe oils.
>My best tip is to read primary sources, not some guy on youtube or a blog or even a guy on tv.
The problem is that primary sources like to use made-up words like azeotrope.
It's so funny when rural Americans think they're the only people in the world who distill their own liquor when like every single European country has a bunch of regional moonshine equivalents that people have been making for like 400 years
>It's so funny when rural Americans think they're the only people in the world who distill their own liquor
It's funny when someone dreams up some nonsense and posts it on the internet like it's a fact.
Oh yeah its actually everything they think is something exclusively American.
just take it off the heat and replace the cup once you see it's full to a certain level
My old roommate made one along the lines of this with an old beat up pressure cooker. It was the single most Black person rigged contraption I've ever seen.
It didn't seal right and the mash anyways leaked out a bit. Cleaning that off the stove was like chipping away at concrete. The thumper was surprisingly a lot louder than I thought it would be.
Still never trusted his brew because he's moronic, so I never did try it
Putting one in an unused corner as a heat is looking better and better.
Good thread with decent advice.
I'm really interested in stills and not paying taxes, but totally not interested in drinking booze.
I vividly remember the lost Saturdays after heavy drinking on Friday evening as a teen.
No fricking thanks.
I'm lucky nobody ran me over as I was crawling home like a 3 legged, short sighted moose
friend of a friend met the isekai truck while passed out drunk in the road
driver thought he was a garbage bag
Frick that's unlucky.
Hope he managed to get to the world with some big breasted elves.
Two villages to the west some poor lad froze two death while being shit faced. Temps were not even below freezing and the guy was close to houses.
Mailman found him the next morning.
Sometimes the human body withstands incredible abuse and sometimes you're simply gone.
Stay safe while drinking pals. I might switch to Weed, but I never smoked and the last time I tried it, my lunch celebrated a reunion party
Making heat do as much work as possible while it escapes to eternity is an moral imperative. You can irresponsibly heat your house for. Just your little body
OR
You can have heat do work (like bank chemical fuel as alcohol), and then heat your little body.
Need the biggest cheapest heating vessel or where to find one. A stainless virgin 33 gallon barrel would be ideal.
prison toilet
I built one of these to make Muratic acid
What cha do with that?
Where the frick does someone get beer kegs? I don't drink.
it's 2024 you can buy a counter top still online, it's not illegal to make, it's illegal to sell with out paying your taxes and having a permit.
Well you can tell yourself that but the TTB disagrees with your interpretation of federal liquor laws and will arrest you for producing without their permit regardless. If your belief were true there wouldn't be a huge warning on their FAQ saying that yes you still need a permit even if its only "fuel alcohol" and thus not drinkable or taxable.
heres how you make you a "lickey" still https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glQjCKAI4gA
Look up the foxfire magazine. It's a book published by some apalatchian highschoolers. It has a tutorial on how to make one out of a couple copper sheets.
Great book btw.
I read somewhere (so it must be true) that the dangers of Prohibition era moonshine was mostly from using car radiators as condensers and getting lead in the mix.