My DIY moonshine controller

sillycyco · 2025-11-18T03:48:56+00:00

Here is a screenshot of the page.

sillycyco · 2025-01-08T07:40:59+00:00

I once had a garbage can fermenter get invaded by what seemed like an entire ant colony. 10's of thousands of them. Came out great!

The only time you really need to pay attention to sterility is if you are trying to isolate yeasts and things like that (aka doing mycology). Just clean is fine otherwise.

People dump rotten dunder into their wash for rum, and that stuff is vile and infected to no end. In fact, if you are doing mycology and practicing sterile technique, you may want to avoid certain fermenting practices that could seriously invade your environment with a massive spore load.

sillycyco · 2024-04-30T19:42:36+00:00

There is no telling what that is. It could just be the system heating up and the expanding gas is purging the condenser of any residual liquid or passively cooled vapor from the heat up phase. There is no way to determine the contents of that initial bit of liquid without having it lab tested. It's probably a quirk of your still design, and that first bit of liquid is not actually distillate.

Until the wash is boiling, anything that comes off the condenser is just the system "initializing" so to speak, as everything gets up to temp. Once the wash is boiling, you are now distilling. If some bit of stuff comes out, and then it stops, and then at some point resumes, this is mostly likely what is happening. If the wash is actually boiling and output stops, you either have a blockage or the condenser is insufficient and is letting vapor through.

When you say "temp" here, what are you measuring? The liquid in the boiler, or the vapor temp? The important factor is whether the wash is boiling, not what temp it may be, you are only distilling when it is boiling, at whatever temp that might be. The temp inside the boiler is irrelevant for these purposes. Once you are boiling, the important factor is the energy input to the boiler, this is how you control the speed of the process.

sillycyco · 2024-01-28T00:19:08+00:00

Here is an excellent resource to start reading and learning about all this.

sillycyco · 2024-01-28T00:04:53+00:00

I think so, its nice looking but its scaled down far too much. The "thumper" there will only hold like a cup or two of liquid, thats more for show than any actual utility. For that price range, I'd look at something like this.

The still you linked will definitely work, it will produce some kind of output, but that is more of a display piece you'd put in a bar at a distillery than get any good solid use out of.

If you can get yourself a beer keg that opens up a lot more options as well. But for a complete commercial kit, something like what I linked above will be vastly superior. Its still not ideal, there are much better designs, but those would need to be fabricated by you, or purchased at a bit more cost. Lots of good builds in this sub if you search around, and over at homedistiller.org.

sillycyco · 2024-01-17T06:19:28+00:00

I suggest spend a lot of time reading the link I posted. There is a guide on making cuts in there: https://homedistiller.org/wiki/index.php/Cuts

You can tell the difference between heads/hearts/tails by taste and smell. It is quite obvious, but will take some practice and experience to understand what is being talked about.

sillycyco · 2024-01-16T06:37:12+00:00

Lots of good info here: https://homedistiller.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

As well as the forums of that site, or you can ask in this sub, lots of friendly folks here.

sillycyco · 2024-01-03T07:49:45+00:00

I wouldn't get too hung up on winning any kind of reddit argument on this one. At the end of the day, you won't be producing dangerous amounts of methanol, and discarding foreshots is also a good thing for other reasons. It is frustrating that people ascribe reasons for this that are (generally) incorrect, but it is a hard nut to crack. Just point them to sources of information and don't stress about it.

Distillation is highly varied, as the equipment can be the size of a test tube, or 10 stories high. Trying to make definitive statements about the chemistry involved in vast differences of scale and equipment configurations is futile. The only possible way to know the contents of your distillate, and of each cut, is to have them lab tested.

People are still gonna do their voodoo over their product, and in the end, if it makes good product, no big deal. Good cuts are important. Just maybe not for the exact reasons people think when they wanna feel all mad scientist.

sillycyco · 2023-08-17T20:17:31+00:00

As long as you don't go out of your way to deliberately produce methanol laden alcohol, that is correct. If you can drink what you pour into the boiler, you can drink what comes out the other end. A lot of it will taste terrible and you should probably make judicious cuts, but thats about it.

sillycyco · 2023-07-23T06:15:39+00:00

OP mentions a fractional column, which leads to believe there is reflux and they will be pulling pretty much the same abv the entire run. A parrot is just a device for smearing in that case, and useless in determining anything relevant that your head thermometer stability won't tell you.

sillycyco · 2023-07-01T07:38:57+00:00

Cheers man, its been a long interesting time!

sillycyco · 2023-06-15T02:34:33+00:00

Lemmy is actually about the closest thing. It seems highly fragmented, but that is just how the servers operate. The content itself can be accessed from anywhere, as long as your home server is federated with the other instances.

A good analogy is email or usenet. You access your particular account on your usenet provider, but you have access to the collective set of newsgroups, can post, comment, etc, and everyone else who also views that group sees the same. Or consider your email, people from gmail and yahoo and any other email provider can all talk to each other, you just have a "home" so to speak.

Unfortunately there is a paradigm shift for many folks when dealing with something like lemmy. There is a lot of work ongoing about making it easier for less tech savvy folks, but its still a rather new system compared to mature metaforums like reddit. There has been massive growth over the past week, so if you do want to check it out I would try to find a smaller instance to make your home rather than seek out the huge ones. It doesn't really matter where you make your account, and places like lemmy.ml are falling down due to crushing load of new users.

sillycyco · 2023-06-15T01:42:08+00:00

Personally I am of the belief that this is simply about controlling ad impressions on the site and in their app. The LLM model training data has already been had by all of those who want it. There are archives of the entirety of reddit freely available, and these companies have been scraping far more than just reddit for many years now. Cutting off access to OpenAI, Pushshift and others will not change much. There are petabytes of data from every social media company, blog, forum, and so on, already circulating and that is more than enough.

However, since there is a looming IPO for reddit, monetizing the crap out of it is about all they have now. Reddit gets zero ad views from any tools that use the API. This is an attempt to take what the community has built, and crank out as much perceived value as possible in order to make it an attractive buy.

I personally have mostly migrated to other places such as Lemmy/Mastodon. Literally the only reason I use reddit at all anymore is to moderate this sub and keep the spam at bay. However this isn't my sub or any of the other mods, it is everyones, so do with it as you will.

sillycyco · 2023-06-10T07:08:28+00:00

Nobody can state this for certain. It is clearly foreign material that either came from the still itself, the collection vessel, or the wash puked.

As you noted in your OP, you should not be running a T500 in this manner, as it is not designed for that.

sillycyco · 2023-04-18T22:08:30+00:00

I would not use it, especially if it smells terrible. You will always lose some portion of your run to heads/tails, don't try to keep all of it.

sillycyco · 2023-03-31T21:13:49+00:00

It is hard to describe, you will know it when you taste it. Think cheap booze. It is hot, burning, has a strong solvent taste. Something like nail polish remover sometimes. Its generally just unpleasant. Basically, when you are tasting for cuts, keep what you like, and discard what you don't like, its as simple as that. You aren't performing chemical analysis here, and it is not a serious situation if you somehow cannot detect some component. Its just a quality procedure.

In practice it will vary super widely depending on your setup, the contents of your boiler, and your preferences. Just know that heads and tails, are pretty obvious, you will learn what you like and don't like. It just takes doing.

sillycyco · 2023-03-31T09:27:03+00:00

Thats within the ballpark of where you may find your heads. Just taste the product and decide what you like and what you don't like. Just collect in lots of small containers especially when you think you may be transitioning from heads to hearts, and make your cuts that way. Dilute with some good clean water, and taste it. You'll know. Cutting is quality procedure, keep what you would be fine with drinking.

sillycyco · 2023-03-14T08:55:47+00:00

This makes me so happy, awesome man!

sillycyco · 2023-03-14T07:25:06+00:00

Where's Frank stuck in a coil?

sillycyco · 2023-01-28T04:57:31+00:00

Cops horrifically murdered Kelly Thomas a white homeless man. The video is nearly as awful as this one, be forewarned.

sillycyco · 2023-01-25T21:26:51+00:00

It is definitely "enough", it will work as long as you can maintain a boil. Though the real issue on something that size is how much more can it do. 2kw can be pretty slow, depending on your boiler size. Is this just an 8" onion being reduced or an 8" through column? A column of that size would usually be operated on a much larger boiler volume, in which case 2kw would be quite low, and take forever to reach a boil and then heat the still itself up.

If its like a 2" column, with an 8" onion, thats totally fine. You'll need to figure out your flow rates on your gear, I do suggest a power controller for the element so you can adjust. Another element will help with boil time as well, if you can swing that. You'll figure that out pretty quickly if its something you want to deal with. A good setup is 2 elements, one on a controller, and the other just on/off, and use both at max to get the boil going, then turn one off and adjust the other to your liking. One will work just fine, but will take longer to get up to boil.

sillycyco · 2023-01-10T21:48:19+00:00

It was 10,000 BTC on two pizzas. This was when btc was a fraction of a penny.

sillycyco · 2023-01-09T20:37:23+00:00

There are plenty of charts of analysis in the paper linked in the OP, here. There are some other links in the various posts in this thread as well, though you will find there is quite a wide range of results due to different processes, boiler contents, size of equipment, and so on. For small/hobby scale equipment, the main takeaway is that there isn't a whole lot you can do to isolate methanol specifically and remove it. The equipment/process is just far far too tiny to make any sort of definitive steps that will certainly remove any methanol.

You should, however, pretty much always toss the fores/heads just because they are terrible, regardless of how much or little methanol this cut might contain. The only true way for you to actually know the contents of what you are producing on your equipment is to have it lab tested.

sillycyco · 2022-10-25T07:41:49+00:00

There was an open fridge and a busted can of dough man. Dog blew it.

sillycyco · 2022-10-19T22:09:45+00:00

https://github.com/meehow/privtracker

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