You need to have your boiler lower than your fermenter so you can siphon the fermenter in to the boiler for your still.



but before we get to siphoning we need to clean everything make sure its all clean and sterilized I have not worked this hard to get here only to have an infection ruin it so I am sterilizing everything.



2 Jugs for collecting the spirit from the still, the hydrometer which is one for spirit so i know what percentage I am getting out.a container for the spirit which I can then put the hydrometer the demi john which I will be putting the spirit in after it has distilled.

a funnel for the demi john even the cork for the demi john also I ran the solution through the siphon, I am taking no risks here.



Just siphon the beer in to the boiler, making sure not to suck up the sediment at the bottom of the fermenter.



Now to assemble the still, put on the 2" PTFE gasket, on goes the column and then the thumper, which before its attached I jug in some of the beer so that the inlet pipe is below the surface, but not too much because I don't want the splashing to be too violent when the bubbles break the surface.



Just a quick note on the thumper, which is sometimes known as a doubler, what happens is the steam from the still goes in to the thumper, which has some of the beer in it, and it bubbles through the beer which imparts its alcohol in to the beer. the heat from the steam then heats up the beer in the thumper causing a second distillation. Its called the thumper because moonshiners would have a keg for this called a thump keg and it would make a THUMP THUMP THUMP sound when bubbles come out from the still.



if you dont have a thumper on your still don't worry, you don't really need it you can double distill it, for this you would need to do a fer runs to build up what is known as low wines, so you distill it to say 30 - 40 % and then put it all back in the still and distill it again to about 70% which is what i am aiming for in one go using the thumper.



Interesting side note here on thumpers there is also a similar device which is called a slobber knocker, this is basically the same but the inlet tube does not go very far in and there is no liquid put in the keg. the purpose of this is to catch any gunk from the still should it happen, which is known as burping, this happens if your wash or beer foams up and comes up the still column. by having the slobber knocker you would not end up getting this in your finished product but it would not act as a second distillation.



ok well next on goes the condenser, mine is a liebig which is a tube with a jacket around it and in that jacket cold water runs I chose this because it would be easier to store. Some people have a bucket or a keg with a coiled copper pipe in it called a worm and water would flow in to the top of the keg and out of the bottom cooling the worm.



hook up the hoses, I already had mine hooked up as I just finished running a load of cleaning solutions through it as its been sitting around for a few months. Run some water through it so the condenser is primed, no need to leave it running yet.



Now we need to hook up the controller, I have printed a casing for my controller now using the 3D printer, if anyone wants the STL files for this give me a shout, and turn on the power to about half. We want to take this nice and slow so we don't burn it and we keep some of the flavors in there.



It will take some time to heat up and you get some warning of when its about to come out of the condenser because the bubbles in the thumper start to get very rapid, you will start to see a couple of drops come out of the condenser, at this point you need to turn the water on to the condenser.



collect about 50ml and throw that away, it has all the nasty stuff in it like methanol and the esters which make hangovers much worse. Interestingly Jack Daniels and other Distillery's use a continuous still so they don't separate these out.



we want to collect everything now at about 70% if possible doesn't matter if its a bit over as when its all mixed together it will level out, we want to keep collecting the spirit until the alcohol volume starts to drop off, when it gets to about 60% keep the spirit separate from the main batch. we can then add this to the main spirit to level out the percentage if need be and use it to alter the flavor.



I am writing this as I am running the still and the first lot out was 40% which is too low it needs to be higher so that it will get the flavors from the oak chips later. the only thing to do is reduce the power to the still and run it slower this will hopefully up the percentage. Ok so I have tried slowing it down which hasn't worked either, so I think my thumper is not doing its job basically and the mash doesn't have enough alcohol in it unlike when I do my sugar runs. But this is ok, i can just collect it at what I am getting and use it as low wines, when I have collected enough from a couple of distills I will run it through again which will give me my higher percentage. ;-) and it will be a true sour mash. the only other way to do it is to cheat which I wanted to avoid doing but if you wanted to you could, by adding sugar to the mash basically.



when the spirit coming off gets to around 25 - 30% shut the boiler off and unplug it and let it cool down.



once the boiler has cooled down, normally we would throw away the stuff in the boiler which is the backset, but this is sour mash so we need to keep some of it, so we collect this for the next batch, we need at least 25% of a full mash to make it proper sour mash.

