Hell yeah. With my wash ringing in at a final 1.000 SG, I fired up the Turbo 500 still for it's inaugural run on Monday. All I can say is: wow.

The still fired up quickly, and boiled hard for little over an hour before putting out product. Not expecting it to start putting out so quickly, I ended up taking 150mL heads instead of 50mL (dissapointing) and got things underway.

In a little over three hours the still put out about 3.25L of spirit at a whopping 95%. Hooray. On the first run I managed to control the water column temperature fairly evenly - however on the second run I had to play about with it quite a lot.

The second run performed the same as the first, 3 hours, 3.25L of spirit at 94%. Joy. I wonder if the difference was because I didn't do the mandatory wash of the column packing between runs. Wash number three, which is scheduled this weekend - will be sure to give an indication.

I also need to get a small amount more of column packing - as there's a small amount of volume in the column that needs packing. That should increase the efficiency and produce better distillate, but at these percentages I can't really go much higher before the product starts using the moisture in the air to dilute itself.

All in all, very happy with the product - so now I can produce a bunch of base spirit for testing flavourings with.

So far the coffee liquer (not using my base) is delicious. It started off tasting like it was coffee added to spirit (funny that), but has aged really quite well.

I've also kicked off a Mint Liquer. 3/4 cup crushed mint, 150mL of 94% spirit and 150mL of sugar syrup. It smells crap now, but hopefully after a few weeks the mint flavour and odor really comes out and I can take it off the leaves.

Also in the works: Pear Schnapps, Apple Schnapps and Coconut Liqueur. I've got the ingredients, but now need to find a chance to put them all together.

Updates soon - I promise :)

UPDATE: Oh noes, it turns out I committed a blog faux pas - I've already got an article called Smells like teen spirit! Oh well...

Just checked the wash, which currently has a gravity of 1.005 - meaning there's about 15 grams of sugars to each Litre of the wash that hasn't yet been turned into alcohol and co2 yet - 96% done.

I've agitated the wash and will let it go through until tomorrow, but I'm not really expecting it to get through much more.

At this point, I'm expecting to get about 25 Litres of 40% spirit, depending how much I throw away in heads and tails.

Will update once I've done the spirits run - which apparently I'll be making a bit of a day out of, a few people have asked to drop by and check it out.

To celebrate the silly season, leaving my job and regaining some sanity and the situation in general - I bought myself a present. Heh, any excuse would do - but in any case, I am now the proud owner of a Still Spirits Turbo 500 Still...

Isn't she pretty? I think she is. I've had a serious brewing hard-on for this piece of kit for at least the last six months now... now I've got to come through with the goods, so while the weather is good and I have some time off between jobs - it's brewing season!

So today I kicked off the Inaugural 100L wash. The batch is just a larger scale of my typical 25L dextrose wash (6kg dextrose, 21L water, EC1118 Yeast). However given the hotter weather and the brew store's lack of EC1118 for this quantity - I'm running with a Still Spirits Heat Wave Turbo.

I'm not a big fan of Turbo Yeast, and I've never really been afraid to say as much. However, given the improvements I've been making to my process, the heat factor here (this week the days are running up to 40+ degrees) and that I now have a quality still to work with - I'm willing to give it a go.

The original recipe was pretty straightforwards: 24kg Dextrose, 84L Water, 4 Sachets of Heat Wave Turbo Yeast. This should have yielded an OG of 1.093. After putting the wash together, it was 24kg Dextrose to 75L Water with an OG of 1.095 (ignore what's on my silly whiteboard in the photo). I put the difference down to the calculator I was using, which isn't really based around dextrose.

Anyway, at 2PM I pitched in the four sachets of Heat Wave Yeast into the wash which was at 37.2 deg. It's currently doing it's thing and should be done in about 3-4 days, I'll keep tabs on its progress and keep things documented.

From the yeast specs, I should expect to get just under 12% (or 12L of ethanol) in the final product. Not sure what to percentages I'll expect to pull off on my still, it touts ~93% average, but we will see.

In other news, I received a wine rack for Christmas which has been a huge help organising the area near my desk, which has been cluttered with wine bottles:

Yummy, now I just need to "clear" some space for future purchases. In the meantime however, I'll keep this page up to date with my brewing exploits...