Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Top 5 spirit stills

1) Pot still/alembic


Talisker Distillery Carbost, Isle of Skye

Used to prepare malt whisky or cognac (batch distillation). Pot stills are the modern version of the alembic.



2) Mobile distillation unitDriving from farmer to farmer in Normandy to turn their fermented apples into Calvados.

3) Coffey still (patent still) Double column continuous still for the production of grain whisky, patented by Aeneas Coffey in 1831, works with steam. There is a paper about Coffey in Annals of Science, 1968, 24, 1, 53 (I wish I had free access). ---- Ahhh thanks for sending D.-----


4) bamboo stillInexpensive and readily available hollow bamboo pipes to collect distillate.


5) Moonshine still

This can be anything, made from beer kegs, milk cans, oil drums, cooking pans, boilers etc. etc.


2 comments:

Greg the Chemist said...

Hmmm, I like spirits.

Anonymous said...

My dad briefly owned and operated a small pre-WWI distillery.

The columns were of the steam-heated continuous distillation kind, where the fermented grain mash was pumped ontop of the column and slowly descended through the heated column.

The most important element of the whole setup was a fake hollow support beam contanining tubing that diverted part of the produced alcohol before it passed through the calibrated and tax-official-sealed flow-meter.