UMTravels

Now that I’m back from the Gathering and various road trips, it’s time to replenish the stocks of shine that the boys in the woods gobbled. And time to make a few minor adjustments to the process.

First off is to toast some oak chips for bottling – today I’m doing bacon smoked wood chips. Not that think it will impart any flavor it’s just that while the oven is on I might as well cook up some bacon at the same time:

That done it’s time to set up the equipment. Everything was set up, I plugged it in and…. Nothing. Seems on the last run I manage to finally kill the hotplate that SurfBetty and I picked up in Hawaii… yep, this looks dead, and dangerous:

Off to Target I go, coming home with a 900 watt closed surface hotplate for $19.99 plus tax. Question is, it 900 watts enough at full blast.

The new burner in action.

The only other change was to secure the water line – it keeps flopping out of the cooling jacked and flooding the floor before I’ve noticed:

Nice use of the twist tie I took off the cord for the new burner.

Basically you want to start collecting at 80C and stop at 90C.

Three and a half hours later we have the answer. Yes, 900 watts is enough, though it does take a half an hour longer to run, but the final product is coming out at 80 proof which means I don’t have to monkey around watering it down to get it to the right place.

Of course the nice thing is that since this isn’t on the stove (where open flame would not be good) is that you can also cook dinner while distilling.

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