Lashed out this afternoon and bought myself a new top of the line reflux still. This little beastie can extract about 93% of the alcohol from a wash.... at 95% strength. This is so pure that drinking it would quite certainly kill you, and operating the thing has to be done with a certain amount of caution for fire issues, as the stuff is somewhere between flammable and downright explosive.
The whole rig is well over 4' tall to the top of the reflux column. All stainless construction, twin digital thermometers, inbuilt coolant flow control.
The reflux column is sufficiently well developed that there are no tails developed in the distillate, ie no nasties that will taste like crap at best, and send you blind at worst. You do need to dump the first 50ml of output to get rid of methanol, but after that it can just be left until it finishes producing distillate. That first 50ml makes awesome degreaser, sticky label remover, laminex benchtop cleaner etc.
First run will probably be Thursday afternoon at this stage, I have a fermenter that should be settled by tomorrow ready for clearing, then I can siphon on Thursday and straight into the still.
Best bit - she will take the whole 21 litres of wash in one go and still it in about 4 hours. That beats all hell out of 6x 2 hour runs in the desktop air still.... and I only have to clean the thing once at the end too!
