How to Make Alcohol - Discussion

Would you like to exchange your experiences with other schnapps distillers? Everything in this forum revolves around distilling spirits at home - how to make alcohol. Please observe our forum rules (see Helpful tips for use).

June 2018:

It has now been an unbelievable 16 years (!) since the last major change to the website and forums. When you think that two to three years are an eternity for the Internet sector, that is really something. In any case, there has been so much going on in terms of technology that it has become urgently necessary to completely redesign not only the forums, but also the entire website, from scratch and bring the programming up to date. Naturally, along with this we also introduced various new features; for example it was high time we allowed pictures to be uploaded with a forum post too or enabled users to subscribe to the forums via RSS feeds. And of course we have subsequently included pictures that are saved on external websites and were then integrated here using an img tag, so that no valuable information is lost. In any case, we hope you continue to have fun swapping experiences and trying things out.

Juni 2002:

At this point, we would first like to extend a big thank-you to all the users of our specialist questions for their lively involvement. Without you, we could never have developed such an informative and high-quality reference guide in such a short time (the first post dates from April 8, 1999). The large number of posts and high numbers of visitors made it necessary for us to develop the specialist questions ourselves using PHP and MySQL (at last no more annoying advertising banners!). During the course of this, we have hopefully introduced several improvements.

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So, that’s it. We hope you have a lot of fun swapping experiences, reading, posting and naturally also trying things out afterwards. Dr Malle & Dr Schmickl Dr. Malle & Dr. Schmickl

In need of good equipment tips

Tkhem am 08.01.2021 17:30:10 | Region: Coruscant

Hello everybody,


I am pretty new at making moonshine (did it twice now) and currently question my equipment and the way I reach temperatures with it.

So if you could help me out here, that would be really great!


At first, my setup looks like this:

I place my 25 litres "pot still" (formerly a 25 litres cooking pot) on an external induction plate.

The still is connected to a longer liebig condenser (copper).

For temperature measuring I use a Bluetooth BBQ thermometer at the highest point of the condensor.


The pot and the condenser work well.

But the external induction heating plate drives me crazy!


The problem is, with the power options available, it reaches 90° far too soon imo.

So what I did was to put the heating plate to hold 80° for a long time until there was nothing dripping from the condenser anymore. Then I did the same with 85 and so on.


My question:

Is this approach okay?

What would be an better approach?

Should I switch any of my equipment? (I cannot use any gas heaters unfortunately).


Thanks for your help and sharing your knowledge with me!



RE: In need of good equipment tips

Schmickl am 10.01.2021 19:31:54 | Region: Carinthia
>> at the highest point of the condensor

Beware to measure at the right position, see image (do not bother about the German text).


>> Is this approach okay?
No. The mixture alcohol-water adjusts the steam temperature, or rather boiling temperature, by itself, you can't influence it. Will say, the lower the alcohol content, the higher the boiling point. Therefore, now I know, the alcohol concentration of the content of your kettle must be quite low, otherwise you wouldn't have the problem of reaching 90° C too soon.

Just to prove this statement as follows: fill the kettle with about 20 %ABV alcohol, e.g., by diluting vodka in a ratio of 1:1. Or fill with undiluted vodka, thus about 38 %ABV. You will recognize, the rise in temperature is much slower now, because it takes a while until the alcohol content in the kettle is low enough to rise the steam temperature a bit. Of course you can add some spices / herbs, so that you don't perform a tasteless distillation for this experiment.

Having said that, of course take care to boil not too strong while distilling, this improves quality of the distillate. So maybe it would make sense to search for another hot plate or similar (gas burner?), with not so much power, respectively a device which can be regulated in a better way. In conclusion: You should take care to regulate the distillate flow (shouldn't be too strong), NOT the temperature. Just read off the temperature and use this value to indicate the right moment to separate the tails. I suppose in your case you have to distill twice, due to the low alcohol content.


We wish much success!