Before you can distil you need to produce your basic alcohol or wash as its called. Alcohol can only be made through fermentation. Its one of the basics of chemistry (or is it biology? Think l must have been daydreaming that day at school...). Anyway, yeast eats sugars and produces two things; carbon dioxide (lots of it) and alcohol (ethynol and methynol plus any number from around 300 different compounds in minute amounts. The quality of the alcohol is determined by the amount of ethynol produced and the lack of methynol and all the other compounds. A good quality yeast such as a Triple distilled or clean turbo yeast is going to give best results for this alcohol.

BrewGenie SmartStill: A compact, sleek stainless steel pot still for those who want a no fuss way of producing 40%abv alcohol to mix with our range of essences to give outstanding spirits and liqueurs. It is easy to set up and use with no hoses or complicated assembly and will give good results wherever or wenever you want to. It is attractive, small and compact and will fit into your home discreetly. It uses no water when running and just needs a standard electric socket. It is simple and safe to use having a built in fan to cool the alcohol vapours and requires no cooling water. It has a built in activated carbon filter system to clean produced spirit automatically as produced. It takes 2.25 hours to distil 1.2 litres of 40%abv spirit from 4 litres of wash. Produces spirit at 60% abv before watering down. Will produce 7.2 litres of 40%abv spirit from 24 litres of wash.


Still Spirits T500: The ultimate in home distilling, a must for anyone who wants to produce large quantities of extremely clean, pure alcohol. The T500 allows you to collect an astonishing 95% of the alcohol from the wash and produces a spirit of up to 93%abv making it the perfect base for flavouring into any spirit or liqueur you like. It is classed as a reflux fractioning column still and the condensor is available in either 304 grade stainless steel construction or traditional copper. lt takes around 4.5 hours to produce 8 litres of 40%abv spirit from a 25 litre wash when watered down from 93%abv. It is water cooled so needs connecting to a water supply via a kitchen, laundry or garden tap to give a constant supply of cold water while the still is running to maintain optimum temperatures. The spirit produced will require filtering through an activated carbon type filter. We stock the Still Spirits EZ filter or the Esscencia ceramic and carbon filtering system for this purpose.


Still Spirits Alembic Pot Still: This still is designed for the artisan distiller. while the T500 is designed to strip all flavours from the wash, the Alembic Condensor and Dome Top combined with the T500 boiler for a pot still, which retains and enhances flavours in the wash. This is perfect when you are distilling whiskey, rum, brandy and gin washes to make spirit from traditional ingredients, just like the professionals. It produces 3.5 - 7 litres of 40%abv spirit from a 25 litre wash. To use set up and do an initial stripping-run to give initial spirit. Then rerun the collected spirit through the alembic pot still and collect different fractions or "cuts" of the collected spirit at the stages according to the recipe. This is called the "spirit-run". This still set up is the most advanced in terms of difficultcy and we find most users progress from the T500 reflux still. By purchasing the Alembic Condensor and Dome Top later these can be used on the standard T500 boiler from the T500 Reflux still or can be added to the Grainfather beer mashing machine.

All collected spirit should be filtered through activated carbon to remove any impurities. The BrewGenie SmartStill has its own built in carbon filter. Activated carbon doesn't work with spirit over 60%abv so for the T500 stills a seperate filter needs to be used. For this we have the Still Spirits EZ filter which is easy to use and takes easy to fit carbon filter blocks.