Water recycling’s a toughie, because it comes out of the cooling jacket bloody hot. A friend over in Perth used to run it into the bath and sit there soaking while he fine-tuned the flow rate and ‘supervised’ the process – I imagine a fair bit of quality testing was involved!

Pure Distilling – Australia Largest Manufacturer of Quality Stills – presumably someone makes non quality ones.

I got a shock the other week. I went around to one of my aunties the other day. She’s 75 or so. I hadn’t been to her place for years. So she took me out to the laundry to see her still and insisted I try a few snorts. At 10 am. On a weekday. On my way to another work gig. Brightened up a rainy melbourne day it did.

She said she got the still from New Zealand where its all legit. She gave me the website somewhere and said she’d coach me on the skill. It got a bit complicated lately trying to recycle water etc but she’s got that sorted with hoses and tanks out the window etc.

Yeah, but if you’re hepped up on goofballs nothing can take you down. I wish I could make that rhyme…

Hilker:

Yea verily, acid was my drug of choice for many a year. Mostly because it suited my addictive personality, in that (as much fun as it is) I never really wanted to take more than once a fortnight or so. It’s a roughly annual thing now.

Citrus zest/oil is a pretty good flavouring. We used to buy the little bottles of flavour concentrate from Coles/Woolies. The best ones were lemon, lime, bitters, and peppermint, and they work in various combinations (go easy on the peppermint, it is strong). But you need to also add a bit of sweetness, we used glucose, not sucrose (normal table sugar).

Our first couple of runs through the still were with any swill we could get our poor student hands on. Which meant all the cheap undrinkable rotgut that friends had sitting in the back of their booze cupboards, including cask wine, cooking sherry, crap beer, nasty liqueurs, you name it, the whole lot was just mixed together and run. We had to run it twice to clean it up properly but the product was crystal clear and very nice to drink, and hangover-free (people don’t believe that, but it is true).

I look forward to your Top Aussie Gin, â??Fancyâ??s Fine Old Sippinâ?? Crunkâ??. LOL. Should sell with a name like that.

Sounds like you had some pretty wild days in your youth. Me too. Didn’t get into the powders myself, but plenty around me did, I went for green and a bit of acid (‘Clearlights’), and lots of music.

Problem is thereâ??s not many easy ways of telling whether youâ??ve had a nice clean fermentation, FDB, if youâ??re an ordinary punter who canâ??t tell CH3OH from CH3CH2OH using a box of half-inch nails and a shifting spanner.
DD

It is pretty easy to tell if you have a clean ferment, just smell and taste it. Trust me, only people without any sense of smell or taste at all couldn’t tell methanol from ethanol.

Besides which, methanol is only produced in very small quantities in most ferments. There is more methanol in a couple litres of orange juice than in a 25 litre plain sugar ferment (another reason why stillin is actually quite safe).

Uncanny! My nickname is Fancy, as a matter of fact, and yes, it was a very nicely presented package deal. Label on the grappa said “Fancy’s Fine Old Sippin’ Crunk”, with the illegals in a ziplock bag tied to the neck of the bottle with a purple ribbon. No holds barred in the all-night craft sessions of my (comparative) youth. $100 the lot, mostly because the crystal was so clean.

I’m surprised I remember any of this, I must say.