FRACTIONAL STILL – HIGH QUALITY LIQUOR.
The idea of this still did not came to me straight away, for many years I was just a hobbits brewer and in fact I was making spirits of my own since I was 12 years old (under adult supervision:-) everything was so exiting and everyone was happy about results, as time goes by I started to ask myself some questions like why my home brew is not that good and tastes more like a rocket fuel, so I started to think of how to improve the quality of my brew?
For those times any kind of home brewing was absolutely prohibited in Russia (country of my origin) and it was unrealistic to find something about home brewing in library (no internet yet) so, many plans of distillation equipment and brewing recipes including spirit polishing were circulated among simple folks. Some of those people were so clever that they used their car's engines energy to distil while they were driving, some engineers had built electronically controlled totally automatic systems that did everything from fermenting to distillation and bottling without human presence, very clever but all the time the same verdict of quality: obvious cheaply tasting homebrew.
Regardless of my attempts to make my spirits better I could not achieve desirable results. I have tried everything: double and triple distillation, different recipes of mash, copper catalysts, different methods of filtration and types of activated carbon, and get no luck again, and then I came across with reflux systems.
Reflux stills could produce alcohol with high spirit percentage up to 90% but after dilution with water instead of good vodka, I had the same old distinctively tasting home brew. To be honest the quality of drinks had been improved but even after flavouring anyone could tell the difference between my home made vodka and the one from a liquor shop. The drinks were good for being a homebrew but not the kind you would expect in a local vodka bar.
Thus one day I realized that something wrong with distillation equipment, why distillation process must be carried the same way as it was 300 years ago with the kind of equipment that was used 300 years ago?
I started to think: ok, everything around us was touched by progress - phones, computers, cars. And everyone believes: the newer the thing the better, but what about an old good pot still? The pot still is like an axe from the stone age that even equipped with an electronic control will remain the same axe from the stone age. So regardless of innovations the pot still is always the same pot still. All we need to do is to think differently like we all have the destination, and instead of walking someone would ride the horse, someone drive the car and someone flight the plane: same destination but different ways to reach the goal. Thus instead of constant walking I choose a plane.
The reality is: the new technologies of distillation and purification exist and are widely used by leading alcoholic beverage produces. This is absolutely obvious because along with our smelly homebrewed liquors we have absolutely exceptional products on the shelves of our local liquor shops. Moreover the cost of good liquor production  is two times as cheap as average cost of homebrew production per unit! I know it is for a fact, because I was co owner of vodka factory and the rule of business is - spend less and make bigger margin plus keep quality high.
Only the big guys do not want people like you to know how to make real high quality alcoholic beverages because they can loose their market, but as long as simple people are making simple homebrew the same people will buy quality liquor despite of their hobby again and again. While in the vodka business I was personally suppressing any kind of information about our equipment and the production methods.
From my army background (I was a chemical tester) I knew that in case to produce any high quality spirit the rectification (fractional) column must be used, but all the columns that I came across with were 30 + meters high monstrous constructions with supporting features spread along hectares of ground surface.
I knew the working principal of this monsters, and decided to design the still that would be capable of high quality/percentage spirit and yet to be small enough to be used in any kitchen environment.
Finally after many unsuccessful attempts I managed to build my first fractional column that was producing 96% spirit, and percentage of spirit did not dropped from start to the finish of distillation! And believe me or not it took me another year to find the correct way of column exploitation such as fractions separation and distillation calculations, the final results were astonishing - the vodka I have made with my small still was as good as top shelf products from the liquor shop. Over the time my fractional still evolved into the still that you can witness on top of this page.
As the basis for spirit production I adopted the method that was used in Russia for production of high quality spirits for leading vodka companies, the spirit getting produced in two stages.
The first stage is the production of raw spirit or simple distillation where the main goal is to separate spirit from the mash and all by products that naturally occurring in any ferment: acids, salts (yeast nutrition), and mechanical particles.
The second stage is actual fractioning (rectification) where the raw spirit that contains esters, methanol, ethanol (spirit we are aiming at) and awfully smelling butyl alcohol, is redistilled in fractional column.
The construction of fractional column will make it possible to force the spirit to be redistilled inside the column more than 30 times before spirit reaches the collection vessel ( this ability of column gives us the strength of spirit at 95 - 96% alc/vol). The correctly built fractional column can force spirits to form some kind of queue inside the column where the lightest spirit will locate at the top of the column and get collected while the heaviest spirit located at the bottom. The lighter spirit is collected the next in the queue, more heavier one is replacing the lighter one and so on (this ability of column gives as the quality of spirit: we taking fractions one after another very precisely ).
The knowledge about amounts of different fractions in the raw spirit plus the total spirit percentage in the batch before fractioning makes it possible to forecast all distillation including time of distillation and amounts of spirits fractions in litres or millilitres and percentages in respect to total spirit amount.
Thus this means that instead of relying on carbons you already separating all impurities from each other and all you need to do is to dilute your spirit with water and filter only if you wish so.
 The 25L fractional still has all you need to perform precise distillation, it has one small column for raw spirit production and big fractional column for high quality spirit production. The small column also can be used for an aromatic beverages production where you can redistill spirits that were soaked with herbs or fruits, ( I used the small column to make an absinthe).
When the raw spirit is ready for the fractional distillation and all data about spirit percentage and amount is taken the raw spirit is mixed with water, the presence of water helps to bound heavy spirits and odours. The result is a high quality ethanol for further beverage production.
Just few words about filtration: some people are believe that activated carbon can absorb impurities such as methanol or butyl alcohol, this is not right. One can run the bottle of methanol through the activated carbon filter and get the same poisonous methanol from the other end of the filter. It will be sparkling clean, but there In fact if activated carbon's pores are big enough for the water to run through then they are even bigger for anything that more liquid than water. All the carbon does is absorb the odours and mechanical particles (cloudiness). I prefer the activated carbon that is made out of coconut shell over the carbon made out of peat, guess why?
Some people believe that during filtration the spirit must be in contact with activated carbon for at least 45 minutes, (back in army I used to use the gas mask with activated carbon in the filter cartridge and no one was breathing in for 45 minutes. We were breathing as usually and carbon did the job. In reality you can even use the pressure pump to boost the filtration process (all vodka companies are using the pumps to boost the filtration speed) but make sure that your filter is loaded correctly and tight.
Newer filter undiluted spirit, the carbon works only up to 60% spirit strength, it is simple - the water that is added to the spirit during dilution is bounding up with some impurities and the carbon just keeps this bounded up molecules. Undiluted spirit will just run through the carbon.
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