A stove top still is a pretty simple affair. I've got a post with pictures
over at eG:
http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?s=87a4c2b48f8230ee6c9ed55472e37599&showtopic=54982
O.K. (Deep Breath)
I may be about to get into some trouble here, as well as elsewhere,
but...Homemade hootch ain't really all that hard. In fact, it's really dumbass
simple.
A little background:
I used to make my own beer, back when you couldn't buy good beer and then I
quit 'cuz, all of a sudden, you could buy good beer. So I started making my
own cider because.......well, you can guess the rest. So let's just say that I
know a little about fermentables.
So on a whim, I moved up to Maine and found 7 gallons of (Bottled) 2 year old
cider in the basement of my new house. It just had to be gawdawful, right?
So we fermented it out.
It was STILL gawdawful.
What to do, what to do?
Vinegar seemed like a lot of trouble, seeing as we'd already gone to a lot of
trouble making gawdawful cider.
Thinking Cap time.
So I'm unpacking some of my boxes and what lands in my hands? Annie Proulx's
Cider book. (I can't lay hands on it now, but I'm pretty sure her husband had
a hand in its production too.) Towards the back of it are instructions for
building a stove-top still, with all the legal disclaimers about how illegal
the project is, but it's included for, ahem, educational purposes only.
Amazingly simple, even though it might take you 2 hours to construct.
Ingredients:
Copper pipe (1/8 inch will do)
Pressure cooker
5 gallon pickle bucket
Some fittings
A funnel, if you wanna get fancy.
You'll need a calculator too, if you wanna keep it drinkable.
So we distilled this horrible cider into something that kept us warm that
winter. When the fire in the stove died down, we'd fortify our inner man with
a couple of shots, rush out and grab a few more logs for tossin' on.
We were living in a part of Kennebunkport known as "The Landing", so we called
our little product, "The Lift-off".
Gots me some pics, too.
http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/10999385..._1099938999.jpghttp://forums.egullet.org/uploads/10999385..._1099938636.jpg
myers