Simple Home Made Water Distiller

[Lobsta]

hi there,
just coz i can, i was thinking of making a device to distill water for brewing with (mainly because i know from a chemistry prac at uni last year how dirty (and hard) brisbane's water is, plus, i can use our rain water tank water if i distill it. my question is, has anybody done this before using simple stuff from around the house/garage. i was thinking of either using my 19L brewpot as the boiler or nicking one of mums smaller saucepans. my main issue is the fitting together of stuff to collect the steam and the fashioning of a cheap and easy condenser.

anybody got some plans made up of something that they have used like this before?

Lobby

 

[pint of lager]

Just use your tank water. If you are ag brewing it all gets boiled anyway.

If you are kit brewing, boil and store it in a spare fermenter for brew day. Don't store any excess water for more than a few days before using it. Don't forget, when you boil water, it removes most of the dissolved oxygen. So oxygenate well for brewday. Just sanitise a spare fermenter, boil the kettle and pour it in. Keep boiling the kettle.

Distilled water uses heaps of energy and takes a long time to generate. Think of how long it takes to boil a saucepan dry, and that's all the distilled water you are going to catch. Also, usually some sort of cooling coil is used, which is once again wasteful as what do you do with the cooling water.

You need is some way of boiling water, some way of catching the steam that comes off the water and some way of passing this captured steam through a cooling path.

 

[Jye]

+1

Brisbane water isnt really hard and in fact is low in calcium so if your mashing you really need to add some salts to get the level up to about 50 ppm.

Have a read of How to Brew (chapter 15) which goes into water composition, residual alkalinity and mash pH. You should find it interesting with your chemistry background.

Cheers
jye

 

[mika]

Distilled water would remove alot of the mineral content as well wouldn't it ? You'd have to build your water back up with salts to get the correct profile.

 

[Simon W]

I just buy it, it's not that expensive.
I brew with Bottled spring water 'coz the profile is known(it's on the label) and has a pretty neutral taste, then I use distilled(actually, de-ionised) water to thin the salts if there's too much of something(usually carbonates) in the spring water for a particular style, then bump the rest of the salts back up with mineral additions.

 

[stoutdrinker]

I like Simon's idea if you are really interested in the chemistry of the water you are using.

Freshly distilled water tastes a bit unusual (?) because theres nothing in it.
If you're after a certain water profile for a particular beer style you will need to add salts to the distilled water anyway. I reckon it would be easier with the spring water where you are starting with known concentrations of minerals/salts and can dilute where needed or add if needed.

Cheers,
Stout.

 

[devo]

maybe we are all missing the point here and this is really a indirect way of having a discussion on making a still!? h34r:

 

[bugwan]

Plenty of resources on the web for cheaply 'purifying water or extracting essential oils';

http://www.frogfot.com/misc/destiller.html

 

[nonicman]

A word of caution with distilled water. Once had a job as a commercial dive assistant, and one job we had was to dive in the distilled water tanks in the steel works. The BHP man told us not to drink the "pure" water as it was considered dangerous to do so as distilled water will leech out minerals from the body.

Did a google to see if it was a fairy story and this chap seems to know what he talking about regarding the subject.

http://www.mercola.com/article/water/distilled_water.htm

Granted that you're not proposing to drink distilled water on it's own.