Open Source Distilling

Summary

VIDEO Welcome! Hello and welcome to Open Source Distilling, where time-honored traditions meet modern day technology. This website is dedicated to creating the worlds’ first open source software to be run on home stills. I understand that distilling has its roots in long-standing traditions and many distilleries pride themselves on the history of their craft. The intention of the project is not to completely remove the human element from distilling (although that may be the logical conclusion of the project), but about providing ways to bring distilling into the modern day world and leverage technology to make better spirits. For example, I think a lot of us don’t want to sit in front of a still for 30 minutes waiting for it to come up to temperature at the beginning of a distilling day. I personally would like to have an audible alarm and email/text message alerting me that I need to take action and adjust the power input on the still as it reaches the required temperature. I am very excited to add temperature probes to my reflux column and see how the temperature gradient changes with different initial boiler purity, varying condenser flow, and power input. My Experience and Equipment I’ve been an all-grain homebrewer for close to 15 years, and have been obsessed with home distilling for at least 5 years. In the homebrew world, there are many neat gadgets that assist with fermenting and brewing beer. For example, BrewPi and The Grandfather. Both of these products offer remote monitoring capabilities and the BrewPi project is also open source. There are commercial examples of fully automated stills such as iStill and Geoni. My vision is to take some of the functionality available at the commercial level and bring it to the home distillers. Given the available technology, I believe that the Raspberry Pi is a good fit for the brain of the project. Easily accessible to anyone for a reasonable price, has built-in wifi and remote control capabilities, and can be powered...