Alembic Pot Still Instructions: Setup, Cuts, Gin and Troubleshooting

 

Most people who get a poor result from an Alembic Pot Still did not make a bad cut. They started with a wash that was still fermenting, or they ran the cooling water too slow. Those two mistakes account for most of the cloudy spirit, low yields and hot distillate we hear about at the counter.

This page is the full set of Alembic Pot Still instructions in one place: assembling the dome and condenser, clearing a wash, running a stripping run, making cuts on the spirit run, blending and ageing, distilling a neutral spirit, running gin through the botanical basket, and what to do when something goes wrong. It replaces three shorter guides we previously published separately.

Key Takeaways

• A stripping run on the Alembic Pot Still concentrates ethanol roughly five to six times and returns about one fifth to one sixth of the original wash volume, according to the Still Spirits Alembic Pot Still manual.
• On a spirit run, the standard cut points are 83°C to 85°C at the still head for heads to hearts, and 90°C for hearts to tails, with collection stopped at 98°C or 20% ABV.
• Discard 200 ml of foreshots for every stripping run's worth of distillate in the boiler. This is the section that carries the methanol and the harshest compounds.
• Cooling water flow of about 2.5 litres per minute is the single most important safety setting. If the distillate is hot or steaming, the flow is too low and ethanol vapour is escaping.
• Gin made with the botanical basket takes no cuts. Because the basket releases different botanical flavours at different stages, you collect the whole run in one vessel down to 20% ABV.

What the Alembic Pot Still is and what fits it

The Alembic Pot Still is a copper dome top and copper pot condenser that sits on a 25 litre boiler and produces flavoursome spirits in a single pass. It suits whiskey, rum, brandy and gin rather than neutral vodka. The dome and condenser both fit the Create+ 25L boiler, the T500 boiler, and the Grainfather all grain brewing system.

You can run the Alembic pot condenser on its own without the copper dome, and it will work. You will get a better result with both. The dome adds a large surface of copper for the vapour to contact, and copper contact is what strips the sulphur compounds out of the vapour stream.

Copper is not a cosmetic choice. A study by Harrison and colleagues, discussed in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing, demonstrated copper's role in reducing dimethyl trisulphide and other sulphur compounds that would otherwise distil over into the spirit. Those compounds smell of onion, cabbage and cooked vegetable, and they do not improve with age.

One difference catches T500 owners out. On the T500 you control the condenser temperature with your water flow. On the Alembic Pot Still you do not. The temperature reading on the Alembic condenser will move around throughout the run, and that is normal. The probe is there to tell you where you are in the run so you can make your cuts, not to be held at a set point.

The full range of domes, condensers, baskets, seals and spares sits in the Alembic Pot Still collection.

How to set up the Alembic Pot Still before every run

Setting up the Alembic Pot Still takes about five minutes and follows the same four steps every time: join the condenser arm to the dome, fit the thermometer probe, connect the cooling water, then pressure-test for leaks before any heat goes on. Getting the water direction right is the step people skip.

1. Attach the condenser arm to the dome. Remove the nut and O ring from the base of the condenser. Sit the condenser on the dome, then screw the nut and O ring back into the condenser. Check the lid no longer spins. If it still turns, it is not tight.
2. Insert the thermometer probe into the hole at the top of the column.
3. Connect the cooling water tubing. The thin tube is the outlet: it connects near the top of the condenser arm and runs back to the sink. The thicker tube is the inlet: it connects near the tip of the condenser arm, at the spirit outlet end, and runs to the tap.
4. Test before you heat. Briefly turn the cooling water on and check for leaks. Confirm the water goes in at the end where the spirit comes out, and exits closest to the top of the lyne arm near the probe. Counter-current flow is what makes the condenser work.
   
   
   
   

If the dome or condenser will not seal, the O ring is the usual culprit. A perished or missing dome top and condenser O ring leaks vapour, and leaking vapour is lost yield.

Tap fittings vary across Australian kitchens and laundries. If your tap will not take the supplied adaptor, most hardware stores stock a threaded adaptor that will bridge the gap, and the distilling accessories range covers the common fittings.

Preparing and clearing your wash before you distil

A wash must be completely fermented and cleared of yeast before it goes anywhere near the boiler. Unfermented sugar causes the wash to froth up through the dome and into the condenser, which puts raw wash in your collection jar. Dead yeast boiled in the wash releases off flavours straight into the spirit.

Confirm fermentation has finished by checking specific gravity with a wash hydrometer and looking for a stable reading across three days, or by hitting the final gravity your recipe calls for. A single reading tells you nothing. Two or three matching readings tell you the yeast has stopped.

Clearing the wash is the next step, and there are two ways to do it. Turbo Clear works fastest: silicic acid charges the suspended particles and chitosan pulls them together so they drop out. Chilling the wash to 4°C for 24 hours also works and costs nothing but fridge space. Either way, siphon the cleared wash off the top and leave the yeast bed behind.

Once the cleared wash is in the boiler, add Still Spirits Distilling Conditioner and ceramic boil enhancers. The conditioner is a food-safe silicone antifoam and three capfuls is the standard dose. The boil enhancers give bubbles somewhere to nucleate so the wash boils evenly instead of surging.

Do not fill past the MAX line inside the boiler. Overfilling is the second most common cause of wash carrying over into the distillate.

Yeast choice shapes the wash more than most beginners expect. Whiskey, rum and brandy washes benefit from the strains in the specialty yeast and nutrients range rather than a general purpose turbo.

What cuts are and why pot still distillers make them

Cuts are the decision about which parts of a distillation run go into your final spirit and which get discarded or saved. Fermentation produces ethanol plus a long list of by-products called congeners, including acetaldehyde, esters, ethyl acetate, acetal and a small amount of methanol. These have different boiling points to ethanol, so they come off the still at different times.

The result is that the flavour coming out of the Alembic Pot Still changes markedly from the first drops to the last. The early fraction tastes of solvent, nail polish remover and paint thinner. That harshness gives way to smooth, sweet spirit. Then, near the end, the sweetness turns bitter and flat, which distillers usually describe as wet cardboard.

Those three phases are the heads, the hearts and the tails. The change between them is gradual, not a switch, and where you draw the line is what separates an average spirit from a good one.

Here is the part worth internalising: you do not have to get the cut right in the moment. Collect the heads and tails in small numbered jars, be generous about when you call the transition, and blend afterwards at your own pace with a glass in hand. Start the hearts later than you think and finish them earlier than you think. Anything good in those jars can go back in.

How to run a stripping run on the Alembic Pot Still

The stripping run is the rough first pass. You collect everything in one container, make no cuts, and stop when the output drops to 20% ABV or the vapour temperature reaches 98°C. The stripping run concentrates the ethanol roughly five to six times and gives back about one fifth to one sixth of the original wash volume.

What you need:

• A 5 L glass carboy or demijohn
• An alcometer reading 0 to 100% plus a thermometer
• Still Spirits Distilling Conditioner
• Ceramic boil enhancers
• Cooling water supply and a sink

The run, step by step:

1. Set up the Alembic Pot Still as described above and clip the dome to the boiler.
2. Turn the boiler on and switch it to boil. A full 25 L boiler takes about an hour to reach boiling.
3. When the condenser probe reads about 55°C, turn on the cold tap.
4. Set cooling water flow to about 2.5 litres per minute. Measure it: run the outlet into a 1 L jug and time it for a minute. Guessing is how people end up with hot distillate.
5. Collect everything in one container until the distillate reads 20% ABV or the vapour temperature hits about 98°C.
6. Anything after that can go into a separate container and be added to a future stripping run to recover the remaining alcohol.
7. Turn the boiler off, unplug it, and let the contents cool before emptying. The spent wash is a good garden fertiliser.
8. Wash the boiler, dome and condenser in warm soapy water and rinse well.

Temperature affects alcohol readings significantly. Most alcometers are calibrated for 20°C spirit, so either cool your sample or use an online temperature correction calculator before you trust the number.

A note on the older figures floating around: some earlier Still Spirits documentation quotes a stripping run cutoff of 18% ABV and a distillate start around 70°C to 75°C. Those are close enough that either will work. We use 20% as the stop point because the last two percent is barely worth the water.

How to run a spirit run and make your cuts

The spirit run is where the spirit is actually made. Dilute your stripping run output to 40% ABV, add boil enhancers, and separate the run into foreshots, heads, hearts and tails using temperature and ABV as your guide. Diluting to 40% matters: it gives a fuller boil and better separation between the fractions.

What you need:

• A 5 L glass demijohn
• An alcometer plus a 50 ml sample tube and thermometer, or a copper parrot head with alcometer and thermometer
• Six containers of around 150 ml for collecting fractions
• Cooling water supply and a sink

Combining two or three stripping runs into one spirit run is worth doing. It makes the transitions between fractions clearer and gives you more graduations to blend with. Distilling conditioner is not needed for a spirit run, only boil enhancers.

The cut points

Foreshots. Once the probe reaches 55°C, turn on the cooling water. When the distillate starts to flow, the first 200 ml is foreshots. This carries the methanol and the most harmful compounds in the wash and is discarded, not saved. The 200 ml figure is per stripping run of distillate in the boiler, so a spirit run charged with three stripping runs discards 600 ml.

Heads. After the foreshots, start collecting into 150 ml jars and number each one in the order it fills. The spirit will smell solventy at first and gradually turn neutral. When the probe reaches 83°C to 85°C, the heads are done.

Hearts. Put a large vessel under the outlet and collect the hearts in one go. No jars needed here. Keep collecting until the output falls to around 55% ABV or the probe reaches 90°C. This is the base of your finished spirit.

Tails. Back to numbered jars. Keep going until the probe reaches 93°C to 95°C, at which point the useful part of the tails is collected. Switch to a large vessel for the last of it and run down to 98°C or 20% ABV. Turn the boiler off, unplug it, and let it cool before emptying and cleaning.

Cut points shift slightly with the still, the wash and the charge strength. Some Still Spirits documentation for single distillation runs gives 90°C at 68% ABV for the heads to hearts cut and 95°C at 45% to 50% ABV for hearts to tails, because a 12% wash behaves differently to a 40% charge. Use temperature and ABV as a guide, and your nose as the decider.

For a grain-based whiskey worked through this process from scratch, our guide to making fine whiskey from grains with the Alembic pot condenser covers the mash side.

Blending and ageing a brown spirit

Blending is where you taste every numbered jar and decide what earns a place in the hearts. The last few heads jars nearest the hearts and the first few tails jars nearest the hearts are usually the ones worth adding. You do not have to add a whole jar. Add what improves the spirit and set the rest aside.

Heads bring harsher notes but carry a lot of ethanol. Tails bring flavour but very little ethanol. Judging the two against each other is the actual craft in pot distilling, and it gets easier every batch.

Everything you reject goes into the feints container with the late tails. Feints are not waste. Add them to your next stripping run, or collect feints across several batches and run them all as one spirit run. That last option produces a surprisingly good whiskey.

Ageing schedule. Dilute the blended spirit to 50% ABV with filtered or distilled water in a 5 L jar, leaving headroom for later water additions. Add an American charred oak carboy spiral and store it somewhere cool and dark. Flavour starts extracting immediately and is largely finished after two weeks, so taste as you go and pull the spiral whenever it suits you.

Then step the strength down: 47% ABV at three weeks, 44% at six weeks, 40% at nine weeks. Adding the water in stages produces a rounder result than dumping it all in at once. Give the spirit a minimum of two months. The more heads and tails you blended in, the longer it will need.

Different oak gives very different results. The oak chips and spirals range covers French, American, light toast and heavy char if you want to run a comparison across two jars of the same spirit.

Distilling a neutral spirit from a sugar wash

A pot still can make a clean neutral spirit from a sugar wash, but it takes more passes than a reflux still to get there. One distillation gives you a base suitable for liqueurs. Two gives a noticeably cleaner product. Three gets you close to vodka territory. Each pass costs yield.

If clean neutral spirit is your main goal, a reflux column is the better tool. The T500 reflux still produces triple to quadruple distilled quality in a single run, and our T500 instructions cover that process. The Alembic Pot Still earns its place on flavour, not purity.

Stripping run. Identical to the brown spirit stripping run above: collect everything in one container until the output reaches 20% ABV. If you plan a third distillation, dilute that output back to 40% ABV and repeat the stripping run.

Spirit run. Dilute to 40% ABV, add boil enhancers, skip the conditioner, and set up as before. Turn on the cooling water at 55°C. Discard 200 ml of foreshots per stripping run of charge. Then collect the hearts in one vessel until the output falls to 40% ABV and the probe reads 92°C.

Everything after that is tails. Discard it, or collect down to 20% ABV in a 1 L to 2 L container and add it to a future stripping run. Turn the boiler off, unplug, cool, empty, clean.

Carbon filtering afterwards makes a real difference to a sugar wash neutral. The carbon and filters range covers both loose carbon and cartridge systems.

Making gin with the Alembic Pot Still and botanical basket

Gin is neutral spirit that has been flavoured with juniper and other botanicals. The Still Spirits botanical basket vapour-infuses those botanicals as the spirit distils, which is how most quality gin distilleries do it. The alternative, steeping botanicals directly in spirit, is bathtub gin and tastes like it.

Start with a clean neutral spirit. Run the sugar wash process above, or use a T500 neutral, and filter it before the gin run. You need a minimum of 6 L of filtered 40% ABV neutral spirit for a full boiler.

Botanical basket setup

1. Add the filtered spirit to the boiler and top up to 25 L with water.
2. Fill the base of the botanical basket with your chosen botanicals and screw it into the basket head.
3. Attach the condenser arm to the dome using the head of the botanical basket in place of the stainless steel nut and O ring. Screw it tight and confirm the dome cannot rotate against the condenser.
4. Insert the thermometer probe into the hole at the top of the column.
5. Connect the cooling water tubing as normal, thin tube out to the sink, thick tube in from the tap, and check for leaks.
6. Clip the dome onto the boiler.
   
   
   
   

The gin run

Turn the boiler on. A full boiler takes roughly an hour to reach boiling. At 55°C on the probe, turn the cooling water on at 2.5 litres per minute.

Take no cuts on a gin run. The harmful compounds were removed during the neutral spirit run, and the botanicals release their different flavour compounds at different points in the distillation. Cutting would remove part of the flavour profile you loaded the basket for. Collect the entire run into one vessel down to 20% ABV.

Anything below 20% can be collected separately in a 1 L to 2 L container down to 10% ABV and added to a future stripping run. Turn off the cooling water, turn off and unplug the boiler, let it cool, then clean the boiler, dome and condenser thoroughly.

Water the finished gin down to 40% ABV and let it settle before drinking. It improves over the first week.

On botanicals. Juniper berries are the one non-negotiable ingredient, since a spirit without juniper is legally not gin. From there, coriander seed, angelica root, citrus peel and orris root make up the classic London Dry backbone. The Still Spirits London Dry gin botanical kit is the easiest starting point, and the gin botanicals and profiling range covers single botanicals for building your own recipe.

If you want to watch the vapour work through the basket, the Create+ sight glass botanical basket set puts a window in the column.

Running the Alembic Pot Still on the Grainfather Connect

The Alembic copper dome and condenser fit the Grainfather Connect and turn it from a brewing unit into a distilling unit. The advantage over a standard boiler is Power Control Mode, which lets you set the power output as a percentage instead of a target temperature. Slower output means more time to measure and cut accurately.

To enter or exit Power Control Mode, hold the heat button for six seconds. There is also an option in the Grainfather mobile app. Once active, the LCD shows current temperature and power output only, and the up and down buttons adjust the output in 5% increments.

Why this matters on a spirit run: your cut points are defined by temperature and ABV, both of which are moving. Dropping the power output slows the distillate and buys you the time to take a reading, taste a sample and swap jars before the window has passed. On a full-power run those windows go by quickly.

Troubleshooting the Alembic Pot Still

Most Alembic Pot Still problems trace back to four causes: an unfinished wash, insufficient cooling water, a leaking seal, or surge boiling in the boiler. The table below covers the faults we see most often and what fixes each one.

Copper that has gone dull is not a fault. After a few runs the inside of the dome and condenser turns a patchy brown, which is copper sulphide, the exact reaction you want happening. Scrubbing will not remove it and does not need to. A vinegar wash restores the shine for cosmetic reasons only.

Keeping the still clean between runs matters more than keeping it shiny. Warm soapy water and a thorough rinse after every session, with the cleaning and sanitising range for anything the soap will not shift.

Safety and the legal position in Australia

The Alembic Pot Still produces a highly flammable liquid, and ethanol vapour is heavier than air, so it pools. Ventilation, constant attendance and keeping ignition sources away are the three rules that matter. Have an alcohol-suitable extinguishing medium within reach: water fog, fine water spray, foam, dry powder, carbon dioxide, sand or dolomite.

Precautions:

• Run the Alembic Pot Still only in a well ventilated room
• Never leave the still unattended while it is operating
• Keep the still away from smoking, sparks, heat and open flames
• Make sure nearby equipment is earthed
• Do not boil dry. If it happens, reset the cut-out button under the base. A fusible link provides backup if the cut-out fails

If you spill: shut off every possible source of ignition first. Clean up immediately with cloth, paper towel or an absorbent such as soil or sand. Collect, seal and dispose of it properly, then mop the area with plenty of water.

The legal position. The ATO states that using a still of any capacity to distil alcohol requires an excise manufacturer licence, and that it does not grant licences for distilling spirits for personal consumption. Details are on the ATO's excise on spirits and other excisable beverages page. Owning a still is legal, and stills are used lawfully for water distillation, essential oil production and licensed commercial production.

We have covered the licensing question in detail in is it illegal to distil alcohol in Australia, and the broader picture sits in the complete guide to home distilling in Australia. Check the current ATO requirements before you proceed.

Frequently asked questions

What does distilling conditioner actually do? Distilling conditioner is a food-safe silicone antifoam. It stops the wash frothing in the boiler, which is what pushes raw wash up through the dome and into your collection vessel. Three capfuls is the standard dose. Residual sugar and an uncleared wash are the two main causes of frothing.

Why does the distillate need to come out cool? Two reasons. Ethanol vapour is extremely flammable, and if the cooling water is not doing its job the spirit leaves the condenser as vapour rather than liquid. Temperature also skews alcometer readings badly, and most alcometers are calibrated for 20°C, so hot spirit gives you a wrong number right when you are making cuts.

Can the Alembic Pot Still be used as a reflux still? Not directly. Redistilling the output through the pot still improves quality in a similar way to refluxing, but with lower yield. True reflux requires a reflux column such as the T500.

How long can I keep a wash before distilling it? Distil within a week of clearing. Beyond that, autolysis of the dead yeast starts producing off flavours. Sealed and kept cool, a wash is usually still fine at eight weeks, but it will not be as clean.

How much does it cost to run? The still draws about 2 kW per hour in Australia and New Zealand, and around 1.5 kW per hour in the US. Multiply that by your power rate and by roughly five hours of operation, then add cooling water and the cost of the wash ingredients.

Is methanol a real risk? Methanol is present in the final product at no greater concentration than in commercially produced spirits. It has the lowest boiling point of the compounds present, so it comes off first. Discard the foreshots as instructed and there is no pathway to methanol poisoning.

Can I recycle the cooling water? Yes, with a closed circuit. A 200 L container such as a clean bin, filled with water and six 2 L bottles frozen a few days ahead, plus a pump with enough flow, will get you through a run. Used cooling water is also fine for the garden.

How long does fermentation take? Usually 4 to 10 days, depending on yeast strain and temperature. Confirm it is finished with a stable hydrometer reading over consecutive days rather than by looking at the airlock, which can mislead.

What to do next

These Alembic Pot Still instructions cover the whole run, but two things carry most of the outcome: finish and clear the wash, and run enough cooling water. Get those right and the Alembic Pot Still is a forgiving piece of equipment. The cuts are a skill you build over batches, and collecting in numbered jars means an imperfect cut on the day is fixable at the blending bench a week later.

Start with a stripping run and a spirit run on a simple wash before attempting gin or anything with grain. Keep notes on temperature and ABV at each transition, because your still's numbers will settle into a pattern that is slightly your own.

Everything referenced here, from domes and condensers to botanical baskets, oak and spares, is in the Alembic Pot Still collection. If you are still deciding between pot and reflux, or want a complete setup in one box, the Alchemist Series Alembic pot still with boiler covers the lot. Give the team a call if you want a second opinion before you buy.