"http://jonahsimon.com/public_fo...ooninites/moonshine.html

This is what he said."

This is what he said do with the steel wool:
Essentially, the distillation process takes advantage of a special property of mixtures of volatile components. If you have a mixture of two volatile compounds, and you bring the mixture to a boil, the vapor produced will be richer in the more volatile of the two compounds than the original solution. In short, if you have a mixture of alcohol and water, and you boil it, the vapor produced is much richer in alcohol than the original solution.

This effect can be compounded with the addition of a fractionating column. This is, four our purposes, a pipe stuffed with steel wool, or some other material with a lot of surface area. As the alcohol and water vapor passes through the pipe, it condenses on the steel wool. Eventually, the vapor heats the steel wool enough that the condensed liquid starts to boil off. This results in an even more alcohol-rich vapor, which condenses further up the pipe where the temperature is not quite as high. The process repeats itself: