First of all, I expect this to be a hostile crowd when I say that I'm not so impressed with the Pro II extractor. First of all ,I am a career chemist,, one needs to re-route the plumbing in order not to overcool the column. The valve between the condensor and the column cooling tubes helps, but you buy that extra. If you don't do this, your distillation times will be very slow. Secondly, the condensor should be thermally isolated from the column because cooling the condensor also cools the top of the column, since the condensor is thermally coupled to the column. Next, you need a number of extra elbow joints because the tubing pinches if you connect it the way the instructions indicate.

.... and another thing.... there's wheat beer, rice beer, barley beer.... but there's no commercial corn beer. The fact that corn beer is conspicuously absent from the commercial market is proof that it must taste like pig poo. ,I recall Steven Hawking's proof that time travel is impossible because no one has been caught doing it. By analogy, corn beer is awful because no one does it. But, I really like the smell of corn beer. I drank some once when I was a kid and got really sick. Perhaps I would have gotten sick anyway. The corn beer may have had nothing to do with it. But I am not willing to do that experiment again right now.,

I use an old family recipe for corn whiskey, and you just have to have a taste for the corn, 'cause it ain't good if ya can't taste the cob.

Try this if you like corn whiskey: go to the local feed mill and get a garbage can ,new, full of cracked corn. Let a 4 or 5 gallon bucket of it sit for 48 hours ,it will bubble and foam but it is also malting,. Fill your 7 gallon fermenter half full with corn, mix in 1 lb of barley malt and cover with water. Let it sit for 3 days. Pour off the milky liquid into your Pro II extractor. Do the sugar thing ,18 lbs sugar, 1 pack of turbo-yeast, water to 25 liters,. On the second day your Pro II pot will be blowing CO2 like crazy. This will stop in about 3 days. After this the rate of fermentation is very low. Distill ,you can do a beer strip followed by a second distillation or you can be careful the first time,. Dilute to 90 proof. Enjoy.... ,with tomato juice, orange juice et cetera,.... remember take your vitamins! Purists will take me to task about the yeasts and so on, but when we were making shine when I was a kid, we didn't have any yeast except what was already on the corn. That's what real corn whiskey was made from. Want to age it in wood? Go to the lumber yard and get some oak 1x1 sticks and soak them in the whiskey. Me - I don't need the wood resins and terpenes in my corn whiskey.

harrell, very interesting...could you please go thru that corn whiskey recipe again ,step by step,i am very interested in making some of that good stuff....thanks for your time....scott from texas

Many thanks for your note, Scott. We had 'home-made' when I was a kid and the taste is very distinctive, which is the best for my taste. You can taste the corn and it is very smooth, almost sweet, but there's no sugar in the whiskey.

We raised Black Angus so we got our corn from the elevator in garbage cans that had never been used for anything but hauling corn. To make at least three batches:

1, Fill a 4 or 5 gallon bucket with cracked corn, mix in a pound of malted barley ,fine grind, and cover with water. Keep it room temp or slightly warmer for 3 days. It will be bubbling vigorously after the first day and the corn will start to sprout. This is another malting process.

2, The typical sour mash instructions differ from us at this point. We don't cook the corn at this point. After sitting for three days and after the bubbling settles down to a lull, pour off the water into your still. The water will be a milky color. You can test it with your hydrometer, but it won't tell you anything useful. That hydrometer measurement assumes that there's nothing else in the water but water and alcohol ,in that case the hydrometer is most accurate,. You can smell the alcohol and taste the sourness. ,I love the smell of the corn beer., If you get some corn with the water, that's fine. If the mash actually tastes sour to you, the pH will be where you want it to be.

3,Put 15 pounds of sugar in your Pro II Extractor pot along with water according to the directions ,I use a 2 liter pitcher, filled 1/4 with sugar and the rest with warm water,. At the end, add the turbo yeast that has been 'started' in a warm sugar solution. Cover the opening with something like Saran Wrap with a rubber band and maybe even poke a hole in it with a nail to let gas out.

4, The still pot, which is now your fermenter, will blow CO2 at a high rate for about 3 days. At that point you have most of the whiskey you're going to get, so when the volume of escaping CO2 drops to a trickle, I run the still. I normally get 2 liters of 'middle run' and a liter of 'tails'. I'm very careful with the temp.... I don't make a 'head cut' but I do not let the tails contaminate the 'middle run'. I save the tails until I get ten or so liters and then do a 'wash'. Depending on my mood, I might do a straight water wash or a molasses wash ,put a quart of molasses in your still with the tails and water before you run the still... be careful about the temp... when the temp goes higher than 79 or 80 deg. C ,my elevation is 1500 ft. and ethanol boils at 76 deg. C, you'll start getting too many higher alcohols ,methanol or wood alcohol comes off at about 64-65 Celsius and you won't have hardly any of that,.

5, Run the still being careful. You will get a sweet tasting ,although there's no sugar in the spirits,, smooth corn whiskey. At least two liters of 90 or 100 proof. Excellent. You WILL taste the corn.

6, If you want to go for the absolute real McCoy, put the mash from step 2 into a fermenter ,could be the pot of your Pro Extractor II or one of those 7 gallon polyethylene poultry waterers or a carboy, and let it sit for a couple of weeks, covered but not so tightly that the gas can't get out. Then distill the liquid. The spirits will be similar to the above but with a stronger flavor. It's hard to describe... very mellow, sweet and corny. I hate to overemphasize, but this corn whiskey is very smooth, sweet and corny. You just can't buy this. Again, there's no sugar in spirits. That's how my family got started. And that's the standard by which we judge everything else!

By the way, Clint ,my mother's father, hated commercial whiskey, but he thought Jim Beam was the best of that crappy stuff that you can buy in the store! LOL!

There is a certain creaminess, sweetness, and corniness about Clint's whiskey that you just can't buy. I like to put just enough ,diet, Coke in it to give it some color. Fine sippin'!!!

Thank you for your post, Timothy. You're probably right about that dishwasher tubing. At this point, it would be cheaper for me to buy about 6 elbow joints and spring clamps, your solution would work well.

Yes, the problems I mentioned occur when using the still in reflux mode. The condensor is connected to the top of the column by metal so if you don't watch the temp of the condensor well enough or have it regulated well enough, it will cool the top of the column. I built my first distillation apparatus many years ago. My condensor was a long coil of copper tubing that ran to a bucket of ice water so I didn't have a lot of these problems.