"I started out using a 1 kilowatt electric hot plate. It took 4 to 5 hours to get 25 liters to boil, and then many more hours to distill. I had to reduce the cooling flow to just a trickle to get anything out, and I had to adjust it constantly as the water in the reservoir got warmer. What a tedious pain in the butt.

Now I use a propane burner called a ""Jet"" burner. Sounds just like a jet at full burn. It takes only 30 minutes to get 25 liters to boiling. I spend 2 hours doing the first fast distillation to get the ETOH out of the sugar/yeast solution, and I do not care about the percentage as I am going to dilute it to 50% for the carbon filtration anyway. I don't worry about not catching the starting and ending water in the carbon filtration process. The little black book says to continually taste the drips until the alcohol starts, and then to do the same at the end until you taste water. This only makes sense if you are planning to use the filtrate ""as-is"" at 50%. All that tasting is time consuming and pointless if you are planning to distill again. It took me an absurdly long time to figure this out! So my second fast distillation is starting at around 35-40% and ending at ~70% in 1 to 2 hours. The last distillation is easy and takes about 1-2 hours getting me to 90%. I always do three batches at a time so that I need only three initial distillations, 1 or 2 second distillations, and 1 final distillation, to get 3+ gallons of 85% ETOH...which I call ""Tsunami!"" (I finally decided on 85% because it is much easier to obtain then higher percentages, and it is a lot less hygroscopic (i.e. harsh) then 95%.)

As to the cooling, I adjust the flow from the still with the amount of heat I apply, not with the cooling tubes. This is not possible with the hotplate as you need every last watt just to keep the thing going! I use a big aquarium pump, like a Rio 2100, and put it in a little 3.5-gallon bucket...this is far more convenient then the 20-gallon rope-handled buckets I used to use. I run fresh water from my garden hose through the cooling jacket at a the smallest flow rate I can get away with, and run the output into the bucket. This keeps both the rate of flow, and the temperature of the flow, through the cooling tubes consistent. And it means that I don't have to constantly adjust the burner. I could just let the water overflow the bucket onto the ground, but I am big into aquariums and have a spare ""continuous siphon overflow"". I just hook that sucker on the bucket and attach my other garden hose to it. Now my cooling water trickles onto the lawn."