An Arduino-controlled automated whiskey distillery

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A perfect complement to open-electronics’ Drink Maker automatic drink “printer”, here it is the Arduino controlled whisky distillery!

If you simply want to have a drink now and then, building your own automated distillery probably isn’t the easiest way to obtain alcohol. As shown in this Instructables post, however, it can be done. On the other hand, if you create your own “NanoStillery,” you’ll have to contend with possible legal and safety issues while running the process… and of course, the risks of actually using the product.

Features:

• Alcohol vapour detection and automatic machine shut down.
• Safe heating with ‘under floor’ heating coil.
• Fully automatic – just press the start button – includes all pumps and valves.
• Inline hydrometer to automatically remove methanol.
• M2M and IoT (Machine to machine and Internet of Things) technology.
• Real-time custom made webpage graphical display for quality control.
• GPRS cellular network data transmission to online database – no wifi required.
• Audio messages for machine status and error warnings.
• Stainless steel and copper fabrication.
• Easy boiler cleaning.
• 4 different temperature sensors.
• Small, lightweight and compact for transport by donkey.

Home made beer or cider is pumped into the boiler and then rapidly heated to about 85 degrees C after which the power is reduced and the alcohol starts to boil off. Vapour travels into an air cooled condenser and then trickles out the other end into an inline hydrometer.

The hydrometer is connected to a pressure sensor which detects the level of fluid at any given time and a solenoid ‘dump valve’ at the bottom of the device allows the product to be dumped into a separate container to separate out the methanol.

The rest of the product goes into the conical flask and the process finishes when the boiler temperature hits a preset level controlled by a potentiometer on the control panel.

To learn how to distill home brew into alcohol, check out my purpose made instructable HERE.

Here is a video showing the distillery at work:

More details here: Arduino Blog

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