Hey, everybody. It's Mike here at Hillbilly Stills. I just wanted to give you a quick rundown of our new 50 gallon boiler here, mash pot. We just got these in. This is just kind of a test run. We wanted to see if the TG5500 would heat it up and run it efficiently.

Obviously, as I hope you can see here, it's doing pretty well. We just changed our water control here and started pulling some product off our plates. This is an ethanol run. We do have a permit for making ethanol. So that's what we're doing here.

We've got 50 gallons. It's about 40 to 60 gallons of water of wash in here. The new boilers have sight glasses in the top and the bottom. I'll get you a close up here in a minute. You can really see the wash working in here. What's nice about it is you fill this boiler up to about, you want about a quarter of the sight glass full, and you can see how much your product grows as it heats up. That's why you have to leave to room for expansion in your boiler.

Now, we're running this right now. We started it at 5:15 this morning. We turned the element on. A little less than four hours later, the plate started to bubble. So it took right at four hours for the TG5500 to heat it up. Now, with that said, I feel like if we wrapped this in insulation, it would cut that time in half.

I've had a lot of people ask will the 5500 run it? Obviously, the answer to that's yes. We're running on 20 amps right now. So we've turned it back about 4 amps from heat up. It heated up for, like I say, almost 4 hours at 100%.

All the plates are working. The bottom plate is bubbling, but it's a little bit lower in the sight glass, so you can't see it quite as well. We're cooling off at 90% right now. We're not running really extreme. We're being pretty conservative this morning, just kind of checking things out.

I can probably speed that up a little. I'll demonstrate here. Shut a little more off of the dephlegmator, and we should see that stream pick up pretty good there. There it goes. It's picked up quite a lot, actually.

We'll move the camera in and give you some close-up of this and you can see what we've got here. That's where we're at, and any of you micro distillers that are interested in this 50 gallon pot, one 5500 watt element will run it. It's a long heat up time, but like I say, I think we insulate it, we can cut that down probably in half to about two hours. So we're going to get you a close-up of some of this.

Okay. Here you can see the plates bubbling. They're doing really well. I could probably slow the dephlegmator down a little bit, because we're putting out a really, really good stream right now. We're probably running close to a little over a gallon an hour with that stream. So we're pushing it right now. I'll increase our water flow and slow that down a little bit.

We're still running at 90% with a stream like that. When you run a hard stream, your plates will start to bubble a little bit. They're still bubbling, but not as aggressive as they will if you slow it down some.

We're going to pan down and give you a shot of the sight glasses on the boiler so you can see how nice they are. That's a really nice feature, I think. You can kind of see what your wash is doing inside with those.

Then we've got the two inch drain on the side on the bottom, which is right here. Then on the very bottom, on this unit, there's a one and a half inch fitting that we could put a drain on. Now this one, it does not have a drain on it, but the rest of them I think will have. We need that. It's right in the bottom. It's a conical shape. So when you drain it, it is empty.

That's what we've got here from Hillbilly Stills. We're really happy with this boiler here. We've been polishing on it a little bit. This is four millimeters thick. The top, as you can see, has got these big eye bolts, very heavy duty.

It's got a really nice, almost a half inch wide, silicone seal in here in the top. It seals up good. We have this three inch filler neck here, which in the future, what I'd like to do is either have a thermometer here, but I'm really thinking about having a fitting put on the front here, maybe between the two sight glasses with a thermometer in there. I just like to monitor my boiler temperature, and I think others would too.

So that's what we've got. I know a lot of you are interested in it. I thought I'd make you a quick video just to let you see the 50 gallon working to let you know that the 5500 will run this baby.

If you're interested, give us a call here at Hillbilly Stills. We'd like to fix you up.