u/Medium_Barber_3087

Disgustingly low heart fractions with still spirits air still. thoughts?

My friend has a still spirit air still. Seemingly perfectly fine unit, no leaks no defects.

They get stupidly low yields on the heart fractions of spirit runs, maybe 25%.
That's around 450ml drinkable 60% abv spirit for each 10.5 (TEN POINT FIVE) liters of 13% sugar wash, with ridiculous amounts of feints being produced.

This was not what people on here and online say about the air still, with hearts usually being mentioned to be around 50%.

This is making them think air stills are completely worthless for anything other than stripping runs if making neutrals.

How do they make this process worth their time? Are air stills really this awful? Do they need to upgrade to something bigger with a reflux column to make this remotely worth the effort?

They use it like so:

  1. Run 3 stripping runs, which have around 3.7L of 13% sugar wash each
  2. Put the resulting ~1.8L low wines + water to fill to "max" fill mark in the still for a spirit run
  3. separate the output in ~10 open/covered jars, wait a day.
  4. make cuts. thats it.

Is just plugging the still spirit air still for spirit runs not enough? must they use a power controller?They thought the still spirit version was able to do spirit runs without.
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EDIT: Friend tried doing a feint run. They got ethyl acetate sickly sweet taste smeared across the ENTIRE output, right into the tails. what the fuck. If the still spirit airstill does that, its just completely worthless for serious distilling

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u/Medium_Barber_3087 — 5 days ago

The Fantastic Expansion - Card 13 - Thief's Mark

I'm back after months of lacking motivation to work on my expansion.

This card is my take on the "Force play" archetype from some of the earliest custom expansions the community had made. Force play cards always had massive clunkiness around skips and attacks when they are played on someone else's turn, and this card bypasses the issue entirely in a clever way.

The idea is you play this and they have a choice to make: play the targeted card immediately or lose it. If you target say, their "draw from the bottom" and you manipulated the bottom card the turn before (with a card like "swap top and bottom"), then they will be reluctant to play it due to the added risk, turning this card into a one card steal. Other times you can force actions like an attack, or steal cards they cant play like defuses or always-marked cards (from my expansions!)

It also synergizes with mark-based decks and adds a much needed steal effect to the game, which is especially needed if you don't use cat cards in your decks (they take space from much cooler cards. Fantastic expansion and Market expansion provides many balanced 1-card steal effects to replace them).

It is not the most approachable for new players but I expect this card to garner niche appeal, as it does fill underserved mechanics and is possibly the best take on the force play archetype thus far.

u/Medium_Barber_3087 — 1 month ago