Captain PRO is the flagship model of the SamogonUral trading network, produced at its own Ural Commodity and Production Plant named after. D.V. Schukin. For the first time, Malinovka Kapitan PRO was presented at the House Hold 2018 exhibition and is a version of the “Captain” made on clamp connections.
Stills
The device is equipped with cubes of 20 and 30 liters with diameters of 25 and 30 cm, respectively. The maximum heating power, which allows distillation of sugar mash without uncontrolled foaming, is about 2 kW for 20 liters and 3 kW for 30 liters of a cube. This is quite enough for a standard bulk.
The cubes are equipped with a drain cock and a bimetal thermometer in the steam zone of the cube. But the faucet is very exotic with a non-removable herringbone for a rather thin hose. If you want to drain the bard faster or work with more or less thick brews, you will have to completely change it.
The thermometer is a standard cheap option with an accuracy class of 2,5 and a scale of up to 120 degrees, i.e. with an error of +/- 3 ° C. Just enough to understand if the bulk is hot or still cold. This is where its usefulness ends. When the thermometer shows exactly 92 °C, the temperature will lie between 89 and 95 °C.
There is no blast valve, apparently, it is considered by the “caring” seller to be optional elements.
Pay attention to the photo of the neck of the cube – the diameter is 100 mm, why does the website say 110 mm? The wooden handles of the cube also raise questions – even in neighboring photographs on the official website, they mysteriously disappear. Apparently, the manufacturer, calling it one of the advantages of the device, has not yet decided whether the buyer is worthy of these pens.
The manufacturer also claims a 4 mm ferromagnetic bottom, 1,5 mm wall thickness and 3 mm neck. But, apparently, the device can be equipped with completely different models of cubes! Violated the principles that distinguish factory production from handicraft – the repeatability and predictability of product properties. Simply put: “one name – one drawings – one complete set”.
Despite loud statements about the high technical level of the plant’s equipment, modern Russian, German, Italian equipment and CNC machines, it is hard to believe in this. How else to explain the fact that for some reason there were no exhibition copies with satisfactory quality of welds and their processing even for photographs on the site? However, anyone who wants to find a lot of such photos on the sites of the plant and the distribution network.
The biggest difficulty in studying this device is waiting for a potential buyer in obtaining not advertising technical characteristics, but real geometric dimensions. They are practically non-existent. But we managed to peep something from numerous dealers.
So, the characteristics of the moonshine still Malinovka Captain PRO:
- This is a collapsible apparatus with a drawer 40 cm long and an inner diameter of 35 mm, a reflux condenser 25 cm long and a 40 cm refrigerator. The design connects two 90 degree bends and 6 clamps.
- One of the outlets has a nipple for an electronic thermometer. The refrigerator comes with a drain glass and a parrot.
The standard set was repeated dozens of times by various manufacturers, there are no innovations on which you can somehow make a big mistake, but, as experience shows, everyone is weird. The robin, alas, is no exception.
Tsarga
This is the first thing that makes it impossible to use the Malinovka Kapitan PR apparatus as a beer column.
Drawer length 40 cm, inner diameter 35 mm. With such dimensions, one can only hope for moonshine with strengthening. Even when using the RPN as a nozzle, it is quite possible to obtain a product with a strength of over 90%, but there can be no talk of any noticeable purification from impurities. After dilution to a drinking strength of 40-45%, the entire bouquet of fusel oils will appear in full.
The packing volume in this column is 0,38 liters. Even if you fill it with SPN, then it will be able to keep the fuselage when distilling raw alcohol with an absolute alcohol content of not more than 3 liters. This corresponds to 7,5 liters of 40% bulk. With 20 and 30 liter cubes, the bulk will be 15 and 22 liters, i.e. 2-3 times higher than the limit. Even if you finish the selection of the “body” at a temperature of 91-92 degrees in the cube, there are practically no chances to contain the fuselage, since it simply does not have enough space in the column.
As for the “heads”, their selection is certainly “possible”. Only they will come out unconcentrated, without a clear boundary of transition to the “body”. But for a distiller with fortification, without the most important tasks of cleaning moonshine, perhaps this is good.
Dephlegmator
Puts an end to the question of the similarity of Captain PRO to a beer column. The apparatus is equipped with a shell-and-tube dephlegmator 25 cm long with 4 tubes 8 mm in diameter. Immediately striking is the excessive utilization capacity. For a column with an inner diameter of 35 mm with a SPN packing, the pre-choke power is about 950 W, with an on-load tap-changer 20-25 percent higher – about 1200 W. This means that this should also be the maximum power that the dephlegmator needs to utilize in the mode of operation of the column on itself, in other modes of the BC it will be less. To utilize 1200 W, a 15 cm dephlegmator with the same 4 8 mm tubes would be enough. The question is simple: why more?
The answer is also not complicated: the designers sincerely believe that the reflux condenser acts as a powerful barrier to fusel oils and other impurities, and therefore must be long.
I quote: “The product is cleaned in the first refrigerator (reflux condenser), due to the cooling of the reflux condenser, fusel oils and other harmful impurities (phlegm) are separated (condensed), which then flows back into the tank. In simple terms, harmful impurities simply cannot physically get into your excellent product. ”
Too bad it’s not that simple. Evaporation and condensation of vapors occurs in proportion to the rectification coefficients of impurities. Therefore, a single condensation will not give any noticeable effect in cleaning moonshine. Only multiple re-evaporation of the phlegm moving towards the steam groups impurities according to the degree of volatility and distributes them in the packing along the height of the column.
Selecting the top of the column of pairs and sending them to the refrigerator, we select the most volatile, while the rest remain in the column. And this is only if the rate of steam extraction does not exceed the rate of their entry into the column. Fractionation requires sufficient column height and packing volume to retain impurities. The volume of phlegm returned to the column must be at least 4 times the volume of product withdrawn. It is to adjust this parameter that the dephlegmator serves, and not as a mythical barrier.
The short side and the small volume of the nozzle put an end to this process. The composition of the product will not differ much from the original raw alcohol, you can forget about good cleaning. And for a number of impurities – even worse, because of the welding in the cube.
The most common design error in the design of a reflux condenser is the neglect of the speed of steam moving through it at the operating power of heating the cube. With an insufficient inner diameter and number of tubes, steam passes through them at such a speed that it does not allow phlegm to flow into the column, but drives it up into the selection. With this, Captain PRO is really bad.
If you believe what is written on the official websites, then the reflux condenser has 4 tubes with a diameter of 8 mm. Even if this is the inner diameter, anyway, the steam speed will be 4,5 m / s with a useful heating power of 1200 W. And that’s the problem.
To stabilize the process and work without the risk of driving phlegm into the selection or getting choked at the inlet to the dephlegmator, the steam speed should not be higher than 2-3 m/s. This means that you will have to reduce the useful heating power to about 800 watts. That is, to work with one and a half times less productivity than possible.
The dephlegmator of the Malinovka Kapitan PRO apparatus is its bottleneck.
90-degree bends with the possibility of installing a thermometer are standard and do not raise questions.
Refrigerator
A shell-and-tube refrigerator with four 8 mm tubes 40 cm long can handle 3 kW of useful heating power during the distillation of mash, providing a declared capacity of up to 6 l / h. Its weak point is the receiving funnel with a tube for communication with the atmosphere. Moreover, with the refrigerator in a vertical position, everything will work fine, but if you assemble the device in potstill mode, when it is located at a small, about 30-35 degrees angle to the horizon, miracles will begin.
The product drain tube located along the axis of the refrigerator determines the presence of a puddle of product between it and the refrigerator tubes. This same puddle will block 1-2 tubes of the shell and tube. Steam will mainly go to the remaining free ones. How will the refrigerator work in general? Badly. There will be pressure surges, spitting splashes of bards and foam in the selection. To avoid this, it was enough to move the tube close to the pipe wall on the opposite side of the TCA, for example, as in the photo.
A trifle, absolutely unimportant in the previous, non-separable generation of the device, here acquires a very specific meaning.
A parrot
Device for continuous monitoring of alcohol content (output strength). Done really well, the drain tap is quite appropriate and convenient in the selection of “heads”. By design, it is also worth noting that the inner tube of the parrot protrudes a good 5-6 mm above the overflow glass, which makes measurements very convenient.
conclusions
- When buying this moonshine, you need to clearly realize that it is a column-type distiller with reinforcement, nothing more.
- Despite the outward similarity, Malinovka Captain PRO, in terms of the degree of purification of moonshine from harmful impurities, does not even stand next to the beer columns.
- Due to significant design miscalculations, refinement and modernization are impossible.
- The manufacturer should think about the alchemical views on the theory of rectification of persons occupying the position of designer and technologist at the enterprise.
Reviewed by IgorGor.