There is a Business Case for Traditional Stills!

No, this is not a Sunday Joke. However hilarious or intensely sad it is, this is a genuine post. No pun intended and it isn't April Fool's day either. This is for real: there is a business case for traditional stills. A German colleague of ours proved it. And what an invention it is! It turns out more people in our industry than just Odin think outside of the box ...

Congrats, dear German colleagues! And no, I am not being sarcastic. This truly is an innovative idea that does perfect justice to the strengths and weaknesses of traditional copper stills. Let me dive in a bit deeper, so I can elaborate on that ...

Traditional stills, whether they are made by Mueller, Holstein, Carl, DYE, Vendome, or whomever, are based on - at best - 1870's technology. In other words: not-so-advanced technology. Horse-and-carriages had not yet been replaced by cars, carrier pigeons had the upper hand over phones, and traditional stills do not offer much control over flavor composition and are very inefficient. How inefficient? Well, 70 to 75% of the energy one puts into a traditional distillation run does not enter the distilling process, but simply and inefficiently heats up the distilling room instead ...

And that's what is unique about this application of traditional potstills; it takes advantage of a main reasons why traditional stills suck at distilling: they are better at room heating than creating alcohol. "Every disadvantage brings an advantage", legendary philosopher and football player Johan Cruijff often said. And Mueller has acted on that perfectly by using their potstills where they shine: at heating up the only room we all like extremely hot and humid: the sauna! Congrats!