AlembicHowTo

The Alembic:

• How to Build an Alembic

At the bottom of the Alembic wiki page shows where the temp is on the temperature bar for a specific type of spirit
Each type of spirit has a different temp (range)

Controls

Heating

Heat (+) or Don't Heat (-)
My guess how the temperature is determined: take a random number, then add or subtract it from the current temp depending on if heating or not heating

Flow

Flow size is 1,2,4,8 db per temp cycle. There are 4 different sized flow buttons

Adding

You can add cc at any time and it uses cc fairly slow (maybe less than 100 cc per hour)
You can add wine or beer at any time, they both have "potential" to be spirits but don't use both together as you will be wasting one of them
A bottle of wine has some amounts of tanin and sugar in it
Tannin for low-temp spirits (Wood, Worm and Grain); sugar for high-temp spirits (Vegetable, Mineral and Fish)
A barrel of beer is used for making Rock spirits, multiple barrels are usually better than one (other than your first time, perhaps) and Flow Size should be small (1 or 2)
It can be any type of flavors or strength and can be "spoiled" without affecting the outcome

Display

The "current" temperature bar is between "Flow" and Temperature Control
A circle on the on the right showing the relative quality (more brown is lesser quality)
The "Sink" will appear once you are distilling and it shows the amount (in DB) of what would appear in your Inventory if you chose "Reverse..." right then
(You do not need jars, bottles or anything else to hold the output)

General Operation

Make sure you have cc loaded
You have in your inventory some wine and/or beer
Pin the menu
Decide what type of spirit and quality you want to make (be sure the wine has tanin or sugar to match the type of spirit) Start heating
Either add the beer/wine immediately and "Dump.." anything collected once get to the type of spirit you are after OR wait until the temperature bar is even with the line shown on the wiki page for type of spirit you want and then add the beer/wine
Additional beer or wine can be added at anytime
Keep the temperature centered on the spirit type and try for the least temperature variation as possible
When you are collecting no more spirits into the "Sink" without lowering the quality or you've got the amount you want, "Reverse..."
Repeat for each spirit type until you have enough of each

Things to know

You can only "Reverse..." once in a run, it cleans itself out when you do this
The amount temperature change at one time is random and can be almost the full difference between types of spirits (but this big of change doesn't happen very often unless you have bad Teppy karma)
The temperature change may be appear to be zero
The time between temperature changes is random (might also be a fixed length of time plus Internet lag)
Before you get any spirits in the "Sink", it will discard 4 times the flow size, once it starts collecting it will always increase if there was any Potential at that temperature
Flow size is 1,2,4,8 db and there are 4 flow buttons to match
Grey spirits (which is also Grey quality) is made by running the temperature up and down, collecting all/most of the "Potential" of your wine or beer - you might want to do this once to have Grey spirits available as they are occasionally required
Quality affects the output of the number of drops when you are making Essences, you can use Earth quality but you will get only about 2/3rds the number of drops than produced with Fire quality
If you mess up the quality and don't need any more Grey spirits, if you need other types of spirits and have the needed tannin/sugar for it, just change to the needed temp and "Dump..." what you currently have, starting over collecting a new type of spirit without discarding the beer or wine you started with

How it appears to work (but doesn't really)

How tannin and sugar become Potential

Please put up with my theory as it isn't correct of how the types of spirits are determined and is meant to give you a general idea of what is going on (you do not need to know this)
Look at the temperature bar, imagine it is broken up into many small "slots"
Each point (maybe a pixel or smaller) on the temp scale is a "slot"
When you add wine or beer, the amount of Potential added is broken up into many slots based generally on sugar and tannin present (plus who knows)
Some slots will have high values, some nothing and the others values anywhere in between
Note each bottle of the same wine will have identical distributions in every bottle but different wines will have different distributions (this means one wine may not have about the same amounts of say "Mineral" and "Vegetable" but another wine will)

How are the slots used

Again, this is not completely correct and only for a general idea of what is going on
You are running the Alembic and the temperature changes as usual and using at the slot that corresponds to the new temp
Is the slot empty?, if yes, wait for the next temp
Not empty, subtract the "flow size" from that slot and subtract that amount from the "Pot" if not finished discarding the first 4 times (remember the first 4 times the flow size are discarded at the beginning of each run), wait for the next temp
Add flow size to the Sink and do quality calculations, wait for the next temp

Quality

Your guess on how this works is better than mine!!
Watch the brownish circle, the darker it is the closer it is to a lower quality, this means that Ra is very light (like it looks before you start) and Grey is very dark brown
A wild, hairy guess on how it might work follows:
Remember my "slots" for Potential and assume there are "Sink slots" receiving the output
Whichever (Sink) slot has had the most put in it, becomes the "base" (is the first spot to appear on the bar to the right of the temperature control buttons) and will probably change if you have very many temperature variations
The quality is calculated using the Sink slots and subtracting the "base" from all slots that have something in them (use absolute values only - positive), then multiply the number of slots away from the "base" with the amount collected in that slot to give the quality (higher is bad)

Note:
If you have the quality that drops below what you are after and if there is still Potential left at or very near the "base" temp, you can sometimes get the quality back to what is desired by being able to keep the temp very near the "base" temp - if you succeed, "Reverse..." immediately