The basic principal of use is the use steam to transfer gentle heat directly to the fruit that is supported above a boiling water pot in a perforated basket. The juice is collected in the middle section and let out with a small hose while still hot and sterile directly into clean bottles for long term unrefrigerated storage. The quality of the juice is high with little solids except, we have found, for a little dissolved pectin.
All of the units that I am familiar with are made in a three-tier configuration that resembles a double boiler. The bottom section is a simple pot placed on a cook stove to boil water to generate the steam for the process. The next section is the juice collection container with an opening in the middle to pass the steam through and a hose fitting that is used to drain it directly into storage bottles. The top section is a perforated basket with a lid to hold the fruit while allowing the steam to reach it while holding the fruit itself out of the extracted juice. The steam is not held under pressure and the juice is delivered with a food grade silicone rubber hose into the bottle.
If you want to, you can load the fruit into the strainer section and add sugar, pectin (to prepare jellies), ascorbic acid (to improve shelf life) and other ingredients that will dissolve and mix with the juice as it is extracted. To get a consistent batch of juice the whole charge is allowed to extract and then bottled when complete to make a homogenous batch.
Besides juice and jellies, you can steam rice (with the use of cheese cloth), cook vegetables or blanch them for freezing. Though we have not done it, they say you can steam cook meats and bread too.
We have used it to juice rhubarb, bush, black and choke cherries, honeyberries, elderberries, wild and domestic plumbs, grapes, and green, ground fall, wild apples (cut in half) and tomatoes.
Improvising a Still from a Steam JuicerThey have been used as emergency distillation units for preparing clean water and, even, medicinal alcohol. Most would distill somewhere around a ½ gallon or more of water for batteries, potable water or to make small batches of alcohol for medical use.
A steam juicer comes in three major parts, the top section (for containing fruit), the second section that collects the juice and the bottom section that contains the water. To use it for a still all you have to do is leave the top section off. Put the product to be distilled in the bottom section, put the second section with its drain tube in place and put the lid on. Heat the liquid in the bottom section gently to turn it to steam which rises into the collection area, recondenses and run out the drain tube. You want to heat the bottom section just enough to create steam but not so hot that it prevents the steam from recondensing in the collection area. To be more efficient, you need to cool the lid with wet cool cloths and ice (in bags) or circulate cool water through cooling coils.
A brew of 10% alcohol will boil at 180o F with a cut off at 199oF, so, a thermometer in the condensing vapor chamber would be helpful in producing 40 to 55% alcohol by volume and redistilling should result in around 80% alcohol good enough for most herbal tincture preparations.
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