78 
Sugar-Beets and Beetroot Distillation. 
in Berkshire, and is now carrying out for the second year an 
experiment on a scale which will ultimately result either in a 
splendid success or a gigantic failure. Mr. Campbell's spirited 
enterprise will be watched with great interest by the agricultural 
community. Mr. Campbell, who farms about 5000 acres of land, 
expects to grow yearly not less than from 10,000 to 12,000 tons 
of beetroot for distilling purposes, and to be supplied by his 
distillery with sufficient refuse pulp to feed 12,000 sheep and 
2500 oxen. 
Mr. Campbell, on the strength of the best information obtain- 
able in France and elsewhere, as regards the most efficacious 
rectifying stills for obtaining pure alcohol, decided in favour of 
Messrs. Savalle and Co.'s stills. These stills are held in high 
esteem, not only in France, but likewise in Germany, Holland, 
Belgium, and other parts of the Continent ; and they received a 
gold medal for excellence and superiority at the International 
Exhibition in Paris in 1867. By the use of these stills, Mr. 
Campbell obtains from beetroot an extremely pure alcohol of 
great strength, which cannot be distinguished from pure spirit 
of wine. When I saw the Buscot distillery in active operation 
in the spring of last year, the pulped beetroot was passed through 
Collett's presses, and the juice thus produced was fermented, and 
subsequently distilled. 
This season, I am informed, Mr. Campbell has changed his 
modus operandi, and discarded Collett's presses for obtaining the 
saccharine beetroot juice, and altered his fermenting and dis- 
tilling machinery so as to adapt it to the macerating and diffusion 
system. All improved stills are heated by steam, which, on 
account of its regularity of action and economy, possesses great 
advantages over the former plan of heating by a naked fire. 
Savalle's stills include a boiler, a distilling column, separating 
condenser, cooler, and a special reservoir for the reception of 
fusel-oils, and a steam regulator. 
The distilling column consists of a metallic cylinder, fitted in 
the interior with a number of diaphragms, which are placed one 
above the other. On leaving the distilling column, the impure 
alcoholic vapours enter the analysing condenser, in which their 
densest constituents are liquefied and thrown back into the dis- 
tilling column, and the more volatile escape. The condenser 
communicates with the refrigerator, which receives the volatile 
vapours, and rapidly condenses them. The condenser as well as 
the refrigerator are tubular. The regulator is a novel and 
ingenious contrivance introduced by Mr. Savalle for maintain- 
ing a uniform temperature and pressure, conditions essential for 
producing a rapid flow of good alcohol. The operation, con- 
