Authors


	Nixon


	McCaw

Mike Nixon

Mike is a Chartered Engineer, a Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and proud to be a Kiwi. His grounding was in physics, chemistry and mathematics, leading to a career as an engineering officer in the Royal Air Force in England. He is now retired and living in Auckland, back home in New Zealand. Like many Kiwi Blokes, his pride and joy is his Shed. A Shed is a place where a Kiwi Bloke spends much of his time alone surrounded by his tools, current and past half finished projects and the collection of parts and material usually referred to by others as 'that pile of junk'. It is a place where new uses for No. 8 fencing wire can be explored - for New Zealand is a place where lateral thinking and a healthy disregard for 'experts' is admired. A picture of his Shed is shown below.

Mike is the one who's first boiler was made from an old industrial vacuum cleaner, and who investigated the possibilities of using jam jars to make a glass column. In case you're wondering … industrial vacuum cleaners make great boilers, and jam jars can be made to work, but require tapered lapped joints to be ground using a lathe, lots of patience, and techniques borrowed from amateur astronomers who grind their own mirrors. This Shed 'research' led to development of vapor management techniques for compound distillation, to a new and simpler design of Soxhlet extractor, and is now progressing, in close collaboration with Mike McCaw, towards development of new and innovative types of still and processing equipment.

Mike McCaw

Mike McCaw is a research scientist for a major manufacturing company, specializing in the optimization of processes. He grew up on a dairy farm, where he learned how to improvise with materials at hand to keep a process running. 400 angry cows waiting to be milked can definitely focus one's attention! His undergraduate work was in botany, and his graduate work in Mycology, which led to his owning and operating a mushroom farm at one time.

He has been making beer, wine, mead, and a variety of other fermented beverages and food products for over twenty years, and maintains a large collection of yeast cultures. He, too, is an inveterate tinkerer with a workshop full of projects under way.

His profession consists of finding ways to make large machines and systems do more with less – to simplify, improve and stabilize them. He has eagerly applied these skills to beverage making, botanicals extraction and purification, and recently to the design of distillation equipment. Frustrated with the provincialism of many hobby groups, He and Mike Nixon have founded the Amphora Society, dedicated to widespread experimentation and sharing of knowledge in the areas of beverages, perfumes, extracts and foods.


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