How the Receiver Works

A receiver's function is almost entirely passive: it is simply the vessel positioned to catch whatever liquid drips or flows out of a still's outlet, whether that outlet is an alembic's curved spout, a retort's downward-bent neck, or the open end of a coiled worm condenser. Its placement, not its construction, is what makes it work: an operator set the receiver directly beneath the point where condensed distillate emerged, close enough that no liquid was lost to splashing or missed drips but clear enough of the heat source that the collected liquid was never at risk of being reheated or evaporating back out.

For a long or unattended distillation, the receiver's capacity mattered as much as its placement, since a vessel too small would overflow before the operation finished, and some setups used a train of several receivers that could be swapped in sequence, letting an operator collect different fractions of a distillation separately as they came over. A stopper or loose cover was sometimes fitted to the receiver's mouth to slow evaporation of a volatile distillate once it had been collected, though it had to allow vapor pressure to equalize rather than sealing the vessel airtight while liquid was still actively dripping in.