Originally Posted By: nursemike
It would require monitoring the temperature of the distillation flask so that you could discard the stuff that boiled off below 100 degrees celsius, which would be the volatile organics (including ethanol, if you get really, really lucky in your contaminants), and stop collecting the stuff that boils at temps over 100 c.


Unless you're using some sort of pressure vessel, you cannot raise the temperature of liquid water over 100 degrees C (or whatever the boiling point is at your altitude). Temperature is constant during phase changes; adding more heat will simply increase the rate at which it becomes steam.

I'd agree with you that distillation is the only sure-fire way to get rid of the really nasty stuff.