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What is the best yeast for a neutral wash? you mention you buy lallemand for your gin. Currently I use a bakers yeast that gets the job done but stinks like crazy during fermenting, flocculates badly, and because my still is only 92% efficient, lots of the flavours carry over and I have to double run it and charcoal filter it. I've tried lavin ec118, directions say the 5g pack is enough but I bought 2 packs anyway. The 5g pitch did not go well. Lots of activity but after a week SG was still 1050! I added the other pack but you know how yeast is, you just get one shot otherwise it's a long limp home no matter what you do... I did like it though, clears up way better, less smells, flocculates well (too well - I had to keep rousing it), ends up clearer and more neutral compared to the bakers yeast. I'm thinking of trying a new yeast or just giving it another go (double pitching from the outset and more yeast nutrients in the wash). Current bakers yeast in comparison is already 1010 after 4 days (the ec118 took 3 weeks to get to that!) , but I hate the flavour/smell of the bakers yeast
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Sep 7, 2017 13:45
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Applesnots posted:Would you be willing to export to china? I have a good friend that is living there and made a business of importing American beer and spirits to China. There is quite a boom in the market there right now for the imported stuff. Not just imported, but small batch craft styles tend to sell the best. I think we'd be willing to export, for sure. But as always, the agreement has to be done carefully. Some exporters are happy to take us on, but they demand we supply them with n cases of spirits per month. If we can't supply that many, there are penalties. I think once we've been around a year or so and have a better handle on exactly how much we can produce in a given month, these sorts of deals become much more attractive to us. The Lone Badger posted:Do you need to take care to keep the methanol content of the ferment low, or is that pretty much handled in distillation? Both. We try to keep our yeasts in a fermentation environment that the particular enjoys. That means keeping the temperature, sugar content, sugar type, pH, and a host of other factors in line with that strain's tastes. This reduces stress on the yeast and generally means it's going to make less of the stuff we don't want (methanol, "bad conegers", etc) and more of the stuff we do want (ethanol, "good esters", etc). Also, being that we primarily make rum mashes, we don't tend to get a lot of methanol anyway, since sucrose is broken readily into glucose and fructose, and the yeast we use just metabolizes those straight to ethanol. When you start getting into fruit-heavy ferments with lots of pectin and other complex molecules, methanol production starts to go up as the yeast ends up metabolizing non-sugar compounds. The other part of it is that we remove almost all of the methanol that is made in the distillation process. During the stripping runs, there's a period of time before the main run starts where methanol and a number of other "lighter" molecules drip out of the still. These are called the foreshots and should NEVER be ingested. They're what "makes you go blind" so to speak. We separate them, put them in a spray bottle, and actually use them for disinfectant around the distillery. Fo3 posted:What is the best yeast for a neutral wash? you mention you buy lallemand for your gin. I'm going to assume you're in Australia or New Zealand. (NEVERMIND: I just realized you'd posted already and you /are/ in Australia. Congrats on living somewhere civilized!) So, you've basically run into the distiller's conundrum. You want something that finishes fast, but doesn't taste like sewage. Bakers want a yeast that works fast. They want it to get bread rising in an hour or so, so it can get in the oven and bake. They don't care if it makes a lot of alcohol, because that's not what they want in bread. They don't care about flocculation or attenuation at all. As a result baker's yeast is pretty much a super fast, but very low alcohol tolerance strain. If you pitch it heavy, it'll eat all the sugars, and make a ton of yeast (biomass) rather than alcohol. That's what it does. Lavin EC1118 is a wine strain, and wine makers love some long living, high alcohol tolerance yeast that settles out really nicely. As you noticed, after a week, the SG hadn't moved much at all. Even with 10g of yeast, it was taking it's sweet time. That's just EC1118. It's going to take four weeks or so if you pitch it at the recommended dosage. Did you acidify the wash? Wine yeasts love acid. Add in a cup of fresh lemon juice. Did you add yeast nutrient? Wine yeasts thrive on that stuff, too. The hard truth is that bakers yeast, and all of the "Turbo Yeasts" are pretty shite for making good quality liquor. Yeast that is living and metabolizing that fast is under enormous amounts of stress and it starts making all sorts of nasty esters that really mess up your flavor profile. Avoid them. There are "distillers yeasts" out there, and I'm dubious about most of them. If you're using a neutral sugar mash, try finding some Lallemand Distillamax SR. (It only comes in 500g packs, and will probably run you $80.) I'd give EC1118 another shot, but do a few things differently. Two days before you mash, make a starter for the yeast. In a half gallon container (two liter for Aussies and Kiwis) start a 1060 mini mash of about 1.5 liters. Let it cool to 98 degrees, and then put a lid on it and shake the poo poo out of it. Make it foamy. Then pour in the yeast. Cap it, and shake it again until the yeast is mixed in. At this point you want that yeast to make more yeast, not alcohol, and the way you make more yeast is by keeping it well oxygenated. After shaking it, leave the lid off so it can vent the CO2. Twice a day between when you start it and when you are ready to pitch your main mash, shake it up again. This is what we do on a much larger scale in our plant, using 30 gallon drums as yeast propagators, and medical grade oxygen fed into the starter through airstones. Edit to add: What substrate are you using? Sugar, grain...? Weltlich fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Sep 7, 2017 |
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Sep 7, 2017 16:58
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4kg table sugar, 1/4 tsp citric acid (in with a 1/2 the sugar in a boil to help invert some sugar to glucose), 1 tbsp of yeast nutrient (di ammonia phosphate (sp?)). So there's enough acid with the citric plus I use starsan to sanatise and there's acidic foam left over from that. I just make a 10% 'wine' to get about 3 bottles every 3 weeks or so. Someone suggested epsom salts so I might add 1/2 tsp of that in future. I might change the diap yeast nutrient to wyeast's yeast nutrient next time I go to the homebrew shop. E: I hydrate the yeast in plain cool boiled water for 20min, then add 1 tsp of sugar and yeast nutrient and pitch when that starts foaming over. I do homebrew beer as well, inc making starters from small yeast samples (just did one with coopers beer yeasts, collecting the dregs from 10 bottles), so I can do and I might try a starter if I buy ec1118 again. 2e: It's a long term plain to get into grain for beer and distilling, but that will have to wait until I have better living arrangements. Fo3 fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Sep 7, 2017 |
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Sep 7, 2017 17:23
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Fo3 posted:4kg table sugar, 1/4 tsp citric acid (in with a 1/2 the sugar in a boil to help invert some sugar to glucose), 1 tbsp of yeast nutrient (di ammonia phosphate (sp?)). So there's enough acid with the citric plus I use starsan to sanatise and there's acidic foam left over from that. Sounds like good advice from the shop. My inclination is to use fresh lemon juice in place of the citric acid, though. It'll have a better mineral/vitamin composition. And the wyeast nutrient is better than DAP for sure - it has dead yeast in it IIRC, which the living yeast feeds on to make more yeasts. Otherwise, I'd say you're looking good. Some other strains I've had good luck with are EDV46 (Lallemand, I think? Danstil also makes it.) Distillamax RM and SR are solid as well. I really would recommend using a strain that specifically likes sugarcane products - it makes a world of difference. After that, I'd go to a wine yeast like K1-V116, I think it'll preform better than a champaign specific like EC-1118 will. And seriously, over-pitch if you're distilling. It dramatically reduces off-flavors and aromas in your mash. If it's cheap to buy 5 to 10 5g packets of yeast at the shop, don't hesitate to do it. If they're over-priced, then make the starter.
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Sep 7, 2017 17:38
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Do you have a limit on how many gallons you can produce a year? Here in My there is a 50,000 gallons limit for craft distallaries
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Oct 17, 2017 12:59
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joebuddah posted:Do you have a limit on how many gallons you can produce a year? Here in My there is a 50,000 gallons limit for craft distallaries Yes and no. The federal government does not place any hard caps on a distillery's production - the expectation is that whatever we make, we'll pay the taxes for. So the more we make, the happier they are. There's no distinction at the federal level between a distillery, a micro-distillery, a farm distillery, etc. There can be distinction down at the state level, though, and I understand that different states have different rules. Vermont doesn't - we just adhere to federal guidelines. The other part of the answer is that we do have a bond that sets a soft-cap on the amount of alcohol we have in storage. Generally, we owe taxes on every bit of alcohol we produce. But, anything in a barrel, tank or bottle that is still under our roof is considered to be "under bond" meaning that we can defer those taxes until we ship the bottles out. When we put our paperwork in for our federal licence, we had to submit a bond against the estimated tax value of liquor our facility could potentially store. That way if the place burns down, the feds still get their money. Off the top of my head, I think we have a $200,000 bond, meaning that we can have something on the order of ~14,000 gallons of liquor in barrels or tanks at any given time. The feds take a dim view of going over that, since in the case of disaster they lose the guarantee that they're going to get paid. But, it's easy to up the bond amount if we anticipate going over that capacity.
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Oct 18, 2017 02:06
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Congrats on "making it"! I know you're fresh on the market, but you've passed some massive hurdles. I love entrepreneurship stories. Could you tell us of the paths your distillery took to where you are now? What were the first years like? -You mentioned that you worked in retail/wholesale, how did you go about teaching yourself what's needed to actually run your distillery? -How did you raise money? -Though you probably had some initial connections from your past jobs: Starting out, what was it like making the initial calls and deals with suppliers and deliveries? -What was it like building up your distillery building? Did you start in a smaller space? ..and is your gin available now?
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Oct 18, 2017 14:53
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Woodstock posted:Congrats on "making it"! I know you're fresh on the market, but you've passed some massive hurdles. Thanks for the kind words! So I've always preferred spirits to beer or wine. Around 2008, I'd gotten out of the Army, gone back to school in Boston, and wrangled a job at a liquor store to get some spare cash. This was about the same time that new US distilleries were finally starting to pop up in any meaningful concentration, sort of the second wave of micro-distilleries in the US. It was really exciting to see the store's shelves start to fill with a fairly good cross section of these new spirits. At the time, I was like a lot of consumers in that I just assumed that if a new bottle hit the shelf that it was from an actual distiller. But around 2009, because I had access to the industry publications, I started to find out that a lot of these - Redemption Rye, Tempelton Rye, and Bulleit Rye spring to mind in particular - were all mass produced at a single mega-distillery in Indiana (MGP) and then sold to smaller "Potemkin Distilleries" that just re-bottled it under their table and sold it at premium prices. It really rubbed me the wrong way, so I started researching every bottle before I bought it, to make sure it was made by the people who were selling it. Turns out that about 75 to 90% of what is being sold on the shelf as "micro distillery" spirits are in reality "rectified" spirits, meaning that someone just buys the spirits in bulk, mixes in a little food coloring or water, and then bottles it with the claim that they made it. Tito's Vodka? Rectified. Whistlepig Rye? Rectified. If it's got really snappy marketing, then I'd bet a dollar that it was a rectified product, not a distilled product. But all that research led me to discover the actual distilling scene that was starting to pop up on Cape Anne in Massachusetts. Both Turkey Shore and Ryan and Wood were two real-and-true distilleries that were making local product, so I went to visit them. I owe a large debt to Bob at Ryan and Wood in particular, since he was the first distiller that really sat me down and said "look, it's all well and good to say you want to make spirits, but what do you know about regulations?" Then he spent almost six hours going over all the paperwork, legal snags, and reporting that he has to do to run a distillery. He uses that as a litmus test as to whether people are really interested in it as a business - most people run screaming sometime during the first hour. So I just started hanging around in a few distilling shops up on Cape Anne in my free time. And for people who are legit interested in getting into the industry, that's a great way to do it. If you've got a day off, and don't mind getting your clothes dirty, most of these shops don't mind letting a person volunteer for a day doing whatever needs to be done. You get hands on experience, they get some much needed labor. Most won't let you do it every day, because eventually the Dept. of Labor starts asking questions as to why you're not getting paid, but a day or three a month is generally ignorable. And it started to give me the whole picture of "how is a distillery run," not just "how do I make spirits." Cut to January 2013, I graduated college eight months ago, and the job market was looking pretty awful. I had done 8 years in the Army, then 4 years in college, and the thought of an entry level job at 32 years old was not appealing. At the same time, I'd been introduced to a guy who was running a farm in Vermont and looking for ways to do "value added" manufacturing on site to boost the profits. It was a pretty obvious match - grow grains and other distillable crops, then turn them into spirits for a large margin increase. In theory, you can now support three families off of 100 acres of farmland. That attempted partnership lasted for about three years - we crowdfunded a still and starting capital, had it about 90% of the way to being a functional distillery, then drama bombs started falling. Without going too much into it, I'll just say that certain parties were more concerned with having a lifestyle than having a business, and I'd been naive in my business dealings with the farm to the point where my leverage to make sure things were done properly had eroded away to almost nothing. We had to bring lawyers into the mix, and in the end I and another party ended up splitting off to go start our own distillery about 20 miles away. So we took all our hard lessons, and in January of 2016 incorporated Old Route Two Spirits, which is the holding company for our current distillery. It took until May to find a suitable location for the place. Even then it was hard to imagine a distillery being in our current building, because up until the week we took the lease, it was being used as a heavy equipment repair ship for an excavating company. What was going to become our new distillery smelled like the inside of a diesel tank. The floors were concrete, but covered in oil spots where it had soaked in. The walls were a soft vinyl sheet covering bagged insulation, and that was covered in a 1/16th of an inch of soot from diesel exhaust. It was disgusting. We had to have a skim-coat of new concrete put down on the floors to cover the oil before we could apply an epoxy top-coat to make it food grade cleanable. Then my partner and I spent about three months framing out and dry-walling the interior space. We had to rent a scissor lift because the ceilings are about 25 feet off the ground and gently caress doing all that on ladders. We went with steel stud construction which is way more water resistant than wooden stud construction, but also a much larger pain in the rear end. Still we got it done. All the while the plumbing company we hired to install the steam boiler and run the pipes for that was also working to get things ready for the machinery. And to top it off we converted an upstairs office into an R&D lab that we're incredibly proud of. Our lab is something that very few distilleries of our size have access to, not to mention giving us the ability to make exclusive small batch products. I'll make a follow up post full of pictures of the renovation in a few minutes so I don't clutter this one up. Oh, and we swapped out the ancient, epilepsy inducing fluorescent lights for modern LEDs that actually light the place up well without making me want to puke from the incessant strobe effect. All in all, it took ten months of renovations and refits to get it up to our standards, and that was fine, because it took about as long for the federal government to get around to issuing our distilling license. March of 2017 we had everything in place to start distilling, and started making Rum which went into barrels, and then we started making Gin in July. Our first major shipment of 120 cases of gin went out the back door three weeks ago, and is now available in Vermont Liquor stores! As for financing, the current distillery is a blend of self financing, and community loans. Both my partner and I had some personal savings we put into the place, and the town of Barre, Vermont has also given us a very generous loan. Barre was hard hit the past few decades as jobs from the granite quarries started to go away, and the current development board is hot to get new manufacturing businesses into town. We're really proud to be part of that push, and starting next spring, we'll be hiring. Five new jobs next year, and then hopefully about ten jobs a year for the next ten years after that. If you are in the Northeast and want to start a business, especially light manufacturing, it's worth your time to check out small towns. I can recommend Barre in particular for any goon that wants to set up shop in a place that is both beautiful and co-operative. There's enough regulation to make sure people aren't polluting and abusing labor, but the zoning is such that we don't have any "Not In My Backyard" issues from crotchety neighbors. (I've you've never been to a small town planning commission meeting, you're missing out on some grade A whinging.) Anyway, as to the question about suppliers, I can say without a doubt that after dealing with the Feds, dealing with vendors is probably the next most frustrating thing we have to do. The customer service for vendors serving this industry is just awful. Never in my life have I run across companies who's whole customer service strategy is to never return phone calls and refuse to sell to anyone you're not already selling to. There were so many bottles we liked, and tried to get samples of, only to get dead air in return from a vendor. We lucked out in that we finally found a bottle maker that was both making bottles we liked, and would actually talk to us. Even then it took months to finally get samples. I can go on and on about this if you want, but the short answer is that I think there's a good deal of "startup fatigue" in the industry at the moment. Lots of people who daydreaming about starting a distillery, and pestering suppliers to get quotes that will never materialize into real orders. The net result is that actual orders tend to get lost in the noise. Also, the supply chain for the industry is still set up to serve large scale distilling - so if you're a startup wanting 10,000 bottles instead of 1,000,000 bottles you're not worth their time. And if you're a true micro-distillery who's only making a few hundred bottles a month, then good luck getting any custom work done at all. That was part of our decision to scale up early, because otherwise the margin on bottles, packaging, and raw inputs gets to a point where we'd have to charge $50+ a bottle to make our money back. Here's a glamor shot of our gin, which is now available at liquor stores in Vermont!  Time lapse of our build-out to follow shortly...
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Oct 18, 2017 18:07
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Shout out to the Groverhaus thread. My only regret is not having five different types of windows on the same wall. So this is what we walked into: Notice all the grease spots on the floor. We actually hired professional industrial cleaners to come in, and even with their help, it was still pretty gross. That's when we knew we had to do an actual rehab on it.  First thing first, we had to get the lower part of the walls framed out and drywalled/cement boarded so that the floor crew could come in and but down the new skim coat of concrete and then seal the edges of the floor to the walls to prevent any liquid from getting back there. This involved cutting steel studs to fit in between the girts, adding extra insulation, and then tacking the sheet rock to it. My dog, Reggie, claims to have helped. You can also see some of the first steam pipes being run. More on that in a bit.  Is this cement board load bearing?  Once we had that lower layer up, they were able to come in and start doing the floors, one half of the shop at a time. We'd move all our equipment to one side, they'd do the floor, then a week later, move it all to the other side and they did the rest.  Now it was just a long six weeks or so of putting up more studs, stuffing in more insulation, and then adding more dry wall.   Mud, Tape, and Paint...   Then get all the equipment laid out, plumed in, and wired up.    And sooner or later it looks like this and we're making liquor:  To get the boiler installed, though, required a little more heavy work. What is now our boiler room used to be a partitioned room with an outer blast wall because the excavation company that owned the building before us did demolition work with high explosives. Seems like a good place to keep a boiler!     And while all this was going on, we were also kitting out one of the upstairs offices to be the lab.       We saved a shitload in labor doing most of this work ourselves, but it took a solid ten months to do it. I still wish we had more ungrounded outlets in the floor, though.
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Oct 18, 2017 19:15
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Just want to say I don't really care about booze but this is still a cool rear end thread, I enjoy the in progress pics and admire all the work that's gone into your setup. Good job!
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Oct 18, 2017 20:13
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Looks awesome as gently caress. Two questions: 1. I saw you drywalled off all of the walls, are you worried about anything falling from the ceiling that appears to have been left scrubbed but otherwise alone? 2. Did you ever get pics from the inside of your still?
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Oct 19, 2017 18:29
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do you feel it's moral to create an addictive drug that ruins lives
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Oct 19, 2017 19:34
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Ein cooler Typ posted:do you feel it's moral to create an addictive drug that ruins lives Do you feel it's moral to make posts trying to ruin threads?
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Oct 20, 2017 00:14
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I wish someone had done that good a job when converting the building I work at into a food factory.
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Oct 20, 2017 10:17
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Straight White Shark posted:Just want to say I don't really care about booze but this is still a cool rear end thread, I enjoy the in progress pics and admire all the work that's gone into your setup. Good job! Thanks! Nth Doctor posted:Looks awesome as gently caress. Oh man, the ceiling was a bitch to get cleaned. We used a little steam generator that fit on the scissor lift and steam-wanded it. Unfortunately, we can't sheet rock the ceiling, though. The building is steel construction with a shallow pitched roof; since we're in Vermont, we actually rely on the buildings heat loss to melt snow and ice on the roof. If we insulated and dry-walled it like we did the main walls, we'd actually risk collapsing the place when the snow finally piled up. So, that means that a few times a year, one person gets to jump in the forklift's cherry picker basket and get lifted up to manually wipe down the ceiling and roof girders. Thankfully this isn't really a high dust environment, so its more of general hygiene and maintenance now that we've gotten it clean that first time. And I took pics of still's mechanics and totally for got to post them, so here they are: The still is sort of a split system. One half of it turns liquid into gas, the other half of it turns gas back into liquid. We'll start with the pot, since that's the first half of the system. It's just that: a pot. It's got a steam jacket around the lower half of it so we can put energy into the system and heat up whatever it is that we're distilling. There's an agitator motor attached to it that drives a mixer shaft, so if I'm distilling something like whiskey we can keep the liquid inside moving at all times to prevent any solids from potentially scorching on the bottom. (In theory that can't happen, since we're using steam instead of a direct-heat like propane or firewood, or whatever. But I'm not taking any chances.) There's also a hatch in the top so I can climb into it between runs and scrub it down. Some distilleries only make one product, and have separate stripping and spirits stills. They literally clean their stills once a year, if that. Where I'm making three different types of liquor, and doing both stripping and spirits runs on the same still, I have to tear down and clean my stuff every time I switch what type of run I'm doing. I'm looking forward to future years when I have multiple stills, because being inside the still is one of my least favorite things. It's usually hot, and the floor slopes in such a way that makes getting a foot hold tough. Even with the agitator unplugged, being around the mixer gives me the willies. But, it's got to be done.   The next half of the system is literally everything else. It's the column, the dephlegmator, the lyne arm, the condenser, and the parrot.  The column is. a 6 inch stainless steel pipe that rises five feet up from the pot. There's a stainless screen welded into the bottom of it so that we can shove copper mesh into it. The mesh is pretty important, especially during stripping runs and the spirits runs for whiskey and rum, since copper is magic when it comes to sequestering nastier sulfur, phosphorus, and nitrogen based molecules that might otherwise foul the spirit. Both our rum and our gin are developed from a molasses heavy mash bill, so there's quite a bit of sulfur in the base that needs to be cleaned out. Some distillers get an all-copper still to do it, but personally I prefer the sanitary nature of stainless steel. Not to mention that as copper sequesters these compounds, it slowly degrades. Running an all-copper still means that you're basically using the entirety of your system as sacrificial metal, and sooner or later you're going to have to decommission it and build a new still. Copper's not cheap. So, we pack 300 feet of copper mesh into the columns that acts both as a chemical filter, and also as a reflux matrix. As the vapors rise up through the column, and contact the mesh, the heavier molecules (like water) condense on the surface of the mesh and start to rain back down the column, causing more and more of the vapor to condense as it precipitates. The net result is that only lighter compounds have the energy to make it up and out, effectively "purifying" the distillate. Here's what it looks like when I've just finished packing the column with fresh copper. I take it out every few runs and run it through a citric acid bath to de-scale it, then rinse and dry it before putting it back in.  The dephlegmator is next, and it's a device that is basically made up of a honeycomb of tubes surrounded by a water jacket. I can pass cold water through the jacket and basically turn it into an in-line condenser that accelerates the reflux process. Gas that made it through the column has to pass through the tubes, comes into contact with the walls, and then is cooled to the point where it drips back down into the column again unless it's light enough to punch through. In a sense this lets me artificially raise the height of the column an additional 15 feet. You'll notice that there's a valve assembly on the device which lets me vary the depth of the water inside the jacket. I can run it full on by closing both the valves, I can run it half-on by opening the upper valve, or I can run it with just a small puddle of water in the base of it by opening both valves. I can also not run it at all by turning the water off at the source. So why would I want to do any of that? If I'm wanting a spirit that is more neutral in character, like the base we use for our gin, then I want to run it wide open. This prevents most of the compounds that have flavor (like phenols and fusel oils) from ever making it into the final distillate, and only pure ethyl alcohol can get through the system. But, in a rum, whiskey, or the botanical run for our gin, I want those compounds to make it, because otherwise the spirit would be flavorless and bland. So I can sort of use the dephlegmator to modulate "flavor volume." It also has a direct impact on the overall "proof" of the spirit that the still is producing. Since only light molecules make it through, most of the water is forced to stay in the pot. With the dephlegmator running full power, the still gives off 190+ proof alcohol (95%+). Great for vodka, but by law whiskey must be distilled at no greater than 160 proof (80%). So it's nice to be able to turn it down a little. You can see the valve assembly in this pic, and further down there's a pic of the "honeycomb" inside the primary condenser. The honeycomb in both the dephlegmator and the condenser is functionally identical.  Next up is the lyne arm where the gas makes the turn to head down toward the condenser. You can take a look at it in the picture I posted for the column - it's the piece at the very top of the assembly with the thermometer on it. Historically, the lyne arm was a very important piece of a still that could greatly affect the character of the spirit by it's geometry. In a still without a dephlegmator of packing in the column, it's the primary agent of reflux and usually where the gas coming from the pot started to encounter more and more surface area to condense and precipitate on. So, a lyne arm that had a positive angle coming from the still would force any precipitate to drip back down the length of the arm and back into the column. A lyne arm that had a negative angle would allow all condensation to drip down into the condenser. The steeper and higher the arm, the more "pure" the spirit would be, and a low arm would let full flavor come through. If you look at old brandy stills, they typically have long, low lyne arms to try and capture as much of the flavor from the wine as they could. (They also captured a LOT of methanol, which is why traditionally brandy will give you a much meaner hang-over than nearly anything else.) Our lyne arm is more or less neutral. It's got a slight bow to it, so that anything that makes it more than half way gets to go on, and anything that precipitates before that ends up dripping back down to the pot. Almost all our flavor control work is done by the dephlegmator and column.  Once the gas makes the final turn through the arm, it's routed through the primary condenser. The condenser is 5 feet long, and constructed like the dephlegmator - a honeycomb of tubes with a water jacket. In the industry, this is called a "shotgun condenser." When most people think of stills, they think of a long helix of copper running through an old barrel, which is called a "worm condenser." Worms are beautiful to look at, and if they're long enough, you can get some great condensation out of them. However, for our needs they're bulky, expensive, and prone to being temperamental about cooling the condensate enough once the water temperature rises above a certain point. You need a lot of water flowing through a worm barrel to keep the thing cooled. The shotgun condenser on the other hand is pretty efficient, provided you start the cooling water flowing before any hot gas gets to the system. (If you don't you're going to be fighting the temperature the whole run.). Typically we go through about ~80 to 120 gallons per hour of cooling water. Either system used, the condensate should come out of the condenser at about the same temperature that the cooling water is going in. If you're running 60 degree cooling water, you ought to be getting ~60 degree liquor out. The cooling water coming out of the system is usually around 120 degrees, so we end up using it as wash water for other equipment or the floors. Here's the end-on view of the condenser, and like I said before, the dephlegmator has the same basic structure. You can see I've got a bore brush that I'm using to scrub it out. I'd just finished running gin, and wanted to make sure it was clean before I made rum. Typically I save the foreshots (high methanol stuff) from stripping runs to do cleaning like this. They strip away any waxed fusel oils really, really well, and then a blast of hot water through the system rinses everything out.   The final piece of the system is the parrot, which is more or less just there to let you take proof readings as the still runs. It's pretty ingenious. The liquid drips down into a U shaped tube that's open on both ends and it pools so that it's about ten inches deep. Then you can float a hydrometer in the lower branch that ends up spilling over into a shallow bowl. By reading where the level of the liquid rests on the hydrometer's hash marks, you can tell the percentage of alcohol by volume. The liquid that spills into the bowl is then drained through a smaller tube at the base of the bowl, and into whatever catch vessel you want to use. Typically I use a few buckets to catch the "heads" of a run, then for the hearths I'll switch it over to the pipe you see in the picture. That's connected to a 300 gallon tank. It's not as "pretty" as it flowing freely into a stainless steel bucket, but it's a while lot more sanitary. I took that picture about halfway into a gin botanical run. It was running about 155 proof, and when it got down to about 105 proof, I switched it to the tails tank. The heads and tails went back into a future stripping run, the hearts got diluted to 80.2 proof and bottled. Ein cooler Typ posted:do you feel it's moral to create an addictive drug that ruins lives i feel it's morally imperati*fart* The Lone Badger posted:I wish someone had done that good a job when converting the building I work at into a food factory. We ended up way more than was demanded by code. The way we figured it was that once all this equipment was in place, it will be a bitch to move it - so do the right thing when it's easy instead of having to spend a ton more effort and money later.
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Oct 20, 2017 13:58
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The distilled vs rectified angle is super interesting information. How do you find out who distills their own vs who just tweaks the mass-produced stuff? We have a couple of small distillers now where I live (Rochester NY). I know they distill their own because you can tour their facilities. I'd like to learn more about the other brands that I buy!
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Oct 20, 2017 16:12
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Is that a dial thermometer on top of the still? Wouldn't an RTD probe be easier to read (you can put the screen at eye level) and also able to be logged?
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Oct 20, 2017 19:29
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Awesome write-up.Weltlich posted:
Do you find you need to do temperature corrections for your hydrometer to get accurate readings? Or do you have it such that coming out of the condenser you're at the calibration temperature of the hydrometer? I find myself constantly adjusting for temperature in my homebrewing sessions.
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Oct 20, 2017 19:49
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The Lone Badger posted:Is that a dial thermometer on top of the still? Wouldn't an RTD probe be easier to read (you can put the screen at eye level) and also able to be logged? It is indeed a dial thermometer. We're planning on going all digital at some point in the future, but for now I want to minimize the number of wires I have to connect up there, and the number of batteries that I have to change. The analog thermometer up at the top of the lyne arm is actually pretty easy to read from the floor. At some point, I want to have everything wireless and tossing data at a few screens scattered around the distillery, so I can wander away from it for a few minutes without worrying too hard. But, that's a budget item for the future. Nth Doctor posted:Awesome write-up. Oh yes. That's largely why I try to dial the coolant water in to a flow rate that causes the distillate to peg at 60 degrees F - that particular hydrometer is calibrated to that temp. Now, if the still hydrometer is off, it's not the end of the world. I take all my cuts by smell and taste, not proof, so the hydrometer in the parrot is largely there to be a diagnostic tool to tell me how the still is running at-a-glance. If I notice it shifting proof over a short span of time, I know something's up, but the actual proof of the flowing distillate isn't make or break. What is make or break is the proof of the liquor in the tank, as a whole. For that I've got a full set of about 10 very specialized, very expensive, and yet very fragile hydrometers that are calibrated to read in 0.1 proof increments (0.05%). I need a 250ml graduated cylinder to use them since they're so freaking fat. I've also got a calibrated and licensed thermometer that gives dead-on accurate temperatures. Between that, the hydrometers, and a computer program that auto-adjusts the proof once I plug in the temperature I can accurately tell the proof of a spirit to the TTB's satisfaction. They're really anal about it, and I'm only allowed to be wrong by 0.2 proof without risking a fine. So between that and the desire to be totally honest with customers, I try as hard as I can to be spot on. Here's a picture of the one that measures between 75 and 95 proof. This is the one that I tend to use the most when bringing things down to bottling proof.  Aunt Beth posted:The distilled vs rectified angle is super interesting information. How do you find out who distills their own vs who just tweaks the mass-produced stuff? We have a couple of small distillers now where I live (Rochester NY). I know they distill their own because you can tour their facilities. I'd like to learn more about the other brands that I buy! The truth is that it can be really hard to tell. You already figured out part of it though: Distillers like for people to come for tours and see where it's being made. If you ever hear of a distiller that's cagey about letting people look behind the curtains, that ought to be a red flag. We're proud of what we've built and what we're doing, and generally speaking we're all geeks of some flavor and love talking shop. So when I hear someone say "I went to XYZ Distillery and they only had a tasting room and wouldn't let me see the still," then I'd gladly put a dollar against them being a real distillery. Maybe they're legit, and they just don't want the public in their facility, but playing the odds I'd still make money way more often than I lost it. If you're at a liquor store and grab a bottle, you can also get a quick feel for if it might be a rectified spirit by reading the back label where the "produced by" block of print is at. If it says simply "Bottled by XYZ Distillery" then it's 100% rectified. This is the stuff that Whistlepig pulled, labeling all their product as "Hand Bottled in Vermont." Sure, it was bottled in VT after being shipped in via IBC totes from a mega-distillery in Canada. They were selling 10 year old whiskey and they had only been a company for three years, so some red flags should have gone up. The problem is that the press is lax about checking this stuff, so they got away with it for a few years before someone caught on. Meanwhile they'd been winning all sorts of awards, because truth be told it is actually good whiskey. It's just not worth $75, and it's not made in Vermont. Grab any good bottle of $35 Canadian Rye and you're getting effectively the same thing. Now they're charging $500 for a 15 year old bottle they call the "Boss Hog" and people are still shelling out for it because there's this meme that the older and more expensive a bottle of whiskey is, the better it is. There's also people like Tempelton and Tito's that put "Produced and Bottled By XYZ Distillery" on their label, which is an even more blatant attempt to obfuscate the origin of the liquor. I'm not sure if Tito's is still doing it or not, they were facing a class action lawsuit about it a few years back, so they might have stopped. I know the judge tossed out most of the lawsuits against them because the TTB had approved the label, not because they were actually making the stuff themselves. Tempelton's bottle has some BS backstory about being a recipe passed down since prohibition, etc etc. Nope, they're made in a mega plant in Indiana. What you want to look for is the phrase "Distilled and Bottled by XYZ Distillery in Cityname, State." That's generally a good indication that it was made by the people claiming to make it. Generally speaking, I won't fault someone for being a rectifier. There's a lot of good rectified spirit being sold out there. High West has some amazing spirits, and they are up front about being a blender that was using rectified spirits to finance building their own distillery. I only really take exception when the marketing flim-flam takes over and people start telling stories about how this recipe was passed down from their great-great-grandpappy and that it's hand-made by a secret order of hillbillies that feed the grain to pigs and you can taste the whiskey in the bacon. That sounds stupid, right? But that's almost literally what Tempelton Rye was saying at one point. I condensed it, but there's nothing there they didn't claim. And it's a crying shame because Tempelton is actually pretty decent rye whiskey. If they'd just say "Blended and Bottled by," I'd have a lot more respect for them. I think I alluded to it earlier, but this is really a symptom of the "Second Wave" of micro-distilleries in the US. The first wave started in 1997, when they deregulated large parts of the mandatory reporting, and made it financially viable to own a distillery that produced less than a million bottles a year. There were a number of entrepreneurs and enthusiasts who started real distilleries for the love of the craft. Unfortunately, some were pretty naive, and did things like sign agreements with Anheiser-Busch that were nominally "Distribution Contracts" that seemed like a great idea. "You just make the liquor, and we'll get you nationwide distribution." But the catch was that there was a clause that said "If you can't make it fast enough, we can force you to sell us the distillery at whatever price we think is fair." We lost a lot of the first wave to vulture capitalism, and since A-B had no idea how to run distilleries, they tended to fold really soon after they got bought out. There's a few still around, but they're sort of languishing in obscurity because A-B has no real interest in doing anything with the brands other than owning them. In the early to mid 2000's the Second Wave started. It was characterized by more of a punk aesthetic and jamming trombones into songs inexplicably. No, wait, that's Second Wave Ska. Sorry. The Second Wave of craft distilling was when people started to understand what a rectification licence meant. Whenever you apply for your federal licence to be a distiller, there's a box you can tick off that says "I want to be able to rectify spirits if the opportunity arises." It's just a single box, and you check it, and all of the sudden instead of having to make things from scratch, you can buy it cheap in bulk, put a flashy label on it, and sell it for ten times what you paid for it. The inside joke in the industry is that the real distillers are actually idiots - seriously, who'd do all that hard work for such small margins? But a lot of the rectifiers had good intentions. It was a great way to start a distillery on a shoestring budget. Get the licence, start rectifying, and then use that cash-flow to finance everything else. The problem was, once you start doing that, why stop? The money's just too good. You're slinging mass-produced liquor, but you've got to keep the marketing angle that you're small, different and unique. So you start telling stories about prohibition recipes. (Another safe bet that it's rectified and is relying on marketing bullshit - it mentions prohibition, bootleggers, or speak easys.) So, why am I doing it? Besides the love of the craft, there's a growing sense of unease in the industry right now that there's a rectification bubble. In a blind taste test, few people can tell any difference between the rectified brands, (for obvious reasons.) Their market growth is basically capped, and they're going to start eating each other, and being eaten in turn by larger conglomerates like Diagio and InBev, etc. There's also the looming threat of new regulations that will require a spirit to state clearly if it's been rectified or produced by someone other than the bottling agent. Really, the only interest I have in rectification is doing collaborations with other distilleries. Like an applejack where I make the whiskey and another local distillery makes the apple brandy. By law it becomes a rectified product because either they have to transfer the brandy to me under a bond, or I have to transfer the whiskey to them under a bond. Anyway, that was a hell of a ramble, here's a tl;dr: Look for: Local Distilleries that let you watch them make their products. The phrase "Distilled and Bottled by XYZ Distillery in Cityname, State" The phrase "Bottled in Bond" (this is archaic, and you don't see it much but it literally means this product was only ever made and bottled by one distillery. It's making a come back to combat rectifiers.) Avoid: The phrase "Bottled by" The phrase "Produced by" Any grandiose stories about heritage, bootleggers, prohibition, etc. (Not saying it's always BS, but it usually is.) Any spirit with an age statement older than the company's been in business. (How are you even going to sell 10 year old whiskey when your "distillery" is only three years old?)
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Oct 21, 2017 03:03
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Wow, thank you for that! 5’d the hell out of this thread.
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Oct 22, 2017 00:29
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Weltlich posted:At the time, I was like a lot of consumers in that I just assumed that if a new bottle hit the shelf that it was from an actual distiller. But around 2009, because I had access to the industry publications, I started to find out that a lot of these - Redemption Rye, Tempelton Rye, and Bulleit Rye spring to mind in particular - were all mass produced at a single mega-distillery in Indiana (MGP) and then sold to smaller "Potemkin Distilleries" that just re-bottled it under their table and sold it at premium prices.
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Oct 22, 2017 01:18
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twodot posted:I'm a person that both likes Bulleit Rye and has been aware they're a re-bottler for a while. Where can I buy the identical but cheaper product? Bulleit's not bad stuff at all - it's just that the whole "Small Batch" marketing angle is total bullshit. Maybe they bottle it in small batches, idk. That said, Bulleit's about the cheapest common bottling of MGP's rye that I know of, and usually rings in somewhere betwen $25 and $35 depending on your state. You can snoop around to see if anyone local's doing the rectifying thing, and if they offer a cheaper bottle, but as far as nationally distributed, Bulliet's your ticket. I really can't badmouth MGP itself much at all. They've got some of the best booze scientists in the business working there and the library of spirits they produce are a blender's dream. You can make so many good whiskies by buying a little of this and a little of that from them, then blending it up in your own facility before bottling it. It's exactly what High West has been doing (Try any of their ryes, honestly,) and they've got it down pat. Their Double Rye works really well because they're blending young and old ryes from MGP, and it makes an incredibly drinkable product for under $40. I like it more than Whistlepig's stuff they're slinging for $150+.
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Oct 22, 2017 01:39
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Weltlich posted:Bulleit's not bad stuff at all - it's just that the whole "Small Batch" marketing angle is total bullshit. Maybe they bottle it in small batches, idk. edit: Like when I care about buying from an actually small distiller, I'll walk to one to one of the local distilleries. I buy Bulleit Rye from Target. I don't think anyone is deceived by the marketing. twodot fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Oct 22, 2017 |
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Oct 22, 2017 03:44
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twodot posted:So you're complaint here is that while they offer a good product at a good price, they don't meet an arbitrary meaning of "small batch" that you personally hold?
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Oct 22, 2017 03:47
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Aunt Beth posted:I think it’s just more how they represent themselves. If you’re going to rectify something that’s mass-produced, don’t bottle it with a story about how it’s your grandfather’s recipe and he’s been making it in a shed in Tennessee since 1840.
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Oct 22, 2017 03:51
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twodot posted:I'm literally looking at a bottle of Bulleit Rye right now. Where do I find the story about the grandfather's recipe (recipe!?) and shed in Tennessee in 1840? My bottle explicitly says it's from Indiana.
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Oct 22, 2017 03:58
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Aunt Beth posted:I’m not talking Bulleit in particular, I was using it to generalize how some rectified liquor is presented as being a craft product. Nobody is knocking Bulleit as a quality rye at a good price. But I think what the OP is saying is that there are liquors (I think he mentioned Tito’s vodka) that try to represent themselves as a handmade craft product when they’re not. edit: OP: Bulleit Rye isn't a distillery, they just rebottle a different distillery's product Me: Ok, but they offer a good product at a good price, where should I get something better? Aunt Beth: Well people shouldn't lie about their histories. Me: I see literally no lies on my bottle of Bulleit Rye. I also see an admission they're from Indiana. Aunt Beth: I'm suddenly not talking about Bulleit Rye. twodot fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Oct 22, 2017 |
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Oct 22, 2017 04:00
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twodot posted:So you're complaint here is that while they offer a good product at a good price, they don't meet an arbitrary meaning of "small batch" that you personally hold? In a nutshell, yes, they offer a decent rye at a decent price. However, it goes waaaaay beyond whatever arbitrary definitions I'm using personally. Note that Bulleit is one of the least egregious of the brands I listed. Like on a continuum of potemkin distilleries, they're on the end that is pretty open about what they're doing. But to say that "most people know better because they can get it at Target" is also wrong. The market research shows that most people don't really know anything about what's in their bottle. As far as most people are concerned, if it looks like it's in an old-timey bottle and it's got "small batch" written on it, then it's a "craft spirit." The TTB talks a good game about "making sure the consumer is educated" by the label. They're the agency that gives me the strict definitions something has to be if I want to call it whiskey, or straight whiskey, or straight corn whiskey, and so on. It's stiflingly strict. Here's an example. About five years ago a few distillers started putting out gin that had been aged in barrels. On the label, they called it "Barrel Aged Gin." The TTB pitched a loving fit and made them recall bottles. Why? The TTB claimed it was misleading to consumers, because according to the definition of gin, there's no aging involved:  So now, if you're making gin and you want to age it in a barrel for a while, you have to literally say "Barrel Rested Gin." Because for some reason that's not misleading but "Barrel Aged Gin" is. And this is where small distillers get REALLY frustrated, because the TTB pulls stuff like that, and prevents us from calling something exactly what it is, but they're A-OK with letting bullshit like "Small Batch," "Prohibition Recipie" and other marketing gimmicks get plastered on bottles of rectified spirits. Why? Because the whiskey definitions don't say anything about it one way or the other, so you can put whatever you want on the bottle just as long as you don't contradict the listed definitions. But you know, I don't think it's unfair to expect some sort of truth or honesty in the packaging for a product you're drinking, even if the TTB doesn't seem to give a poo poo. Now compound this problem: When it comes time to revise regulations in the industry, the TTB usually comes to the producers for labeling input. They also tend to favor ones that have more shelf presence. So when 7 out of 10 bottles on the shelf are being made by rectifiers,they end up with the lion's share of pull when it comes to re-writing the rules. That's why there is no real way for a small distillery to differentiate their product on the shelf as being single-source besides using the "Bottled in Bond" guidelines, which come with their own host of problems. And that's why this isn't just some "presonal problem" I have. It's an industry problem. I'll end with this poor parable: Imagine you went to a farmer's market. There's a bunch of stalls where people in straw hats, plaid shirts, and suspenders are selling vegetables that have been meticulously arranged in wicker baskets on top of gingham tablecloths on top of hay bales. Some of the farmers are talking about how this farm's been in their family for generations, that they're still growing tomatoes like they did in 1873. Others are just saying they "own a small farm." You peek into the back lot of the farmer's market, and you notice a semi-trailer full of the same produce you see shipped to the supermarket, and 75% of the "farmers" are busily picking off PLU stickers from vegetables that came in plastic trays, and arranging them in those wicker baskets. When you ask what's going on, they just shrug and say "Well, I never said I grew it on my small farm." If you're OK with that, then buy some tomatoes. Weltlich fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Oct 22, 2017 |
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Oct 22, 2017 16:16
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I apologize if this is the wrong thread for this, but I’m curious if there are any particular “horror stories” passed in the alcohol-making community when it comes to trying to circumvent the creation process - case in point.
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Oct 28, 2017 20:00
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TheObserver posted:I apologize if this is the wrong thread for this, but I’m curious if there are any particular “horror stories” passed in the alcohol-making community when it comes to trying to circumvent the creation process - case in point. In a modern sense I can't think of many, at least in the US. The TTB here comes down hard and fast against anyone that is adulterating or otherwise incorrectly producing their products, and if you're doing it on purpose, then it can include some serious jail time. For instance, if you get snagged making whiskey with sugar in the mash to boost the proof, but you plead ignorance, you'll probably just face some stiff fines and a recall. If they catch you putting glycol in something, you're going to jail. This is also why you'll never see any Indian made "whiskies" on the US market. Indian makers are notorious for using whatever sugar sources they can get their hands on to make alcohol, but then call everything "whisky." For the rest of the world, if it's not grain, it's not whiskey. India makes some decent rum, though - it's just a pity they don't market it as such. Historically, a lot of this requirement for hyper-specific labeling and zero-tolerance for deviation goes back to the 1870s. The advent of the transcontinental railroad in the US meant that there was now a massive market for hard liquor west of the Mississipi river. Distilleries in the east could not keep up, and since liquor was such a money maker, some unscrupulous people started putting all sorts of awful stuff in a bottle and calling it "whisky." Why bother making good bourbon when you can take isopropyl alcohol (aka rubbing alcohol), soak some tobacco leaves in it, and then bottle it and call it "Straight Bourbon"? Thus, the Bottled-in-Bond act was passed in 1897 to try and set national standards for quality and prevent substandard product from being sold as genuine product. It was literally one of the first consumer protection programs the US had. The clip you posted was actually founded in reality, btw. IIRC, it was Austrian wine, not French, though. They were putting Ethyl Glycol (what used to be the prime ingredient in anti-freeze) into the wine because it is sweet to the taste and it added body and viscosity. It's also fukkin' toxic. When I was working at a retail Wine and Spirits store in the early 2010's I had an older customer come in and I tried to sell them on an Austrian wine, and I was baffled because they had such a negative reaction to it. The owner said that person had been shopping there for almost 30 years, and he'd gotten a bad bottle of the Austrian stuff back in the mid 80's. I'd seen that Simpsons episode as a kid, but never imagined it was based on a true event. I think it's a good lesson in why it's important to only put out the good stuff. Once you get a reputation in this business, it sticks around forever.
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Oct 29, 2017 23:38
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Awesome thread, really interesting reading. I've tried a couple of Indian whiskies recently, single malts from Amrut and Paul John. I found them to be pretty reasonable, in some cases far better than *some* Scottish single malts. That's my two cents of course, everyone has a different palate. The Paul John stuff was interesting as I got to spend a decent amount of time talking with the rep (I'm in retail). They're doing all the "right" things, or at least the things I look for. Non-chill filtration, no colouring etc. It's going to be interesting to see where they are in a few years as their prices are very reasonable, especially compared to other non-Scottish singles malts.
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Oct 31, 2017 03:24
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slothrop posted:Awesome thread, really interesting reading. That's good to know - for a while now single malt Indian whiskies have been suffering from the bad reputation that the more common, molasses-based stuff has garnered. I know that every few years, either the SWA sues India for trying to ship sugarcane spirits to the EU in bottles marked "Whiskey", or India sues the SWA because they're not allowed to ship molasses based spirits called "Whiskey" to the EU. I'm given to understand that the Indian usage of "whiskey" has historically been sort of a regionalism, like parts of the South in the US call every sort of cola "coke" regardless of what sort it actually is. Compounding the problem, a number of Indian distilleries would effectively make rum, then blend it with a small amount of imported scotch whiskey and bottle it as "Scotch Whiskey." Thus the feud with the SWA, who takes that sort of thing really seriously.
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Nov 1, 2017 00:32
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I have some experience with vacuum distillation and some backers interested in alcoholic vacuum distillation for human consumption. After a cursory search, there is a lot of "distilling is a trade" on the higher end and "dump the tails" on the lower end but I haven't found a clear list of congeners, especially as marked by starting materials, yeast strain and fermentation temperature (but a more general primer is fine). I can make educated guesses or, I guess, do some HPLC work, but since distillation (even good distillation) predates HPLC, there has to be an easier way. I'll admit I haven't done as much searching as I could but, hey, I figure this is a good space to ask a professional for their professional advice about a fairly niche subject.
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Jan 2, 2018 05:01
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CassandraSupreme posted:I have some experience with vacuum distillation and some backers interested in alcoholic vacuum distillation for human consumption. After a cursory search, there is a lot of "distilling is a trade" on the higher end and "dump the tails" on the lower end but I haven't found a clear list of congeners, especially as marked by starting materials, yeast strain and fermentation temperature (but a more general primer is fine). I can make educated guesses or, I guess, do some HPLC work, but since distillation (even good distillation) predates HPLC, there has to be an easier way. Unfortunately, the answer is that documentation of that sort is next to non-existent in the public domain- at least in a capacity that would assist someone trying to tailor-make a spirit with desired characteristics. Academic work on distilling has largely been stymied by both industrial atrophy in the wake of prohibition, current regulations and restrictions on distilled spirits, and a general reluctance at the university level to let students study booze. This is changing, but it'll be 10 to 15 years before our knowledge base catches up with the beer makers. Right now, most of what you're looking for is "in house" knowledge compiled by the big guys like Bacardi, etc, and good luck getting a peek at that. That's not to say that you can't find a few gems out there. This paper informed a lot of our early decisions on our rum program: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3769&context=gradschool_theses It's probably close to what you're looking for if you want a list of congeners, etc. It still doesn't break it down by "this yeast makes this flavor," but it does a decent job listing off what a person can expect when using a sugarcane and molasses substrate. There's another study that broke down aromatic esters and precursors from wine yeasts, but for the life of me I can't find it anymore. The link went bad a year or so ago and I can't find another copy. So there's a lesson there - If something seems to be interesting or valuable, print that poo poo out and keep it in a 3 ring binder. There's a book called Brewing Yeast and Fermentation by Boulton and Quain that's pretty much the yeast bible. It goes into great detail on yeast metabolism and how pressures and stresses can affect the output. It's $70 bucks used and worth every penny. I'm working on a paper with UVM this year on rye whiskey production and will be using their lab's Mass Spectrometer and Gas Chromatograph to collect data on the compounds we produce in our whiskey. It'll be a while before that gets published (since the rye's not even harvested to start the tests yet), but if you're interested, keep corresponding with me. Part of our "mission" as a business is to grow the industry though partnership with academic institutions. So if you've got access to a MS, GC, or HPLC, then use it. But there's also the basic reality that this is a highly creative industry that is as much cooking as it is science. Even within a limited field like "Rye Whiskey fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae and distilled using a pot still" you're going to get soooo many variations. Imagine telling three different, yet talented cooks to make "Fish and Chips, using cod and a beer batter." You're def. going to get three things that are recognizable as Fish and Chips, but they're also going to be different to the point where you can't mistake one chef's dish for either of the others. And that's what makes this industry awesome.
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Jan 3, 2018 17:12
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Thanks, that helps! A few resources and confirming that what I was seeing was real as opposed to me being lazy  Scale of 1-10, how much should I worry about going blind?
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Jan 3, 2018 18:32
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CassandraSupreme posted:Thanks, that helps! A few resources and confirming that what I was seeing was real as opposed to me being lazy As long as your setup doesn't include a radiator from a 60's Ford truck and you take good head cuts, you'll be fine. Taking head cuts isn't hard, it's just that some people get greedy. The thought of "losing" alcohol sucks, but at production scales, what's lost is miniscule. On a 600 gallon batch of rum mash, we get about a gallon and a half of true foreshots that gets used as cleaning solution around the distillery, and about 8 to 9 gallons of heads that is recycled back into future stripping runs. There's still good alcohol in the heads, it just too "rocket fuel" to make it to my final cuts. I probably could take half that and still have a sellable product, but why compromise quality? Brandy's a different animal, though, you'll want much larger fore-shot and head cuts due to the increased production of methyl alcohol that fruit tends to generate. Edit: When I take my cuts, I'm sort of like Winnie the Pooh at the bees nest, standing by the parrot and dipping my hand into the stream to keep tasting and smelling. Once it has the right flavor and aroma, that's when I make the call to start collecting the heart. Early on, I don't taste, just smell - because I don't want to get any methanol in my system. Once the foreshots have passed, then I start tasting a small drip here and there until the "rocket fuel" quality fades from the liquid. Then I know we're in the hearts, and I divert the stream to my catch tank. Weltlich fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Jan 3, 2018 |
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Jan 3, 2018 18:47
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That helps! I know the scale up is not linear, but since smelling/tasting my distillate isn't normal practice, assuming a clean fermentation (adequate nutrients, good temperature control, etc. You can choose your substrate if that helps, seems like sugar for rum which is awesome) out of a 5-15 (you choose, I know it doesn't scale, I can scale, I just want a solid starting point) what would be your anticipated 1) total yield 2) head yield 3) tail yield 4) drinkable yield. I've seen anywhere from 1/8th to 1/3rd on the ends. I've got more control since I can modulate pressure but guidelines are good. My instinct is to just make the purest product possible. But that's no fun. So I want to add enough contaminates for flavor and goodness, the magic of fermentation/distillation but I also don't want to endanger anyone. Add in an economic aspect, there is a middle ground somewhere.
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Jan 4, 2018 05:24
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CassandraSupreme posted:That helps! I don't use a vacuum setup, so your milage may vary - I use a 15 gallon pot still in our lab, and typically run 10 gallon test batches through it. Using a 50/50 sugar and molasses rum recipe, since that's what I've go the most data on, I can figure that I'll get about 2 gallons total distillate from a 10 gallon batch. Of that, I take off about 100ml of foreshots from the stripping run, which is really conservative. Nearly all of the methyl alcohol would be out in the first 25ml, but better safe than sorry. The rest will run out into my catch basin, and be about 2 gallons of 100 proof low wines. I'll clean out the still, put the low wines back in to do a spirits run. This is where I start taking my real cuts. I'll usually take about 200 to 300ml as a head cut - which is a larger cut by percentage than I'd take on the production floor, but more on that in a second. I'll collect about 2000ml of what I consider to be heart cut (between 175 and 150 proof), then run the rest (about another 2000ml) to the tails. I'm running a pot still, so I'm never really worried about lack of flavor or body. Now, here's the caveat - while a lab still will give you an outstanding prediction of what a production level spirit may taste like, it's never perfect. Lab stills run faster than big stills. Lab stills tend to run a little lower proofed, too. When I'm making rum on our big machine, it'll hit 175 proof and just hang there for hours before finally taking a quick tumble toward 100 proof then a long run down to 20. The lab still might hang at 175 for a couple of minutes, then start a slow downward trend to 100, and an even longer one to 20. This is because small stills tend to have a much higher power/volume ratio, so "heavier" molecules (water, fusels, etc) tend to start vaporizing earlier in the run. So, I (and presumably you as well) will end up taking better and more discrete cuts from a production sized machine than you will from your lab setup. In regards to "purity," it's a term I try to steer clear of because of the stigma of "impure" spirits. The truth, as you've figured out, is that it's impurities that actually make spirits interesting. Ask most people off the street if they want to drink the purest whiskey (or rum or whatever), and they'll almost unanimously agree they want their spirits as pure as they can get - but in truth the purest whiskey you can find is vodka. So I tend to use "taking clean cuts" to describe my methods, since I'm selecting for as much of the good hearts as I can without including any of the stuff that truly detracts from the drink. It's stupid, but it's a semantic hangup I have. Sort of like if someone offers me a "pure oysters" on the half shell, I'm going to look at them funny, because I know how oysters work and there is no such thing as a "pure oyster." But if someone offers me "oysters from a clean estuary" then I know they mean these are still raw filter-feeders, but at least they're from a ecologically sound habitat. Out of curiosity, what makes you want to go with a vacuum setup over a pot or column? There's no wrong answer, but it's always interesting to know what other distillers are using and why. What products are you thinking of making at a production level?
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Jan 4, 2018 16:22
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Holly poo poo. I sort of knew but never really understood how much science goes into the making of booze. This thread is outstanding. I had to laugh when I saw you mention titos vodka. They have been playing recently on the radio that they were the start of the texas small batch distillery business and that he started off making a still from pictures of prohibition era stills. Glad to know it's as bs as I thought it was. Count in one Texan who would be intrested in the up and coming whisky.
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Jan 4, 2018 23:54
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Weltlich posted:Out of curiosity, what makes you want to go with a vacuum setup over a pot or column? There's no wrong answer, but it's always interesting to know what other distillers are using and why. What products are you thinking of making at a production level? Thank you for the technical explanation! That really helps a lot! I'm going the vacuum route for the following reasons: 1) Ability/access: I've worked with vacuum distillation (not for human consumption, hence the questions) so it's something I can do and I can easily create test batches using equipment I already have. Additionally, I know people who have worked with varying scales of vacuum distillation so while scaling up to production levels won't be easy it's something that I realistically do with the resources I have available as opposed to more traditional distilling where I'd be starting from the ground floor. 2) Novelty: You can do things with pressure control that you can't do at atmospheric pressure. For example, with a simple set-up, I can easily make 99.9% ethanol. With a complex set-up, I can make 100% ethanol. As soon as it gets exposed to the air, it will suck in moisture and the percentage will lower but that's something you simply can't do at atmospheric pressure. As we discussed, if I made absolute alcohol and diluted it with water down to 40% ethanol it'd be boring vodka with a hell of a marketing pitch. It also opens a lot of cool possibilities. One area that is particularly interesting is organic chemicals that change as you boil them. As an avid beer drinker and brewer, I'm particularly interested in hops. As you boil them, you create different compounds for aroma, flavor and bitterness as the acids isomerize in water. If you tried to distill an IPA at atmospheric pressure you'd end up with a bitter mess because of how long you would have to boil it. Not so in a vacuum. So you can capture the essence of hops as they appear in beer in your distillate, as opposed to just dry-hopping your booze which produces seriously lackluster results. I want to capture the moment of a beer the way a good eau de vie captures the moment of a ripe fruit. Control: On top of that, you have a layer of control. Talking about rum, ethyl pyruvate is a big component of "rum" flavor. If I want a rummy rum, I can dial that up in a very precise way. If I want it to be less buttery, I can easily fractionate out the diacetyl. If I want more butter, I can dial it up (or add it in afterwards). If you are familiar with your starting material (or know it precisely), you can have incredible control and consistency with vacuum distillation. That level of control is very appealing to me, though I'm concerned that it might lead to a sterile product -- isoamylacetate is the major flavor component of bananas but if you've ever had banana candy you know that isoamylacetate doesn't taste like bananas.
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Jan 5, 2018 02:20
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