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RobertS

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Everything posted by RobertS

  1. Ahh, thank you JailBreak. My in-browser viewer was having problems but my dedicated viewer program handled it fine. In the process of hunting, I found how to confirm if you have the latest version: https://www.reginfo.gov/public/Forward?SearchTarget=PRA&textfield=5100.16 Jump to the last entry and check the 'date received' vs your current version. You can also download the form from there by clicking the 'number of forms' value on the far right.
  2. I went to the TTB website to download an updated copy of form 5100.16, transfer in bond, and cannot actually view it. All I can see is: Is anyone else having this issue with what's currently available on the website? All the other forms I tried are working fine. Does anyone have a recent version that displays correctly? I do have a copy of the form from 2013, if that would still be considered valid. I'd like to submit for ASAP approval once the government comes out of shutdown, and can't exactly ask the TTB at the moment for obvious reasons...
  3. Spirits made for unaged consumption are also going to be made a bit different than those for aging. There a number of unpleasant compounds that react during maturation to create complex and complimentary aromas and flavors. At this stage it is probably extraction that has not been balanced by time to mellow, but don't be surprised if your product comes out a bit simple/flat compared to aged whiskies and rums from the same distillery you bought from.
  4. Don't you go spreading your rugged individualism around here, buddy.
  5. Might be a copper compound? Those can range from green to blue.
  6. §19.619 explicitly calls for a tare and gross weight when a package record is required. I could have sworn this was required for use in storage, but the only areas I see calling for it are when the packages are going to leave bond. Even the requirements for a transfer in bond don't require a more detailed gauge. I'd double check with a consultant before doing the less stringent thing, but the 8-ball looks promising. I had figured the big boys just had a more automated way to weigh in bulk, but maybe they are just using accurate-but-not-approved flow meters and 'assuming' everything is equal.
  7. Lacto will smell funky similar to pungent sour cream. Brett smells like band-aid, wet horse, old leather, or medicinal depending on strain and concentration. Everything you describe sounds like infection to me. Is there a dead leg where you may have dirty wash lurking and waiting to pitch an infection into your next batch? Your CIP cycle might be missing a section of your transfer set up.
  8. Indeed there is. Chapter 4, page 11, bottom entry. Flavored whiskies can be 60 proof instead of 80 and must have the predominant flavor in the designation. So they would need "hop flavored whiskey" unless another flavoring is stronger.
  9. Where would I go to acquire a plant or two of quality wormwood of my very own?
  10. Got me to refresh my history knowledge, I had thought the Whiskey Rebellion being put down had settled taxation on liquor permanently. Jefferson repealed the specific tax that the Whiskey Rebellion was fought over in 1802, but there is probably another tax I'm not aware of that went until 1817. Congress set a tax on whiskey in 1862 to fund their half of the Civil War, which then wasn't felt in the South until after it ended. I can only find the barest overview (and only the perspective of the moonshiners being the nastier side) of those early days of the IRS. @Southernhighlander, do you have a book or documentary you recommend for moonshiners vs government at the birth of the IRS? What little I can find says that it will be a great read.
  11. There's a more going on than just fermentables for rum production. Are you using nutrients? Monitoring and adjusting your pH? What sort of numbers were you getting for gravities and yield? Solids are particles in suspension - sugars, acids, minerals, protein, fats, etc. I found a paper from the 40's on the breakdown in molasses. Ash would be the solids that don't burn off. The data sheet the molasses supplier gave you is as good as you'll get without some heavy lab equipment, but you can run a test fermentation under ideal conditions to determine expected yield.
  12. Operating theory for holding vodka before bottling for me has been degassing volatiles into the head space. Even with no air transfer, trace volatiles and minimal ethanol enter the head space due to vapor pressure and are left behind when transferring to another tank or bottles. Bottles have less head space and are more likely to have it shook back in shortly before opening.
  13. What hard spirit would need to be pasteurized? As to bulk vs bottle, that depends on how clean your bottling line is. It is standard practice for dairies pasteurize in bulk and then take extreme pains to maintain a sanitary environment. Canned foods are often packaged and then pasteurized in the cans, due to the nature of the sealing process. It will be a lot easier to retrofit post-filling pasteurizing into an existing line and a lot less fuss to maintain. There are trade offs to product quality, but yours is probably not as delicate as dairy?
  14. Technically, you could have a non-age statement solera bourbon by not designating a barrel as the new youngest until it is 4 years old. Since you have met the aging standards and aging ends once you are no longer in new oak, the additional however many years would be irrelevant from an age statement standpoint. Not much help for a young distillery, but a heck of a show piece for local craft.
  15. We've actually done both on and off the grain for bourbon and rye whiskey. Yield and unaged profile were indistinguishable as far as I could tell, haven't yet pulled samples to see if they age different. We have a Meura bladder filter, which lets us press pretty much any mash bill dry. There are advantages to being attached to a brewery.
  16. You can also try a scaled up version of the moonshiner's mason jar method. If you have suitable containers, you can separate your run into several time/volume units to keep/toss/blend to taste.
  17. I take it that the overthinking is because of TTB Ruling 2016-3? My paranoia stems from Chapter 4 only defining the general 'flavored whiskey' class but not saying anything about sub-classes. Given that major distilleries have flavored whiskies with sub-types (e.g., Jim Beam's Red Stag infusions) I suppose that flavored whiskey is more of a modifier than a monolithic class? Dehner, may I ask what sort of wording and "use" you gave the TTB?
  18. Drums can be funky at a small scale distillery, since they may be treated as a tank by some places and a package by others. If you don't move it around, especially if you have added a drain port, you can probably call it a tank and give it a static ID. If you palletize and store it, it would be given a package ID. I don't have any literal drum-tanks, but I do have a couple tanks that are smaller than drums and it's made sense in record keeping so far. When I transfer into/between tanks, I have a record that says how much of what was moved, from where to where. If it splits and remerges a single lot, no problem. If it blends two separate lots, time to make a mingling record entry of how much of what went in and thus became the new lot. Either way, I have a step-by step record of what was in each tank when, where it came from, what it became, and where it went. The tank is also labelled with its current contents at any given time, but that's dry-erased on while the tank number stays the same.
  19. And on not needing to identify individual packages within a lot, I still find it much easier to have a secondary serial code (I just tack an extra letter on the end) to ID each individual barrel. It takes almost no extra effort and makes inventory and tracking progress much easier, at least for me. Also, when I put spirit in drums for temporary storage (or long-term macerations) I still give them serial codes. Again, very little effort and makes it much easier when more than one person may touch things.
  20. We have less than twenty people, any of which might touch MRO. About ten actually do more than once a year and about six actually use it regularly. Maintenance schedules are spread out across about a dozen manuals right now, compiling those is part of the project. Edit: Apparently 'about' is my word of the day.
  21. I know most of us on here are probably too small to really worry about this, I'm attached to a brewery large enough that we are and I've been tasked with sorting out our non-production inventory. I've been cataloging everything we have and reading up on Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (the MRO in the title) inventory management but the examples aren't as helpful as I would like. I don't feel we're large enough to purchase a software suite to handle the thinking part, we're DEFINITELY not large or focused enough in our needs to have a vendor contract, and 'centrally located storage' is a funny way to put 'the back corner of the mezzanine'. Does anyone here have a manual spare parts management system they're happy with? How do you keep usage records straight with more than a few users? Did you manage to sell the idea to your whole staff, or does someone need to go through regularly and see what's missing? For a little leg up on people who (like me a month ago) haven't even heard of MRO, here are some articles I've found helpful. http://www.supplychain247.com/article/five_basic_practices_that_can_quickly_close_the_gap_with_mro_inventory/inventory https://www.idcon.com/resource-library/articles/best-practices/1059-storeroom-spare-parts-what-good-looks-like.html https://www.lce.com/Changing-the-Storeroom-Culture-to-Best-Practice-Performance-1292.html
  22. I've seen Keurig soup. Keurig gins may be the next big thing, Roger.
  23. Given the rounding artifacts in the TTB tables, my guess is that key data points were collected and the rest were derived by linear interpolation without an over-arching formula.
  24. Having worked in a food packing plant, I can see the advantage to slot drains for incidental messes and I wish we had them there. But it looks like the way slot drains deal with the concerns brewers/distillers have of not being able to handle dumping tanks is 'do something else with slurries and solids'. http://blog.slotdrainsystems.com/5-issues-brewers-must-consider-about-their-trench-drains
  25. Ask your certifier. If you don't talk to them, they will assume regular use and only put it out to a year tops. Even if you can't push past a year, it's still good to be able to recalibrate twice for the price of once and be able to cheaply recover from the inevitable dropped hydrometer.
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