Jump to content

Cultus Bay Distillery

Members
  • Posts

    23
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    5

Posts posted by Cultus Bay Distillery

  1. Andy, I think the difference between your potstill stripping runs and mine are are simply a matter of how far you take the distillation before you shut it down. Making the assumption that most (but certainly not all!) of your alcohol has been collected by the time you've collected 20% of your wash volume, then (with a 10% wash) 1/5 volume at 50% and 1/3 volume at 30% is pretty much the same thing. Understand I'm talking rough approximations, but not far off for a sanity check.

    As far as %s of heads, hearts, and tails in a final spirit run, that depends a lot on your fermentations and how you distill.

  2. Another datum, if all very ballpark: If I potstill a 10% wash (say 100 gallons for giggles) to a final head temp of 99C, I'll have pretty much all the origonal ethanol in the collected distillate, AND the ABV of that distillate will be, very roughly again, 50%. If I have all the ethanol, 10% of 100 or 10 gallons, in a a 50% mixture, than i have collected 20 gallons of distillate, approximately, or 1/5 of the original still charge.

    Now that's a stripping run, with no feints separation, and you can argue that 99C is too far, and that my numbers are only approximate (and they are, but pretty close), but the above scenario is a good place to start when trying to predict an outcome.

    How much you set a side as feints depends mostly on 2 things, your fermentation and your palate so your real numbers may vary a lot.

  3. Nabtastic called it, at least in part. When you're doing strictly barley malt mashes, which we do a lot of, you need no nutrients at all. In fact, for us, our barley malt fermentations are as fast as anything I've ever seen, just a bit over two days, and certainly faster than any sugar wash with high added nutrients.

    We aren't doing any other grain mashes, but I did a lot of bourbon washes in the past, and they also fermented well with no added nutrients.

    I heard someone once, I think a yeast company rep, say that barley and grapes are yeasts very best friend, and everything that yeast could desire, but for anything else you may need to add nutrients.

    It's worked for me.

  4. Ok. My research indicated that not all poitin was made with any unmalted barley, although lots of "less historically accurate" poitin is made with all kinds of fermentables. For reasons of the stipulations of our Washington State Craft Distillers license, which decrees that >50% materials be certified grown in Washington, and because certified barley malt is available to us, while certified unmalted barley is not, we'll stick with the grain bill we're using.

    At any rate, the green label, the shamrocks, and the name don't seem to legally imply a specific grain bill, and it's a very nice whiskey.

  5. We just introduced our "Irish" whisky, but of course we can't call it that. What we can say is that it's a triple-potstilled single malt whisky with a green label with shamrocks, named "Mulligan XXX". We're hoping people get the idea. Helping things out, a Irish waitress at one tasting we did sniffed it, and said, "Jameson". I'm happy with that.

     

    As far as the "known by customers" part, while the first batch was aging, we sold it white at 110 proof and called it "poitin", because it's identical in specifications to that tradition Irish folk spirit. Of course, almost no-one knew what the hell poitin was.

     

  6. 18 hours ago, Dehner Distillery said:

    Was just thinking about something that was said as I was driving home today.

    something about " the end of stills in crappy buildings"

    It makes sense. If there are more distilleries coming on line and more of those distilleries are super nice. Well, when someone goes to a not so fancy distillery it just could possibly make that crappy building distillery look a lot crappier. And if you had a cocktail room in a crappy building, then no one would go to your run down place and you go out of business. POOF>>> your gone......... unless your distribution is awesome.

    Just thinking.

    Just personal opinion and experience speaking, but by far the most innovative and carefully made spirits I've tasted were made in old warehouses, barns, and outbuildings, but when I taste in a gleaming fancy distillery I expect the spirit to taste like marketing, rather than quality. I've been wrong, some, of course, and Woodinville Whisky makes a very nice bourbon in an upscale "distilling palace".  YMMV.

    ZBob

  7. Admittedly, we're a tiny operation at the moment, but our location on a recreational waterway determines that we also can't discharge waste coolant. I built a closed-loop heat exchanger from a Harbor Freight shallow well pressure system, a 24" Harbor Freight fan, a shroud, and a BMW M3 radiator. Although our ambient may (depending on what part of California you''re in) be lower than yours, the system cools our potstill and both condensers on the column still. The column has a 5500W element, and the potstill burner supposedly can put out ~25,000W, although after boilup we drop it way back. Because the delta-T is lower, chilling wort is slower than I'd like.

    I do have a modification ready to install that should increase our cooling capacity greatly. It's a couple of drip irrigation "misters" between the fan and the radiator, so I'll get all that phase-change energy from vaporizing the mist.

    See it here.

  8. Great advice! I've encountered some relatively flavorless juniper berries, but fortunately never used them in a commercial product. Penzey's Spice Company is very good (in my opinion) for quality, but they stopped selling in bulk at bulk price. Now we use San Francisco Spice Co. for the "easy" botanicals, and Mountain Rose (I'm an ex-pat Oregonian) for the less common ones. So far our flavor has been great. I'm not sure exactly the reason, but people comment (and I agree) that our gin is "brighter" than most London Dry types.

  9. Bluestar, thanks for handling what I've come to call the "magic boiling point myth", which often ends with the proponent stating that if you can hold the wash temperature higher than the boiling point of ethanol, but lower than that of water, you can get just ethanol out of the condenser. I've been known to rant on the subject, and you did much better than I often do.

    Actually, as beverage distillers we almost never run into totally immiscible liquids, although we commonly deal with non-water-or-ethanol mixtures that approach concentration of immiscibility. Our gin, for instance, is close to louching (incipient immiscibility), such that temperature or ethanol concentrations can cause or reverse louching. I think everyone's absinthe is similarly unstable.

    Even in essential oil distillation, where those oils are mostly immiscible with water, much of the oil is actually mixed with the water as a hydrasol,

    Hope I didn't muddy the water.

     

     

    • Thumbs up 1
  10. On 1/6/2017 at 6:03 PM, Huffy2k said:

    Welcome! Love the packaging!

    Is that Liberty Pole Spirits?! My 3-greats grandfather was arrested in Berlin Pennsylvania by Washington's (or maybe Hamilton's) army during the whiskey rebellion, and his crime was erecting a liberty pole, from which flew the motto "Liberty, but no excise". In my "amateur" days, I used that name of my gift bottles.

  11. On 2/15/2017 at 8:00 PM, TzuZen said:

    I'm not from Hawai'i. I actually live in Memphis, TN and I work as a certified flavor chemist specializing in savory flavors. 

    So what am I doing here? I'm curious about the world of distilling spirits and the aging process of spirits in barrels. What kind of aging conditions, barrel type, barrel size, etc affect the final spirit that winds up in the bottle. Does volatile compound testing get done on aged spirits to aim at an optimal blend or is it done by evaluating the individual aged spirit and blended by testing? 

    If you mean mass spectrometry or gas chromatography, that's usually priced well above what small distilleries can afford, but I'd dearly love to compare lab results against palate determinations. I can get a rough idea of what I'm tasting from just knowing vapor pressures, probable original concentrations, and substrate and fermentation chemistry, but that's a pretty rough guess.

    I need to dig some more into the forums. I'm an information junkie and really enjoy the digging into a subject.

    I grew up in Wisconsin and I rather dig brandy and cognac. Imagine that. I appreciate spirits more as I'm getting older. The glass matters. 

    I've had great luck with brandies and grappas, and I'm striking some deals with local wineries to expand our product line in that direction.

    I currently commute during the week to my bread n butter gig. I enjoy delving into subjects and I'm enjoying my foray so far into this world of spirits. 

    All the best,

    Susan

     

  12. Hi. I'm Bob, the designer, builder, recipe wrangler, tax-bungler, chemist and engineer at Cultus Bay Distillery, a tiny distillery on the banks of Cultus Bay. Our DSP is now about 9 months old, and we started conventionally producing a vodka, and old gin recipe of mine, as well as a triple-potstilled single malt white whisky we've named (legitimately) poitin. On St. Paddy's day we bottled our first batch of aged poitin, proofed to 86, as an Irish whisky (actually a single-malt with an Irish name and shamrocks, hoping they'll figure it out).

    I'm a potstiller and brown liquor maker by nature, but for the vodka and gin base we built one of the new (to me,anyway) condenser-controlled vapor management stills, which appears to work beautifully, even in the ham-fists of an old pot-thumper like me.

    I've read the ADI newsletter for perhaps a year, but I never realized there was a forum. I love a good forum.

×
×
  • Create New...