JustAndy

Do the Danfoss valves every need servicing or adjustment? We've had one on our still for 15 years controlling the dephleg and it seems like maybe it's sensitivity has shifted lately.

It is not how I do it but there are many different ways to do it so I couldn't say. Are you happy with the results? To me that seems like a pretty low proof to be distilling single pass at and like it would be very tailsy.

I have a lot of experience running whiskey on a 4 plate hybrid still. 40% charge strength is too high for making whiskey. Running the strips without plates or reflux should give you a low wines around 25-30%. If the low wines are above 30% you should dilute them down before the 2nd distillation. At a charge strength of ~30% you don't need to engage plates or reflux, although it can be useful to engage some towards the tails. If you want to do the spirits run with reflux and plates engaged you should dilute down to a charge strength around 20%. My experience is if you compress and remove the heads of a 2nd distillation you will end up with uninteresting whiskey that ages poorly. If you are going to run with active reflux condenser (dephelg) you need to track the temperature of the water in, water out, still head below dephelg and still head/lyn after dephelg to understand what you are doing. Everything is different if you want to run it as a single pass whiskey. It can work for making whiskey but it requires more fiddling than many would like to do which is why most people end up stripping and double distilling.

I understand Apple Brandy to not require oak vessel aging or an age statement. Time in a non-oak vessel (barrel) will not count towards an age statement and the usage of staves requires a label disclosure. DISCLOSURE “COLORED AND FLAVORED WITH WOOD _________” (insert chips, slabs, extracts, etc., as appropriate) is required on labels to indicate treatment with wood · APPLICATION Applies only to whisky and brandy treated – other than through contact with oak containers – with wood: In any manner or form, either directly or indirectly, e.g., chips, slabs, extracts, etc. nAt any point during the production or storage process, up to and including the time of bottling

That's a thought but we use the hot condenser water for cleaning and mashing. I also dont want the wine to spend any appreciable time above room temperature and i need to cool the stillage before disposal anyways. AC supply house is a good idea

I've got a 55 gallon steel drum on wheels that I'd like to turn into a wine preheater / heat exchange tank. I pump the hot wine stillage into the drum, then pumping/gravity flow wine through the coil and into the still, cooling the stillage and preheating the wine. I need a probably 1/2" copper coil with 1.5" tri-clamp ends that I could drop into the drum. Similar to a worm tub condenser just inverse. I know it's out there somewhere but most of my googling turns up undersized, overpriced homebrew immersion coolers

Without doing any heat calculations, why not just get a smaller still? 250 gallons a week is not much, even if you only distilled 1 day a week you could do it pretty easily on a 100 gallon still if you use a heat exchanger or thermal tank to preheat the incoming wash with the hot stillage.

The yield is all the alcohol produced (heads + hearts + tails). Having a variable sized hearts cut on a manually run dephelg still is a user operations issue. You don't actually know the yield from each mash because you aren't running out the tails, and where you are making the tails cut is dependent on how the still is operated (heat input and dephelg water input & temp), meaning you dont know how much alcohol is left in the pot. You might also have a mashing issue but you won't know that unless you have actual yield data. To have good yield data you need accurate mashing SG, FG (which might need to be obtained via lab distillation), and volume. Then you can look at the expected mash yield vs the actual yield off the still.

When you are saying 110 PG yield, is that the total alcohol collected (heads + hearts + tails) or the hearts? If the 110 PG is the total alcohol collected, what is the abv at the parrot when you turn off the still and stop collection. when you say "steam open full, dephleg open wide with dephleg temp reaching approx 200 F" does that mean water flow to the depleg is as high as it will go? And what is measuring 200F, the water out or a thermometer in the vapor path? My guess is you aren't running the dephleg consistently and are turning off the still too early. So when you are running with higher steam/more heat/hotter incoming deplegwater, you are getting less reflux and thus getting to a lower parrot proof earlier in the collection and then leaving more alcohol in the pot when its turned off.

Moutai is the largest alcohol company in the world with a market cap of like 200 billion dollars so that might be a factor.

I never really got a satisfactory answer about what it was, a sample left to settle eventually has the color fall out though and we were able to filter out the color with a pad filter. Once the color was removed it was difficult to note any difference between a typical, non-colored run. We've had it happen a few other times (maybe 20 times out of the 6000+ runs on this still), it is hard to come up with a commonality as it's happened with apricots, pears, and red wine. A winery client thought it might be a byproduct from incomplete malo-lactic fermentation which made some sense in a few of these contexts.

You absolutely can make a congener rich spirit on a continuous column. Bourbon, Armagnac, Calvados, Rhum Agricole etc are all distilled on continuous columns.

Hi Dave, are these glass or plastic?

What do you mean when you say must? Must usually means the crushed, unfermented grapes and occasionally the pressed, unfermented grape juice. The solids left after pressing are pomace. To distill pomace in a steam jacketed still, the jacket needs to be on the bottom of the still and not on the sides, there is very little liquid at the side edges of the pomace so it will cook and stick very easily. Was the pomace destemmed? Destemmed pomace is much easier to shovel in and out of the still as it doesn't form irregular masses. Much commercial production of pomace spirit is done with steam injection stills with the pomace loaded in baskets, or in small bain marie stills as the weight of too much unsupported/structured pomace will compress the pomace and hinder the evaporation of alcohol from the center of the mass.

https://issuu.com/artisanspiritmag/docs/artisanspirit_issue011_web/24