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JustAndy

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Everything posted by JustAndy

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Moutai is the largest alcohol company in the world with a market cap of like 200 billion dollars so that might be a factor.
  8. 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.
  9. You absolutely can make a congener rich spirit on a continuous column. Bourbon, Armagnac, Calvados, Rhum Agricole etc are all distilled on continuous columns.
  10. JustAndy

    Grappa

    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.
  11. https://issuu.com/artisanspiritmag/docs/artisanspirit_issue011_web/24
  12. The smell and large heads cut suggests poor ferments. What was the temp & yeast strain of the mash that finished dry? It seems likely to me it was too hot and the yeast produced off flavors. And obviously the half fermented mash could have had any number of issues/flaws. As for the 96%, my question would be did you measure each jar as it came out, and when was the anton par last calibrated.
  13. The grain is really tiny if you are milling it, we used a sorghum milled into flour. We mashed it just like 100% rye which worked fine, similar to the scheme you laid out. Mashing into hot water leads to a lot more dough balling compared to adding grain and flour at lower temp and then raising the temp with cooking but it's not a problem at our scale.
  14. There are a few 'sour ale' cask finishes out there; Mosswood did one and so did Sagamore Spirit. I tried one from another producer called Virgil Kane and I think the cask finish was a negative and not a positive but everyone's tastes are different.
  15. Likely 70F was too low for that yeast to finish in a reasonable time for infection took hold. 4-5 days is a good goal to finish out in. Also unlikely you need to do a spirit run unless your column has poor efficiency/performance.
  16. Some yeast strains when stressed produce more congeners which end up as heads in vodka distillation (and potentially whiskey distillation): so generally higher temperatures, higher sugar & alcohol percentages, poor yeast nutrition or inappropriate yeast strain, low pitch rate. Poor sanitation or long lag or fermentation times can lead to bacterial or non-inoculated yeast infections which can produce elevated congeners and acetic/other acids which increase heads as well.
  17. Yes, making brandy is financially very challenging. If you have a winery there are many alternative feed stocks that you can distill like lees, pomace, hard press, etc but it is still a lot of work. Depending on what you are distilling (like brandy, rum, or whiskey) you are going to want to get copper into the vapor path in some fashion.
  18. I would be wary of using a mash pump for finished spirits unless you are very certain of your cleaning regime and the alcohol tolerance of the pump components. For batches that small you can save a lot of filtering by leaving time to settle and then rack fruit and other liqueurs.
  19. Direct steam vs steam jacket could be a big change if there is a botanical load in the still. My two guesses are: 1. switching from stainless to copper condenser as that can have a huge impact on the copper contact (depending on where the condensation point is in the copper condenser) and some botanicals you are using might be more susceptible to reacting with copper (grape fruit is an example) 2. A change in one or more of the botanicals (different source, or older, poor/extended storage) maybe of one of the fixative botanicals like orris or angelica root .
  20. What was the previous still design/shape? Are the distillation proofs & cut points the same? Since you've tried bypassing the plates, I wondered about the condenser of the vendome vs the previous still- Does the vendome have a copper condenser or stainless?
  21. Your state laws and zoning may have some impact. In Oregon, spirit storage & distilleries do not count by default as an agricultural usage for land permitting & zoning purposes and would require getting an exemption through local government.
  22. I think yes: How will it become slurry? It seems like without agitation/mixing/blending create a slurry of grain and water I would be concerned at the start you'll have super high viscosity pump clogging dough balls.
  23. The advice I would add is a regimented cleaning schedule only works when you are running a consistent product. Maybe you are planning to, but most small distilleries don't. We can distill pear brandy for two months without needing to use anything more than a brush and hot water, but distilling wine with sulfites requires refreshing the copper with citric after a week. Running rye mash might require using caustic if there is an issue with mash conversion, but bourbon never does. Unnecessary cleaning with caustic and citric will wear the copper. If you only wash your jeans when they are dirty they will last longer than if you wash them every week.
  24. If you haven't worked in a production environment or in spirit sales the sooner you engage with a professional the better. I've been involved in a handful of projects where an inexperienced owner/founder bought the equipment & designed the layout and it always works out to be much more expensive and less functional than if they had spent $500 or whatever right out of the gate to get quality input rather than listening to equipment reps & engineers.
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