MichaelAtTCW

Check out Ferrinox labelers in Italy. We sell their labelers here in the US, but I believe they have representation all over Europe. Their labelers are pretty much bomb-proof. The FX-10 uses optical sensors. There are no real cons to optical sensors except if your label is clear. Then it may require a special sensor that is more expensive to detect the edge of the label reliably. Optical sensors may require recalibration if you're switching labels, but it's very simple to do. Takes a couple of minutes. Labelers that use optical sensors are also more expensive than mechanical sensors like on the Bottle-Matic/Primera.

You may find that you still have to make choices and sacrifices when it comes to deciding on the solids-handling pump. If you are able to move solids at lower temps—say, > 180 °F max—this opens up some options. More affordable pumps like a flexible impeller pump use elastomers in the head that will quickly degrade at high temperatures. And when I say quickly, I mean they will degrade in minutes if the material is too hot. Temperatures that approach 180 °F can be fine, but you will get shorter impeller life. As others have noted, a lobe pump is a great choice if your budget allows for it. Lobe pumps can move solids at temperatures way past boiling. Their high price tag can be off-putting at first, though many distilleries come to terms with the price eventually once they realize how much simpler a bomb-proof pump can make things. Lately we've been selling a lot of Ampco's ZP1 lobe pumps for solids/mash transfer. I wrote this article about mash pumps for breweries, but many of the same principles apply here when it comes to selecting a solids-handling pump. If you're looking for an AODD pump, we offer the SimpleSpirits series pumps for distilleries. Let me know if you need any help selecting a pump.

Hi @lowerylisa1 FM CSC EP 2 is food-grade, and has all the alphabet soup certifications to back it up: FDA, NSF, CFIA. It's best used as a lubricant for sliding surfaces or bearings where incidental contact may occur. Regarding the particular application in this thread—as a grease for the sliding surface of the Mori Filler nozzle—it works well. As for the o-rings in your pump, there are some greases specifically for o-rings that will likely work well. We sell Huskey Lube-"O"-Seal (the "O" is for o-ring), for example. It's another food-grade grease that's very tacky/sticky to stay in place even in harsh/turbulent conditions. It's teflon-based rather than mineral-based. I don't know that there is a "best", per se. With regard to mineral-based vs. polymer-based, I suppose it depends on the o-ring material itself. If you go with something like the Huskey that's specifically for o-rings, it's unlikely that you'll go astray. If you're looking specifically for a silicone-based lubricant the Haynes that @Silk City Distillers mentioned is probably good. We don't sell it. We do sell this silicone-based lubricant from Polysi that works very well. My guess is that unless the o-rings are made of a very exotic elastomer, any of the above will work just fine. If the pump manufacturer specified a Silicone-based lubricant then there's no need to reinvent the wheel, and the Haynes or PolySi will do just fine.

Many thanks, Tom and @Silk City Distillers! Glad to help. Supporting a piece of gear we sold you is really the least I could do. I wouldn't say I "ask for nothing in return". Helping people pursue their passion with a bit of advice, equipment, and problem-solving is satisfying in and of itself. I'm certainly grateful to be a part of this community.

Good to hear. Yes the concave part of the cup seal should be facing downward. And yes, lubing that seal makes a big difference in terms of smoothness. Sometimes roughness is caused by a burr on the stainless. Sometimes it's just that seal that has a bit of extra material and needs some lubrication.

@Silk City Distillers Yes, it could be just metal/metal wear and binding. I'd break the nozzle down removing all elastomers and slide the outer nozzle slowly over the inner to try and determine the source of binding. It could be a bit of stainless that has worn over time or because of the entry of some foreign particle. If you have some fine grit sand paper and scotchbrite you may be able to bring any protrusions back to level and get the action back where you like it. If the source is on the inside of the tubing it may be more difficult to access, of course, and would probably require a round file As far as grease, you should try a thin layer of some tackier grease on the area of the nozzle just behind the spring so that it stays on longer than silicone spray, which is very thin. A standard general purpose grease like FM CSC EP 2 would be good. We sell it, or if there's a store local to you that offers food-grade tools & supplies for restaurants or the like, they probably carry it as well. Keep me posted. Same applies to you @Foreshot Usually nozzles get smoother over time, so it sounds like something got into the interface between the outer and inner tubing and is causing binding.

FWIW, the estimated throughput of the Mori Filler for 750 ml bottles is 8 BPM on the 4-head and 12 BPM on the 6-head. Of course, these values depend heavily on a number of factors: operator dexterity, viscosity, perhaps even elevation above sea level, since the filler is gravity-based. The speed of a full line will also vary based on many of the same factors, as well as the fact that a bottling line can only ever be as fast as the slowest individual step. I would guess that very few operations have personnel with the focus and manual dexterity to achieve 12 BPM, but I have spoken with some who claim to!

Stainless steel filters are—in my humble opinion—a waste of money. I think people buy them based on an incorrect assumption. Namely, that they'll last longer or be more reusable. The thinking goes something like: Plastic is disposable. It has a finite lifespan, and most plastics must eventually be discarded Stainless steel is reusable, and most stainless steel implements last indefinitely Filters made of plastic (or glass) components must eventually be discarded Therefore… Filters made of stainless must last indefinitely! It ain't necessarily so. Filters must be discarded because they eventually get plugged up with tiny particles. Cleaning/backflushing can help up to a point, but eventually there is no amount of regeneration that can bring the filter back. The crud is baked in to the filter pores. This happens regardless of whether the filter is made of plastic or stainless steel. Stainless steel is more difficult material to make into the kind of porous material that makes for effective filtration. Consequently, stainless steel filters are generally more expensive, less efficient, and tend to clog more quickly than filters made of glass, polypropylene, etc. Stainless steel filters are great for applications where the filtrate is too hot, cold, or aggressive for normal filter media types, but I don't think they make sense in most beverage applications. They cost more, and the perceived benefits are illusory. So what does work well for spirits? Pleated glass fiber cartridges (like the Graver GFC cartridges we carry) are great for spirits. Because glass fiber media carries a slight ionic charge, it is more effective at picking up haze-forming colloids and the like. Pleated polypropylene (like the QMC cartridges we carry) is the all-purpose standard. It is inert, so no charge, but very effective at general solids removal. WRT your second question about pre-filtering affecting speed, it shouldn't. Every filter has different nominal flow rates, which will be affected by all sorts of upstream factors. The rule of thumb I count on is that you will see about 3-5 GPM of flow rate for every 10" of filter. So if you are using a 30" filter, you should see a maximum potential flow rate of 9-15 GPM. If you are using two, three, or more 30" filters in series that doesn't change anything. If one of the filters clogs you will see a decrease in flow rate, of course.

We make the MiniMax closed loop rinser and most folks use their own spirits (some use neutral) to rinse. Usually a couple of gallons. The keg holds five, but you fill it about halfway. The spirits are filtered during recirculation, so you needn't be squeamish about using your own product to rinse. There are only residual drops that cling to the sides of the bottle with surface tension, so people just typically put the bottles right on the filler wet. People typically only try to dry the bottles if they're rinsing with water. I don't know of anyone using air to dry the bottles—usually just time and bottle racks. I imagine it would be quite time consuming.

We've helped a ton of distilleries get a bottling line set up. Usual flow is MiniMax rinser (if rinsing is desired) into Mori Filler. We sell a ROPP Capper, but not a T-Top corker. For those we recommend CCR Engineering. Finally, heat shrink, and label. Running semi-auto equipment like the above will decrease the required labor, particularly using a multi-head filler like the Mori. However it will still require several people with a certain level of manual dexterity to run efficiently. A "well-oiled machine" operation has a person working at each station (rinsing, filling, corking, capping, labeling). Or doing it in "phases": rinse/fill + cap in phase one, then capsule & label in a second phase.

Sounds like you're looking for a must pump rather than a mash pump. Must pumps are large enough to handle whole fruit. We sell a heck of a lot of must pumps to move grapes in wineries: crushed, destemmed, and even whole grape clusters. Although juniper berries are a bit smaller than grapes, the same principles should apply, so I'll give the same advice I give to folks looking to move grapes. If the berries and botanicals are whole—that is, not mashed and minced to a smoothie-like consistency—you will need to consider how you'll feed material to the pump. Often I speak with people looking for more of a "must vacuum" rather than a pump. Unfortunately there is no such animal. Most must pumps have an auger hopper that moves material directly to the inlet of the pump. So, you will need to ask yourself how you get the berries into the hopper where they can be consistently fed into the pump's inlet. If you can take advantage of gravity—like if the berries are in a tank above ground level, and you can rely on the berries draining out a bottom port—and you use a very short length of hose to the pump inlet, you may be able to forego the hopper. You may still occasionally clog somewhere in the run-up to the pump inlet. A screw pump may work. You don't want to run screw pumps dry, though, so you'd definitely want to monitor the inlet to make sure it isn't clogging if you're not using a hopper to feed the berries. I wrote a whole article about this. It's targeted to wineries, but the same concepts will apply to any solid/semi-solid pump applications. In short, the best solutions are typically large peristaltics or RPD pumps. Less expensive pumps are definitely available, but will have some trade-off: they can't run dry without catastropic failure, they can't reach very high pressures or pump long distances, they are not particularly gentle (if that's a concern), etc.

We normally recommend Butyl or UPE (a.k.a. Distillery Hose) for anything above about 20% alcohol. It's not a hard and fast rule, though. The manufacturer doesn't provide any specific guidance about the alcohol-% cutoff point, but based on ethanol's fair-to-marginal compatibility with PVC, it's a safe number. Still, I completely understand that the price of the Kanaflex/Line hoses is very attractive relative to premium hoses like GlideTech Butyl or Distillery.

I wrote an article on cleaning hoses that may be of some use, and here's a link that outlines different cleaning formulas and typical max temps/concentrations for different hose liner materials. Any time you have an oily product and a non-oily product it's best to keep the hoses separate. Clean the hose, scrub it, and keep it in good shape, but the oil will stick and—depending on what type of oil it is—will typically shorten the hose's lifespan. Some fats and oils are quite aggressive on hose elastomers. Folks that work with both oils and spirits—say, a facility that produces both wine and olive oil—know that cleaning something well enough to prevent cross-contamination is a fool's errand, and just keeping the products completely separate will pay for itself quickly in time spent trying to completely remove all traces of oil. As far as the hose sponges (or "pigs", as some folks call them), they're brilliant. A small air diaphragm pump should push through, though how quickly it will push is a matter of its GPM rating and its max PSI. One customer I spoke with just uses compressed air to push the sponge through a wet hose, so that could work as well. Sponges are best at cleaning stuck-on solids, though I imagine they will have a noticeable effect on oil. Using the sponge after chemical cleaning and just before final rinsing will likely yield best results.

3 plates is not much surface area for solids, so it does stand to reason that it would load up quickly. Depending on the size of the pads, even a 10" pleated P7 cartridge may have more surface area. We have a few herbal liqueur producers who ended up with our triple column filter housings and say it's been life-changing, as it allows them to run from coarse to fine in a single pass. But they are definitely out of the price range you're looking for. Generally, we advise people with high-solids products to start with bag, lenticular, or plate & frame filtration. They tend to be the friendliest solutions for high-solids filtration. The cheapest option is going to be around $1400 for the Hobby Plate & Frame Filter, though. That said, I think that unit in particular would work pretty well for you if you used it with a crossover plate so that you can use two different filter coarsenesses in a single pass. I think the advice from @Silk City Distillers is on point as far as cheap solutions go. It will be slow-going, but I think it's ultimately be a question of spending more on a setup that does what you want quickly, but is overkill for your batch size, or spending commensurate to your batch size on a more manual process.

A paddle flow meter with a totalizer will work. They work best with pumps that have a smooth flow without much turbulence (flexible impeller, RPD, or centrifugal). You must ensure that there is relatively straight path in the run-up to the meter itself. No elbows or twists. We sell flow meters from Burkert, and include a length of stainless Tri Clamp spool for the entrance and outlet that match the manufacturer's recommendations for straight, hard-piped tubing to the entrance of the meter.

Magnetic flowmeters require the passing liquid to be conductive. Distilled spirits that have been proofed down with RO or otherwise deionized water are typically non-conductive. So while a mag flowmeter may work in some cases, it might be touch-and-go or inaccurate depending on how conductive the liquid is. Just a heads-up.

We sell a ton of filtration products for distilleries: Lenticular Bag Cartridge Filtration Plate & Frame And the pumps too. Give us a call if you have any questions: 707-963-9681

There is no question that it is an international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Assuming you're in the US, Tri Clamp will be way cheaper, and way the heck more common. Hoses, valves, pumps, etc., will all be tri clamp by default, and you'll have to search or adapt to DIN, and pay more in the process. DIN is nice in that you can put it on one handed (till you have to tighten it down), but in all other senses doesn't make much sense. Again, assuming you are based in the US. If you're in Europe, perhaps it's more common.

The elements that contribute to the flavor and color of your product are typically in solution, and won't be removed with barrier filtration unless that filtration is very, very, very fine. Whiskey and spirits are very low-solids products. Most of my filter customers can go a long time on a single set of filters. Months or more depending on how they take care of them. All that being said, the difference between 1 micron and 1.2 microns is extremely minute for most spirits. I would be very surprised if changing from a filter size of 1.0 vs 1.2 microns had any perceptible effect whatsoever, either on the colo(u)r or flavo(u)r. I'm sure the claim is being made in good faith, but it sounds a bit exaggerated. Filters are a "sticky" product. Once a customer has found the filter that works for them, the cost of switching to another brand is pretty high relative to the benefit of sticking with tried and true—even if they do save a few bucks on a per-filter basis. That being the case, I've heard more than a few exaggerated claims from filter salespeople in order to bring them into their ecosystem (Bear in mind the source of this claim, of course. TCW also sells filters). So, the 1.0 vs 1.2 micron distinction sounds like FUD to me. Your apprehensions are very common. New distillers are worried about taking out too much (e.g. "removing flavor") or not enough (e.g. ending up with haze). Removing "too much" with standard, nominally-rated barrier filters—which is 90% of what we sell to distillers—is not easy to do. Staying from 1-5 microns should have no practical effect on your final product, unless fine carbon dust and bits of char are part of your brand. The "not enough" side is tougher. Haze removal has been discussed quite a few times on this board. The short answer is there's no magic bullet. If your product ends up with haze, you may wind up needing to make changes to the final product to remove the haze (or educating customers regarding why haze is a "good thing"). The changes don't necessarily mean that the product will be harmed or diminished, but it may be altered. If you're wary of chill filtering you can try filtering at normal temps with a more highly charged filter media that contains diatomaceous earth, or borosilicate glass. That may be enough.

Sounds like the question is whether leaving the cardboard and dust in the spirits would have any deleterious effects on quality. I'll leave that question to the taste testers. But if the goal is to lower the cost of the rinser, I don't think removing the keg and filter would have the desired effect. The keg and the filter aren't big factors in the overall cost of the unit, and since you'd have to add a second pump downstream to pump it'd pretty much be a wash (no pun intended). That said, I've been thinking about it and may have some ideas on things we could do for an economy version…

That's it. Keep in mind that the crud coming out of your rinsed bottles would be headed back to your product tank. If it's closed loop and recirculating, you'll need a filter somewhere in the mix. Otherwise you're rinsing with dirty liquid (or sending dirty product back to the tank). If I were to make a lower-cost version of the MiniMax, I would probably leave off the pump and let users connect their own AODD. The pump is the biggest single line-item on the bill of materials, and I'm guessing many distilleries have an AODD they could use. We could also remove the pneumatic timer, and only rinse while the bottles are being held down, but I think long-term that's not as nice for ergonomics and consistency. It would make it quite a bit cheaper, though.

McFinn makes a few models of pump. Is it a US-FIP? No suction of liquid could indicate an air leak somewhere, which would typically be fixed by changing o-rings & seals until the culprit is found. If it is a flexible impeller pump I would try introducing some head pressure by partially closing a valve somewhere downstream. Try this in both directions if possible. This assumes you can get liquid to the pump inlet somehow. If it can pump at all and you introduce pressure downstream, any leaks may become visible. If possible, use different hoses, gaskets, valves, etc. so that the source of the issue can be narrowed down to just the pump head. We're not in NY, but let me know if we can help getting you a new pump. We sell a lot of pumps to distilleries. Good luck.

$2,795 for the Four Head.

For those who'd rather outsource tool building so they can focus on their product, we make a ready-to-use automatic recirculating rinser that's in tons of distilleries: The MiniMax. We just finished work on a four head version, by popular demand. The top and bottom sets of heads operate completely independently—they each rinse on their own timed cycles. This allows the user to get a good rinsing rhythm going for bottling. Two bottles rinse while the others are being taken off and a new set of bottles is put on. Two bottles on, two bottles off, two bottles on…