PeteB

Thanks very much for that link Carl. It was very interesting reading.

interested to know what you will do with the dried mash?

I do my own malting of rye but do not dry it. I malt only enough for one batch at a time then use it "green" it saves a lot of time and heating costs. 80% of my mash is crushed unmalted grain. I suspect that using 100% green malt would produce some strange cabbagy flavours because of the attached roots and shoots. see http://adiforums.com...l=+malting +rye

Is this quote talking about wort cooling which is before fermentation, or the still. Copper is very efficient for heat transfer but I was thinking of the chemical reactions that would occur. I have a spare large copper heat exchanger that I could dismantle and clean, that is why I asked the question.

It would be much easier to weigh spirit then add the water once. Weighing smaller amounts on those scales will be less accurate. Yes, it can be awkward to get tank onto the platform. I use several methods. If you can tip the tank over a bit by hand then place a block of wood under it then push the tank up straight and slide onto scales. Or lift tank with levers and chock up higher than scales then slide scales under etc. forklift would be safest but take care not to bump the readout. I use up to 200 litre (approx 50 G US) they are a little bit of a struggle but I can get them on by myself with the block of wood. With 2 people it is easy.

The safest method would be to get the mash cooled and add the yeast as quickly as possible, but it is not the only way. See http://adiforums.com...=+sour +buffalo Similar principal to sourdough bread. It is a little risky just using the wild bacteria but it produces some very nice spirit as Nick Jones can vouch.

I need to increase the capacity of my shell and tube wort cooler (wort = mash with solids removed) I have a lot of copper piping that I could easily convert to cooling wort, but wondered if there are any bad reactions with copper! Thanks Pete

Jedd. I had considered a press, but when the centrifuge built up a layer of packed mash and stopped filtering, I have not pursued it. I have a wool press that I could drag outside and give it a try one day with some spent mash. It would be a bit messy but if I give it a go I will report back. I suspect I will have the same problem, a layer of solid mash will build up against the filter material and clog. Jake, I am unable to get hold of rice hulls at an economical price. No rice grown here. I did an oat + rye mash and that ran off really quickly. The oats had the husk still on them and I am sure that increased the speed of runoff. Someone on this forum did suggest some time ago that "even a handfull" of rice husks would speed up the process. I have a bit of an understanding of the science of porosity and I am sure there needs to be quite a lot of husk before there is any increase in porosity.I am continuously experimenting with amount of crushing, strike temperatures and various enzymes. Enzymes do make the wort thinner but don't seem to speed up lautering very much. The solid inch or so of mash that builds up on the screen is by far the biggest problem. I am not using clarifyers as I am not concerned about a small amount of solids getting into the still. A small amount of caramelising and charring gives a nice "smokey" note.

That is what I was getting at Scott. Why pay for a hose that is over spect. and over-priced? For $18 I could get about 40 feet of good garden hose with fittings for floor washdown Any suggestions for the cheapest options for each application?

There is probably one compound that distillery hoses can be made from that will handle all situations, but I imagine it is quite expensive. I would like to discuss the options, especially in regard to price. We need to move high ABV spirit Low ABV Hot mash Warm mash Hot stillage Hot water Cold washdown water I think most on this forum agree that high ABV spirit can be stored in High Density Polyethylene drums, could HDPE hoses be used? (In Australia we call it - black poly pipe) They are a bit rigid but very cheap! What about PVC? Obviously no problem with cold washdown water if it is reinforced. I think the cheap reinforced garden hoses are PVC. I am guessing they are no good for high ABV but does anyone know if this is correct. I have seen lengths of clear PVC(I assume) in distilleries, used for siphoning or pumping spirit. I use a short silicon hose for siphoning samples. Are there types of silicon hose I should not use? I have a hot washdown hose that is rated to 15 bar. The only issue I have with that is keeping it looking clean. It is white,or at least was.. I will try to buy darker coloured in future. Are most hoses used in the wine industry OK for a distillery? They are easiest for me to buy.

I have been lautering 100% rye for the last 2 and a half years. It is very slow. I need almost all the solids out because I have a direct fired still. I have tried a batch centrifuge but even that plugs up and also the solids are too slow to remove. I am currently thinking of building a fine rotary screen, on a slope. Pump the mash in one end and tumble until it falls out the other end. Put a water sprinkler inside (sparge arm) to rinse the sugars out. My current lauter screen gets about an inch of solid mash on it then it slows to a trickle. If the screen was rotating then that solid mash should keep falling off. It would be fairly simple to build and should be self cleaning. Do you think it would work? Has anyone seen anything like this? Thanks Pete

Barrels are often tested by adding a small amount of water then compressed air. They are rolled around and if there are any leaks the water will show up. I use re-use barrels. They have often been left to dry out for several months. They shrink, the hoops come loose and they leak. But it is not a problem. Firstly drive the hoops tighter and fill with water. They will most likely leak and often quite fast, so leave a hose dripping very slowly and the next day they will have swollen and be watertight. I have never had one not seal. If there is a small seep then use a small hammer and hit the wood around the leak and it will usually seal. I am not a professional cooper but I have had some training. I dismantle and refurbish all my barrels, including re-firing.

Welcome Northstar and blond.chap What are you guys going to be distilling? blond.chap said " the tax business is a little different" The words TAX and LITTLE should not be used in the same sentence here in Australia. Have you seen how much excise tax we have to pay? and there is GST on top of that as well. Hope you can help us get it reduced

Suggest you check out the following link http://adiforums.com/index.php?showtopic=2522&hl=neoprene&st=0 There was some discussion about gasket material. I built my own still and had the same problem with uneven flanges I use "O" section closed cell neoprene. Depending on diameter it will seal some very uneven flanges Pete

Generally it is quite safe to use a valve (on the outlet side) to slow the flow from a centrifugal pump as long as there is enough flow to keep the liquid from overheating in the pump. I have been doing it for 50 years. Reducing the flow rate of a centrifugal pump with a valve also reduces the energy use. As a rough guide, a centrifugal pump with valve almost closed will use half the power compared with outlet fully open. For a pump that is running all day it would be more energy efficient to use a variable speed drive, but if you look at the performance curves of your new pump you will find it is not as efficient, (power use),at lower revs. I don't know why Lenny's pump seals failed so quickly. Maybe there are some very modern pumps that I have not experienced. Warning, I know of pumps that have been run for too long with no flow. The water actually boils and one burnt a friends face with steam when he took the bung out. The pump was still fine.

A Scottish distillery, I think it is Glenfiddich, uses gas fire. The bottoms of the stills are 12 mm thick. $$$ Why? Someone might come up with a bit more detailed chemistry, but basically there are a lot of slow chemical reactions with hot copper. Inside there are sulphates and oxides forming with the copper and these get dumped with the spent mash. Oxides and nitrates form on the outside where the flame is and these flake off. The copper very gradually thins. If it is not used very much the thin copper will probably last many years.

.065 inch = 1.6 mm, very thin base for direct flame. If the still is going to get some serious amount of work it won't last very long.

Looking good Jim. A couple of questions if I may, as I love creating things with my hands Looks like your copper sheet is resting on a piece of thick conveyor rubber while you hammer it, is that correct? What type of hammer do you use? The top section of the head above the rivets, is that one piece or several? If it is one piece,it is amazing how far copper can be pushed. Looks as if it might have been spun first then hammered!

The following is from an article written about my distillery, and mentioning Scotish distilleries. As Cowdery suggested, thin mash helps, roughly lautered in my case. "...double distilled via a direct fired method - no steam coils or water jackets, just flame on copper. It takes attention and skill to manage charges like this. Mess it up and you get undesirable burnt flavours. Get it right and you can introduce some interesting toasty grain characteristics to the whisky as parts of the mash fall on 'hot spots' and are gently ‘roasted’ on the base of the still. This artisanal technique has been, and still is, much admired by the Scots, yet sadly, it's now rarely applied mainly for reasons of efficiency. The Springbank distillery at Campbeltown is one exception. Here “...the wash still is fired from the bottom by live flame and the spirit stills are heated by steam coils from inside. It is thought Springbank is the only distillery in Scotland to do this. Most distilleries these days use only the coils… [Yet] When other distilleries switched from direct flame heating to solely steam coil heating in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s many managers reported a change in the character of their spirit, and rarely for the better.”"

I stumbled across the following. Of interest was "The simultaneous ingestion of ethanol has no appreciable effect on the proposed "safe" and "toxic" doses when considering exposure over several hours." Hum Exp Toxicol. 2001 Nov;20(11):563-8. Defining a tolerable concentration of methanol in alcoholic drinks. Paine A, Davan AD. Source IRG in Toxicology, King's College London, UK. Abstract Methanol, a potent toxicant in humans, occurs naturally at a low level in most alcoholic beverages without causing harm. However, illicit drinks made from "industrial methylated spirits" [5% (v/v) methanol:95% (v/v) ethanol] can cause severe and even fatal illness. Since documentation of a no-adverse-effect level for methanol is nonexistent in the literature a key question, from the public health perspective, is what is the maximum concentration of methanol in an alcoholic drink that an adult human could consume without risking toxicity due to its methanol content? Published information about methanol-intoxicated patients is reviewed and combined with findings in studies in volunteers given small doses of methanol, as well as occupational exposure limits (OELs), to indicate a tolerable ("safe") daily dose of methanol in an adult as 2 g and a toxic dose as 8 g. The simultaneous ingestion of ethanol has no appreciable effect on the proposed "safe" and "toxic" doses when considering exposure over several hours. Thus, assuming that an adult consumes 4 x 25-ml standard measures of a drink containing 40% alcohol by volume over a period of 2 h, the maximum tolerable concentration (MTC) of methanol in such a drink would be 2% (v/v) by volume. However, this value only allows a safety factor of 4 to cover variation in the volume consumed and for the effects of malnutrition (i.e., folate deficiency), ill health and other personal factors (i.e., ethnicity). In contrast, the current EU general limit for naturally occurring methanol of 10 g methanol/l ethanol [which equates to 0.4% (v/v) methanol at 40% alcohol] provides a greater margin of safety. PMID: 11926610 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

I run an alembic pot still, ie no plates From my experience the more alcohol there is in the pot the longer it takes to run. The rough science to it is this: To evaporate a liquid you need to add "latent heat of evaporation" at "X" BTU's per pound of liquid that you actually boil off So if you are boiling off 4 times as much alcohol it will take substantially longer, assuming you are still putting in the same number of BTU's/hour It won't take 4 times as long because alcohol needs only about 1/3 the BTU's compared with water so as Porter said it will runoff faster- at the start. Once contents of the pot is down to 10% it should take the same time to finish. The big time saver is you don't need to heat up your wash 4 times. But as said by Roger, "where are you going to get the 40% wash?" a 40% low wine yes. OK, this is my experience with my alembic, and my take on the science. If plated colums behave differently I would be interested to learn. Pete

To take 80 proof down to 40 proof it is not nearly accurate enough to add equal volumes. You need to take 1 volume of 80 and add syrup until you have exactly 2 volumes. That allows for volume contraction, if any, of the syrup The problem starts when you try to measure volumes very accurately. Firstly the temperature needs to be at the temp of the calibrated measuring vessels. A calibrated glass measuring cylinder is not accurate enough for TTB A certified volumetric flask (they have a large body with a narrow neck) at 60F (or 20C) would probably get close enough, but you would need two, one with twice the volume of the other just to do a 50% reduction. Then you would have to wait some time until the temperature of the mix dropped back to 60F (diluting produces heat) and hope you haven't overshot. etc..etc. As has been said before, diluting by mass is much easier to get it accurate. But in this case I am not sure if the TTB tables can be used to calculate the weights because I am unsure if high sugar syrups contract the same as pure water.

A young Australian died a few days ago from drinking methanol laced cocktails in Bali, there have been about 8 other serious poisonings of Australians in the last year in Bali. I did a qiuck search and found the following from 2009 --------"An American died on Monday from alleged alcohol poisoning after being treated for two days at Sanglah General Hospital, Bali, raising the total number of fatalities from the deadly alcohol mix to 23 in less than 10 days. Forty-eight-year-old Rose Johnson was admitted to hospital on Saturday, suffering symptoms of severe poisoning, Sanglah's head of forensics, Ida Bagus Alit, said Monday as quoted by tempointeraktif.com. Samples of the patient's blood and stomach were sent to the National Police Laboratory in Denpasar. Alit could had yet confirm the cause of Johnson's death, but said she had shown symptoms typically caused by consuming alcohol mixed with methanol. Saturday saw the first death of a foreign victim in a spate of fatalities caused by suspected alcohol poisoning in Bali. Earlier, a resident of Canggu, North Kuta, 59-year-old Briton Alan Colen, was found unconscious after having consumed arak that he had bought from a stall near his house. After being taken to Sanglah Hospital he was later pronounced dead by the attending physician. The hospital had treated 51 people for alcohol poisoning since last Monday. Of that number, 18 are still undergoing treatment. Mixing alcohol with other ingredients is not uncommon in Bali. Mixing arak with methanol increases the drink’s alcohol content, in some cases to poisonous levels."

I have never done grain in, but some comments I have heard elsewhere are-- you need a bigger fermenter and bigger still and you need an agitator on the still.

And to make things even more confusing, I did the tour of Wild Turkey with some of you at the Louisville conference. Our guide said they used a "pot still". When I asked her to explain, she said during its travels through the distillery the spirit dropped onto some steam coils in a vessel that looked like a pot- ie a continuous pot still. (ps.I have noticed that some distillery guides don't always know the answer but will give you an answer anyway)