Water and waste water requirements

[Spazsquatch]

We've been slowly (understatement) pulling together our plans for a distillery and recently came across a property we are interested in. The county it is located in has asked us to indicate how much water we'll require and what volume of waste we'll produce is. That threw me for a curve.

We are in Ontario and the legal requirement to have on-site sales is a 5000L still, which we'll use for producing low-wines and will also serve as our mash tun. Using brewer's mash water calculator I was able to estimate that we would use about 2500L during the process assuming evaporation and boil off scale proportionally from the 5G guide I used. If the output were 40% ABV, the total waste of water and solids would be 3000L, assuming I didn't try to capture the solids. Then there is obviously some water needed for cleanup, is it safe to think this is under 100 or so litres?

Each distilled batch of low-wine would be obviously have some water waste left behind as well, but that's going to be a couple hundred litres of pretty clean water vs. the 5000L still output.

Do those numbers seems reasonable at all? I'm trying to come up with a worse-case scenario since I think this is more about determining if the township can handle the requirements more than the facility. Am I completely off base?

[Sherman]

Don't forget the RO water flushing and the boiler blow down. Bottle rinsing if you are going to do that, and any cooling water you may dump.

[Spazsquatch]

Riiiiiight.

RO I can figure out based on production estimates, bottle rinsing seems like a negligible amount for the scale I'm looking at, but boiler blow down and cooling water, oh boy. I don't even know where to start with those. Probably the equipment manufacturer?

Thanks for the heads up Sherman.

[Sherman]

just did this exercise for Liepers Creek distillery. Had Franklin County TN waste management as an observer at Limestone Branch Distiller. There are a lot of sneaky sewage sources.

[Rickdiculous]

Whatever you think you are going to use, it may seem like a lot to you in comparison to what you use for your bathrooms. But big department stores will probably flush more water down the toilets of their restrooms in any given day than you will use making whiskey. Don't be afraid of this number. Given your calculations with a reasonable addition for unforeseen water and margin of error you should give them a comfortable number.

Your issue of solids is where you make get some blow back. Some municipalities will let you put your stillage down the drain others with a prescribed amount of dilution.

Where I am in Minnesota, my county asked me how much water I would use and when I told them around 4000 Gallons/ 15000L a week and possibly double that as production increases they smiled and said not to worry. Their concerns are in the neighborhood of 1,000,000 million gallons a day. We have a lot of farms in our county and their pivots take huge amounts of water to run. We also have a Bio Diesel plant which is distilling massive quantities a day. You are a drop in their bucket.

This doesn't really answer your question, but I sounds like you are concerned about how your municipality will react. Just thought this might be encouraging.

Rick

[Spazsquatch]

Thanks for framing it that way, the numbers do start to look big to me, but I can see how an irrigation system would use exponentially more water than what I'm doing. I'm pretty sure I'll get the same "smile" when I turn in my estimate.

- Michael

[burk]

Also pay attention to BOD and COD requirements for your waste. Using published values (we're not in production) we were going to use a significant proportion of my towns capacity for BOD if we put our stillage down the drain. They made it clear that we would not get approval if that were the case. We have to divert most of our stillage waste into other disposal paths. (In our case livestock feed). Other distillers in Vermont are direct spraying stillage onto fields.

[MG Thermal Consulting]

If you dump water for mash cooling and condenser cooling, all that adds up quickly to the point it is cheaper to pay for the closed loop chiller than the headache of water plus sewage. Largest load is the mash crash cool and condenser considerably smaller. It depends where you start, how much are you starting with and how long it takes to process.