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White Cane Sugar Wash


eganter

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I'm experimenting with fermenting White Cane sugar and am struggling to achieve a strong fermentation. My most recent attempt went as follows

Per gallon of water:

2/3 pounds of White Cane sugar

1/4 tsp of DAP

1/4 tsp of Distilamax SR

1/4 tsp of GoFerm

4 grams of Distilavite GN

1/4 tsp of Fermaid K after 24 hours

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can strengthen my fermentation?

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I don't use sugar washes for any of my products but I did do some when I was learning to run my still. You might be light on the amount of sugar. I used a recipe I got off homeDistillers.org. For a 50 gallon mash I used 45 gallons water, 100lbs sugar from Costco, 2 gallons grape juice, 6 ounces plant food, some crushed multi-vitamins and 6 ounces DADY yeast(which is way more than needed). I heated it up to about 180 to fully dissolve the sugar and pitched at around 85 degrees. It fermented like crazy for a couple of days and made the 'burniest' alcohol ever....

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What's with the nutrient regimen? I'm curious since that's probably the most I've ever seen dosed.

What's your yeast pitch rate, what's your pitch temperature, what's your fermentation temp, what's your pH at pitch?

Sorry, I put the wrong amounts in my post and I updated them to the right amounts. I'm fermenting at 70° F. I'm pitching after 20 minutes and a slow cooling period from 105°F down to 90°F. I don't currently have a way to check my pH.

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With Sugar washes, the PH will crash to 2.8-3.0 no matter what. You can bring it up to 4.5 using calcium/potassium carbonate(IIRC). I believe your yeast needs more food for it to work, try a can of tomato paste or some wheat germ. The lallemand nutrients worked terrible for me. No need for that spendy lallemand stuff. But, sugar washes tend to make "hot" spirits... never could make a smooth sugar wash. If you're using lallemand's sugar wash yeast, then dry pitch it at 68F, for some reason they don't like being hydrated before pitch.

I stopped doing sugar washes because I could never get the sting off of them. Grain is soooo much better. More work, but better spirits.

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Sorry, I put the wrong amounts in my post and I updated them to the right amounts. I'm fermenting at 70° F. I'm pitching after 20 minutes and a slow cooling period from 105°F down to 90°F. I don't currently have a way to check my pH.

Order some PH strips, both wide range and narrow range so you can find out where you are at.

Yeast/fermentation is a biological process, and PH is very important to keep your little guys busy and happy.

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I process lots of sugar and i can says if done correctly the SR makes for a very very nice smooth rum. If you want A Jamaican Funk rum then go with the LS.

The key to getting high % yields is to "feed" your rum wash. Don't start out with a high amount of sugar. I will end up using 600-700 lbs per 380 gallons of water. The one thing that i did was to stop using yeast nutrient and only use DAP. To use nutrient just cost so much money and the people in Jamaica at the big rum factories mainly just use DAP and that's it. It does help that I will process one batch and leave a little bit of previous batch in the bottom of the fermentation tank with the dead yeast. That really helps the next batch it acts like nutrients for the next batch.

And for many of the rum wash probably one of the best things that help me out is agitation. I constantly agitate the tank on a rotating timer hooked to my lightning mixer. In some of the IBC totes that I use for fermentation tanks I simply go to Harbor freight or Northern tool and buy a water fountain pump. I take that pump and just drop it into the tank and it has a 3 foot hose That I put on it and it is always agitating the tank. That helps degas the tank and keep the yeast suspended. And believe it or not it actually ferments in about half the time.

When the run is done I simply hooked it up to the continuous still in process it.

I'm really looking into setting up a continuous fermentation system.

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Dehner-

Its funny I keep hearing two different stories on agitation. Some say the ferment should not be agitated at all after fermentation starts and others say it should. I thought that the active fermentation caused the tank to self agitate. Now that is with 300 gallons or more. I would think the small home style batches might not be getting much heat or agitation because of their size. Very confused. I have also noticed motors on some large fermentation tanks of 500 gallons or more at some distilleries but most do not have motors on the tanks.

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Shindig-

One thing that I have found out in this industry everybody seems to do things differently to try and achieve the same results. When I first started doing wrong I never agitated the tank. The tank I was using was a IBC 275 gallon tank. I was using a 1 hp tote mixer to mix up the sugar wash in the tank. Normally I would take the tote mixer off but only this time I did not because I was lazy and the whole thing is stainless anyways. I would be doing work around the distillery and about every 2 to 3 hours I would turn the tote mixer on for about 5 to 10 minutes. I really notice that it would almost instantly degas the tank and also keep the sediment on the bottom of the tank from settling it would keep it suspended. During this time I had two totes fermenting both of them started the exact same time with everything the exact same only one I left the tote mixer in one, and the other one was just regular. The one with the tote mixer finished fermentation about three days ahead of the other tote. Ever since then I have implemented a system where I agitate the tank and some fashion preferably with a mixer. For me I find that my fermentations Excel very quickly when agitated. And also they seem to use up all the sugar that is provided instead of leaving residual sugar left in the tank.

I had the rep from lightning mixer coming to the distillery and talk about different style mixers and what they can do for me and he was telling me that even the ethanol plants have huge mixers that constantly's agitate the fermentation tanks to keep sediment from settling on the bottom and reach completed fermentations faster and with a higher percentage of alcohol. I would say across the board for me agitation works, and it works great. Even my whiskey or any grain washes excelled dramatically because of less settlement compaction. I ferment on the grain.

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I had heard from a distiller that switched to agitation from not doing it before and they saw a 15-20% bump in yield. That is pretty damn dramatic. I would also think that it makes it easier at that point to feed into a continuous system (which they were using) because the mash would be more uniform.

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Jeffw-

I would agree with everything you said. Especially when it comes to the continuous still. With the agitation there is no adjustments needed once the con. still is set.

I would say I can put in more than the normal sugar amount because it the fermentation will use it all up. Unlike if it was on agitated, I would have residual sugar still left in the tank, and have to use less sugar so that I did not waste money with unfermented sugar.

one little trick is (and you will have to experiment to find your own flavor profile) do a sugar wash, then add raw molasses or other form of sugarcane to the sugar wash or in the still right before you distill it. Example is 1-2 cups molasses per 30 gallons. It does not take much to achieve the profile you are looking for. This will save anyone massive amounts of money compared to buying large amounts of molasses or other cane products.

take care.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Large fermentations require agitation because the pressure build up will cause gasses to dissolve in the wash making it difficult to ferment. Agitation should help (has worked for me on many occassions) but I would think it would lead to few esters being created due to the more rapid fermentation and probable increase of available oxygen.

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If one wanted rocket fuel (white cane sugar wash) why not buy GNS or some rum alternative?

Just because you're using white sugar doesn't mean that it's going to be rocket fuel. Obviously using different strains of used are going to give you different flavor profiles. And depending what you're going to do with that for example I make a cinnamon rum and a spiced rum which are excellent for a white sugar with very little flavor with a yeast strain like DADY, or SR. A barrel aged rum you might want to different type of you strain like RM or LS.

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  • 8 months later...
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I do a combination of cane sugar and molasses. You will need to monitor pH, it will crash. I buffer with calcium to prevent the pH from crashing. You need the nutrients because the sugar wash is nutrient poor. I do an initial dosing at the beginning of fermentation, then a second dose at 1/3 sugar depletion with an addition of sugar, molasses, and calcium. I achieve a very strong fermentation "boil."

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