Rum

We used to lift the totes up with a forklift. It worked well when it was just me and there were few tours. It's not as workable for us anymore. First, it ties up the forklift for a long time. We need it for other things and I don't want to buy another forklift. Second, I had an employee forget to strap the molasses tote on once and he dropped it. (You have never seen a mess until you have seen a molasses tote dropped off a lift!). I prefer to have a more fool-proof and safer method. Third, we run tours quite often near the equipment. I can't fit a forklift with a tote and still have room for the tours. I am trying to setup production so we can continue our work even if we have a room full of visitors. I am planning on adding some molasses storage tanks at some point. I would like to hard-pipe those in to the mash tanks with an inline pump. It would be nice if I could find something to use now with hoses that could still be integrated into a hard-piped system in the future.

We have two carbon filters with two more being installed. We pump rum into tanks on an elevated platform. From there it gravity feeds to the bottom of stainless carbon housings. It flows at a slow rate up through the carbon and out the top to waiting tanks. We use granulated carbon. Powder is a pain in the ass. After loading the carbon into the cylinders we turn valves and gravity flow r/o water through to clean it. Then we let the rum go through. Then we run r/o water again to clear the rum out of the cylinders. Then we trash the carbon.

We use a positive displacement pump currently. It works but isn't ideal. It tends to get quite hot. I was thinking that a "peanut butter pump" might do the job better. An air diaphragm pump. What has everyone else pumping molasses found to work well?

Since the tours and samples are free I never saw much benefit in using Groupon. We don't like to run sales on the rum itself. Our main business is distribution and we don't want to alienate our retailers by undercutting them regularly. We run ads on Facebook. We don't get nearly the viral reach we did early on due to their algorithms changing. If you are willing to pay you can still get great reach for a relatively low cost. Other than that we pretty much just make sure we are listed on websites like our local tourism bureau, etc. Our main strengths have been making certain that people have a fun time when they visit and making rum that they love. It's just built up over time. OP - Sorry to take your thread on a tangent. Hopefully this is helpful info for you as well.

We allow up to 60 per tour but we don't check tickets when they arrive. In season we usually have extras show up. This time of year we are busier than the summer months. We have three tours on Saturdays. Two on Sundays. We just increased Tuesday and Wednesday to three tours from two. We are in the process of hiring another tour guide so we can have them on Mondays. In the off-season we will cut the number of tours back a bit. We are fortunate in that I started pretty early in the craft distilling scene. We have a ton of word of mouth in the area. We also have good internet search results. For example, we are listed as the #1 Thing to Do in Sarasota on Trip Advisor. We are not the biggest in Florida when it comes to a busy tasting room. That would be St. Augustine Distillery. They are located in the middle of a tourist area and on the main tourist trolley route. We are probably the biggest Florida craft distillery when it comes to distribution though. I would love to be in a better location instead of the scary industrial park we are in currently. I started on a relatively tight budget and took the cheapest rent that I could find. Now it's a major project and expense to move. On days with three tours we have them at 11:00, 1:00, and 3:00. We use Eventbrite for registrations. I've attached two images from this last Tuesday. It was crazy busy for some reason. All day long, not just the tours.

In Florida we cannot charge for tours or for samples. Both are free. We cannot sell drinks. That model works really well if you can get a lot of people to your location and if they like your products. I don't know the exact % that buy but it is pretty high. Today was a great day. Only 126 people registered for tours so I wasn't expecting a lot. We still did $4,500 in sales after subtracting out sales tax. That's a better than average day for that level of registrations. If the Saturday tours are all full or close to it (180 registrations) that would be a pretty average number. So that's about $25 per registered person normally. [edit - I looked at some more actual numbers. Seems to be closer to $30 per registered tour attendee] There are a lot of walk-ins as well. We are not in an easy to find location so the walk-ins have to seek us out. We offer a lot of tours during the week to fit our visitor's schedules. The tasting room is open 7 days a week. Tours are 4 days a week (soon to be 5). We would do tours 7 days a week but we are usually bottling on Thursday and Friday making it difficult to do our tours. As mentioned above, traffic to your tours/tasting room is critical. Then you need a good tour and good products.

In Florida it is by wine gallons. The tax is broken into a few tiers depending on the strength of the product. It is paid at the distributor level.

It's an old post, but for future reference you can also get a faucet mounted eye wash station to add to an existing sink. This is the one we use: https://www.uline.com/BL_880/Faucet-Mount-Eyewash-Station

Congrats Pete! Well deserved!

Sugar will lower the proof. You need to add anything you are going to add before you do the final proofing. Make sure you fully understand how to proof a spirit that has added ingredients. It's not as simple as using a hydrometer.

The problem is not simply the equipment that they were building. It's the guys behind the company. Their attitude towards business and customers is their true downfall IMHO. Fixing the equipment issues doesn't fix the people issues.

Many spiced rums are formula approved as distilled spirits specialty.

I notice that you have a target mass set to one value. Do you adjust that during the bottling run? We take the density before each test of the fill and the spreadsheet calculates the target mass for that read. I've never figured out how much a change in proof during the bottling run will impact the target weight. Not even sure it's worthwhile but we get the density when we take the proof anyway. So I just added it into the spreadsheet as well.

Thanks Michael. This was designed by Alex whom you have spoken to on occasion.

New thread started with pics.

As requested I have attached pics of the mod we made to our Mori filler so that we can fine tune the fill height better than the standard setup allows. This filler works great for us now that we have it dialed in and have staff that know how to use it properly.

Since you are ready to move on from the Mori I probably shouldn't even post this! But I will anyway in case it helps someone else having issues with a Mori. We had issues with short bottles that we were filling for someone else. Ended up solving it by building a wood platform that sat on the metal Mori platform. The key to getting consistent bottle level fills with the Mori is to make certain that the bottle pushes the sleeve above the oval opening. That was the only way we could get the bottle high enough to push the sleeve up far enough. We also modified our Mori by adding infinite adjustability on the platform by welding in screws that raise and lower the level of the bottle platform. We can now fine tune the fill height to a very accurate level. I will be happy to post pics if anyone is interested. We fill 3 - 4 thousand bottles per week all year around on our little Mori.

Piece of cake actually. We order by the truck but pump it into totes when it arrives. We have cardboard with a hole cut in the center that sits on top of each tote to make cleanup easy. The hose from the truck is moved from tote to tote. We fill 16 - 17 totes on average from one truck but that can vary. As long as you have a forklift and the a vehicle to carry totes of molasses it really won't be that difficult.

Are they experiencing any temperature changes? Cold liquor when bottling then placed in a warm warehouse or something along those lines?

Ahhh, now I understand. Cool idea.

Here are a few more: http://www.scholleipn.com/beverage/wine/ https://www.liquibox.com/industry/wine/ I had a successful search by using "wine bag in a box suppliers". Or "bib wine bag". Are you going to get a machine to fill the or contract that part out? Just curious - what are you looking at putting in the bags?

https://astrapouch-na.com/products/bag-in-box/

Copper sulfate? Some industrial producers will add that to spirits to make up for not using good clean copper stills. It starts out blue.

Have you checked with your bottle manufacturer to see if they will ship in six packs? Our bottle manufacturer custom prints our boxes in six or twelve packs. There might be a minimum order, but you won't have to pay for extra boxes. They show up with logos ready to go. We use one upc code as a default on the boxes and have stickers to cover with other product upc codes based on what goes in them.