Rum

My 19 year old son has been distilling professionally since he graduated high school a year ago. He and my three other even younger sons have all been hanging around and helping at the distillery since I started over a decade ago. So yeah, there are some young guys professionally distilling.

Thanks!

I just bought out a minority shareholder. I only have 30 days to report the change to the TTB. Even after looking around I am not 100% certain what form(s) is/are required. There are no new owners. Just a change in ownership percentages. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

The standard FedEx alcohol shipping contract does not allow for shipments to consumers. At least it didn't when I first signed it several years ago.

We do the same. We start with the highest grade molasses we can get. We still get a lot of crap settled out. Besides the impact on the fermentation, it helps to keep the still from gunking up. Only difference in our method is that we usually drain the ash/undesirable stuff from the bottom instead of racking.

Yes. Unfortunately it spends most of it's time as a stripping still to keep up with current products right now. We get to run for barrels on a limited basis.

Wow. I just noticed the dates on this thread. It was brought back to life by an off-topic post. Hopefully the info is still of help to someone!

We are in a town that gets a lot of tourist traffic and has many part-time residents. It has a full time population of 60,000 or so (not counting other close by metro areas). We somehow manage to get somewhere in the range of 15 - 20k visitors per year through the tasting room. Many are repeats who bring in out of town guests. Many are from out of town but have found us online when looking for what to do in the area. Many come out and line up for special releases. It has taken several years to get the traffic to this point. Average sale (excluding special edition release days) is about $60. Our best selling rums are priced relatively low at $25 per bottle. Special editions don't go over $50. Develop a good tour with plenty of education and humor. Encourage online reviews. Get as much local press as possible. Don't hire just anyone for the tasting room. You need to spend time in there because people want to meet you, the distiller, and hear about making the rum first hand. You should be giving as many of the tours as possible at least while you get the traffic built up. All of those things have been a big part of how we get people out to our tasting room in a scary old industrial park far from the tourist areas. During the busy half of the year our tours are often booked solid. We allow 60 registrations max per tour but often end up with more showing up during the busiest times of the year. Our tours are free. Tastings are free. Most who visit will buy. You might want to showcase some samples of mixed drinks if your laws allow so people know what to do with it. Not everyone likes to drink alcohol straight. We always serve it straight up as well as in samples of drinks.

As Thatch noted, that is in C not F. We heat our mash and let it set for two days prior to fermentation to settle out undesirables. If our production schedule gets messed up for one reason or another we will still heat it but might need to cool it for fermentation the next day.

Looking at a new chiller to replace an old one we bought used. Current setup: Still 1 - 175 gallon hybrid used for finishing runs Still 2 - 400 gallon double thumper used for stripping runs and finishing runs Still 3 - 250 gallon pot used for stripping runs only Fermentation - about 3500 gallons spread across four tanks - sometimes we need to crash cool from 85c down to 33c overnight All stills run at least 5 days a week all day long We have piping installed and working with the current chiller. Have 3 phase available. 1.2 million btu boiler Need room to grow, so I don't want to size exactly for current capacity. Suggestions?

It was only done for two years so that it's revenue impact would be smaller. Had to stay under the 1.5 trillion number to keep it to a simple majority vote. The goal is to come back and make it permanent before the two years are up. No guarantees that will happen though.

We spent five figures for a lobbyist on this one. This is huge.

Thanks for the clarification.

Yes. Slobber boxes aren't really used much in commercial distillation. If you're running a still in the back woods with a bunch of burning logs for heat you might want a slobber box. It's easier to control the heat source on a modern still and hence control the potential for foam, etc, flowing over.

Here is a video of one of the thumpers heating up. Make sure your volume is on. IMG_8586.MOV

I've always thought they were the same thing... We run a double thumper. Heat source is in the pot. 1st thumper is filled with 50% tails and 50% water. Second thumper is filled with 25% heads and 75% water. Approximately. The pipe into the 1st thumper is submerged and the vapor from the pot heats the liquid to boiling. The exit pipe is above the liquid line and feeds the next thumper the same way. The thumping sound occurs during heat up of the liquid in the thumpers. The hot air bubbles from the pot hit the colder liquid in the thumper and collapse due to the change in temperature. That causes the thumping sound. They are also referred to as retorts. I believe a double is the same but I may be wrong on that. A slobber box is a thumper with the input pipe above any liquid line. It simply catches overflow.

That is a very generous interpretation based on my experience and those of other distilleries I have spoken with. Lies about how long the still would take to complete were the tip of the iceberg for most cases that I have looked into.

The pressure relief valve on the main pot of our Corson was installed too low. Our molasses foamed up and gummed up the valve. We had to pull it apart and thourougly clean it to be certain it would work if needed. We also reworked the location so that a molasses foam up won't compromise the integrity of the relief valve.

Thanks for the post Adam. I could write a book about everything that went wrong in our dealings with those piss ants. Glad to see it out in the open.

The guy who used to run Florida Caribbean distillery (large producer - used to make Cruzan, etc) told me that they ran experiments on this. They found an acceptable angel's share until they tried to stack four levels high. At that level of stacking they believed that the weight of the barrels put stress on the staves of the lower barrels and caused more evaporation than they were willing to accept.

I haven't bought from them for several years since we primarily use used whiskey barrels for our rum now. The barrels that I purchased from them several years ago were very high quality though. Good people also.

Are they copper? If so, you are going to want to clean them even if it's the same spirit being run through. Rejuvenated copper makes for a better spirit. We have CIP on all of our stills. We use a commercial cleaner (PBW) and a citric acid wash. With a rinse in-between of course. You could do something similar by hand. You don't need to do it after every run, but you don't want too much buildup or the copper will lose effectiveness.

Here is a TTB video that shows how to figure the weight of solids in 100ml. https://www.ttb.gov/media/2014-09-19-proofing-sec4-mds_CCSub.mp4

We don't have any problems with air pockets. If it's flowing in from the bottom at a slow pace through granulated carbon that's not going to be a problem. You can time how long it takes to get flow out the top once you open the valve on the bottom. The flow rate may change over the run as the upper tank empties. We have learned to look at the flow coming into the bottom tank and can adjust accurately enough just by looking at it. You can catch outflow in a container if you want to be more accurate. See how long it takes to catch a liter and adjust accordingly.

We use a very similar setup. In our case it is gravity fed. The source tank is elevated above the filter and collection tank. Our bed might be slightly taller, but that shouldn't be a concern. Contact time is going to determine the result with a given carbon. The volume of the bed will limit the amount of product that you can filter effectively though. Use a granular carbon and run it slowly. You will need to experiment to figure out how much contact time gets you the results you want. Try starting at 10 to 15 minutes and adjust from there. We have the housing attached to a pivot bolt so we can turn it upside down to empty it easily.