Patio29Dadio

Agree with Glenlyon. We are pretty much using the protocol recommended by our enzyme sales guy. My recommendation is for you to do the same. Explain your grain bill, your batch size and your final product you are making, and they should have lots of information to optimize your results. Sales of their enzymes require their customers are happy with their results so they generally are very on point. We are running a 26 gallon mash of 70% corn and getting 19-20 brix at pitch, and 4 days later we are sitting at 2 brix. So 10% mash. Just what we want.

We inspected the top of the 2000+ lb supersack and of course paid attention to the milling process... but our process is a bit closed (for dust containment) and thus did not see what was in the middle and bottom. But this isn't musty... it is a subtle rancid smell. I have the grain supplier coming out and will let him get a wiff of those low wines and tell me what he thinks. I am really convinced that there was a very decomposed rodent in the middle of the grain that we missed. The hammer mill would have made it impossible to detect at the back end.

We have about 100 gallons of low wines from a recent run that has a weird... almost foul... odor. Almost like a rodent died months ago... very subtle but off-putting. But then the next wiff smells like good corn-based low wines. We previously noticed a similar "dead rodent lite" smell around the grain super sacks. We could not find a source and getting closer to the sacks it would smell completely of grain and not of anything bad. But walking by a certain area of the storage area it would hit. We looked everywhere and could not find a thing. The ferment was weird... had some more yellow oily substance on the edges of the grist cap. The ferment got a bit hot... close to 100F. Forgot to put water in the fermenter tank jacket overnight the first night. Thinking about just tossing it, but also wondering if I am hyper-sensitive and almost imagining that we milled a dead rodent that was mixed in the grain sack. Or we had too hot of a ferment and produced some bad compounds. Also thinking about doing a finishing run to see if it clears up, but afraid of corrupting the still. Thoughts?

Using neoprene impellers and food-grade silicone spray. Not running dry. Not reversing when hot. Letting mash cool to at least 140 before moving. All of this and we have had the same impeller for about a week now.

I need to quit typing advise instead of advice!

You have asked a question that I have thought about writing a book to answer. Having started a few small businesses in my life, this has proven to be the most complex. There are endless details and problems to solve, and there is a very small community available to help (although most in the community are very generous in giving advice, etc.). Investor capture work is worth a chapter of two. Start very early in your business plan process and you will spend a lot of time with little results... but those results are generally more valuable as initial capital is the hardest to come by. However, it will also be more costly capital as you will need to give away more ownership to attract the investor at that point (all you have are ideas on paper without any proof you can actually execute on a plan). There are three types of investors: 1 - those that know you and like you and want to help you. 2 - Those that want to play a role in the business. 3 - Those that will only invest based on anticipated probability of a certain level of ROI. #1 should be your first target early. One idea there is to come up with an offering but include a convertible shareholder note vehicle. Let's say Uncle Joe likes you and wants to help. He has a bit of savings he isn't afraid of losing, and more that he would invest if he has some security behind it. One idea is to have Uncle Joe buy-in with some, and then maybe does a convertible note for some of the equipment where he holds title to the equipment. The payments for the equipment can be deferred, but interests accumulates. At some date in the future the principle and interest would be payable to Joe, or he can chose to convert some or all of it to shares in the business. If the business is not doing well, then Joe can take his equipment and sell it to at least partially recover his losses. However if the business is doing well, it can secure a loan to pay off what Joe is owned, and use the equipment for collateral, or Joe can convert all or some of what he is owed into ownership shares. #2 is a partner. Be careful. It is like getting married without the benefit of sleeping together. #3 is the hard one. Be careful here too. Read about Balcones. Better to push this off into the future when you are open and have some proof of concept that you can pour and sell. Note that if you are not an attorney, and you will have investors, you will need to hire an attorney. I will not tell you how much I have spent on attorneys because it makes me cry. The sequencing of steps will look like a mess, and there are many irreconcilable conflicts that you just have to deal with. For example, my building official wanted county health department sign off before he issued the C of O and the county health department wanted the C of O before they would do any inspection. You just have to negotiate your way to some successful conclusion. You will need an address and floor-plan and list of equipment before you can get TTB approval and state approval. I know of one distillery where the owner leased a very small facility to store all his equipment and supplies he was going to use for his final address, and used that smaller address to get his TTB and state approval for his DSP, and then did some DSP-to-DSP transfers of spirit in barrels that aged in this small warehouse space while he worked on finding and building his final space. He submitted and was approved for the changes, and when he finally opened he had 4-year old whiskey to sell on day one. Very smart! That was not me. The very first thing you need is a fully fleshed out business plan. This is very important as it contains all the big picture thinking that answers a lot of the questions for what steps are needed and in what sequence. You need to put a number of hours into just sitting down and thinking and writing it down. You need to think about how big of an operation and how much you think you can sell, and capture all the money in and money out flows in projected financial reports. I have a 6-year cash flow spreadsheet backed by all the assumptions about costs of good sold and sales that updates everything when I make a change. That way I can play with the assumptions as I develop a better confidence and understanding in how the business will operate. Frankly, you should never talk to any investor without having done this first. I will open this next month. It has been over 4 years since I first sat down to start writing the plan, and three years since I started paying for things related to this business. I will have my first sales revenue in July 2019. My last bit of advice.... making beer is a lot easier and quicker.

I have a couple of Letina 1200 liter variable lid jacketed forklift tanks. They get a lot of use in the distillery. Getting ready for our first chill-filtering and just realized that I am not quite sure about the connections. There are two 3/4" male FTP ports at the top of the jacket, and one 1/2". My plan was/is to run glycol from my chiller output to one of the top ports and then output from the second 3/4" port on the tank back to the input of the chiller loop. The bottom is just a drain. The problem is that we use these tanks for production and don't really want to use them with glycol in the jacket. I also do not want to just dump it as it is expensive. How do others deal with this? Do you actually drain off the glycol in the jacket into a container to pour back into the chiller glycol tank? Seems like a pain. What I am I missing?

Cool! Never heard of a belt press. Where do you get one of those?

So the way we are getting this process to work for is... use the hard rubber squeegee to keep the screens clear. We just hit it a few times every five or ten minutes for a couple of hours while we are doing other work around the distillery. Now we have a nice semi-dry grain bed from the stillage that will dry some more over night. Then we can shovel it into a bin. The process is too labor intensive when we scale up production in the future, but for now it works. I can get ranchers to take this stuff as still wet stillage without having to go through all the FDA hoops for real dried distillers grain feed.

In our case we are doing the reverse... planning on all sales through the tasting room and staying away from long-term big distributor relationships until we develop our local and regional brand following. You need to do a business plan with proforma financials that are projected out and include your assumptions. The margins on onsite sales are worth exploring as an option, but you will then be looking at a much larger investment than for a farm distilling operation. I think it is Tree House Brewing that is a mega-successful New England brewery on a farm and has people stacked for miles when they open to buy their beer. As an alternative to building a new tasting room, consider what it would take and return to make your farm distillery a destination. Where I live don't consider opening a distillery with a tasting room in any urban area without a $3M nest egg. My friend and distilling training class mate at Edwin Coe I think is doing a rural distillery tasting room and seems to be doing well.

What about this idea? A lautering mash tun with a rake and plow used as a dewatering device for ongrain stillage? I envision a process where the rake and plow clear the screen well enough to allow water to drain enough that the remaining material in the tank can be shoveled out. This is confirmed a bit by our manual process of using a hard-rubber squeegee on the screens of our dewatering hopper noting significant increase in water flow drainage from the bottom of the hopper. The benefit of this type of process being supported by the mash tun with the rake and plow is that it does not require manual labor to squeegee, and we would have a mash tun for malt whiskey production.

Turns out that a dewatering hopper is not a good choice for dewatering grain stillage. Good news is that I have other uses for the hopper. Bad news is that I have to come up with another process.... one that is likely to require another piece of expensive equipment. Either that or need to find that pig rancher quickly! Sigh. Interesting in what others are doing here.

One change that we did not foresee is fine temperature control. With electric you generally dial in the boil temperature or at least have a rheostat to give some reasonable control. With steam from a steam boiler, you have generally have a manual valve to regulate the steam coming into the jacket and some control over the output pressure of the steam boiler. Without a servo steam valve controlled by a thermocouple you are left having to keep adjusting both the steam boiler pressure output and the still jacket input flow to estimate the heating level in the pot. This is one difference that you should plan for if you are used to fine control with your electric heating.

It is EDPM impellers that are getting wasted. Sounds like I need neoprene impellers. I am going to give that a try along with the other recommendations above. Thanks team!

Have a Jabsco flexible impeller mash pump that keeps eating impellers. Put a new impeller (not cheap) on yesterday and pumped 140 degree mash through a 2" tube-in-tube heat exchange (took about 2 hours to get to pitching temp) and then pumped to the fermenter from the mash tun. Using 2 inch distillery hose. 10' hose from the mash tun drain to the pump input, 10' hose to the input of the heat exchanger, and 20' up into the manhole of the mash tun. Pump is 1.5" connections so have reducers on the pump input and output. Running the pump at half speed. Running a 28-gallon mash. Using exogenous enzymes and the consistency seems plenty thin. Grain is milled through a 1/8" sieve. Mash bill is 70% corn, 20% rye, 5% wheat and 5% barley. 1.065+ SG obtained. Fermentation is very happy. But lost three fins on the new impeller. We could hear them go pretty early in the beginning of the pumping start. This won't work. Any thoughts and ideas would be welcome. Also working with the dealer to get advice.

“so what if there is a few ounces of water left in the jacket, How does the FDA feel about that ? “ I’m confused. Why would the FDA care about water in any jacket?

That is my same question. As Hillary Clinton once said "what difference does it make"? I am a week out from using my device and will report back. However, in terms of mash crash cooling device design given my experience with wort heat exchangers, I cannot imagine anything more functional and operational user-friendly than this tube-in-tube pipe array. Granted we are talking about a mash and not alcohol vapor, but tube-in-tube designs are the standard for distillation condensation heat exchange. Any efficiency deficit compared to other designs would likely be offset by the other benefits like ease of use, ease of cleaning, mobility, etc. We are running a business not a science lab. Perfection in scientific terms can be the enemy of the good for a business that has to cash flow at some point. Trust me, I have dealt with that conflict many times in several other disciplines. As a recovering big corporation IT executive, I was continually mediating the debate between the technology purist and the business side that needed a solution that got the job done for a reasonable cost. But, as I said before there is benefit in the differing opinions as long as they are delivered with respect for the other.

Flojet XP diagram pump. You will need to add a pressure regulator and some hose attachments.

Our forklift is just a bit too long for our barrel room. I need to get a pallet lifter. Storing on barrel racks four high. Don't want to break the bank. Any recommendations?

What are distillers using to label their barrels in the barrel room? We are using a marker. Thinking we might need a stamp. Or maybe a printed form in a plastic pouch.

This is a sad ending to what might have been a nice addition to American manufacturing... a sector that has been about destroyed by bonehead economic policy that has basically given away hard-won American inventions and production to China. There is a lesson here. I think one of the primary lessons is that every business needs to really know what they are in business for. I call this the business mission. If you define your business mission as making a return on investment, then unless you are an investment banker, you will likely make mistakes and fail. Returns are secondary to strong execution on the mission. I purchased from Paul Hall after considering Corsons. Paul's mission is to make affordable equipment that works well, but most importantly is safe to operate. This last past of the mission should be a primary one for any company making distilling equipment. IT NEEDS TO BE SAFE TO OPERATE! Also, it needs to work well. And if making distilling equipment, your mission should also be to help your distillery clients be successful in their business. Corons failed to execute on most of this. There were certainly trying to sell affordable distilling equipment, but it often did not work, was not safe, and they showed a disregard for the damage they caused to their clients' business. I am sure they were desperate for capital to fund their explosive growth and this led to some poor business practices that eventually doomed them. But I certainly don't feel good that they failed. It is sad.

Very interested in answers for this as we are about to start our bourbon runs. However, don't you want to lauter for a barely malt and distill the wash and not the mash?

From my perspective it is the cleaning aspect combined with the need for flexibility that would otherwise be very complex and costly to implement in hard-pipe. You would likely need stainless steel runs. And what if on this day you needed to pump mash from mas tun #2 to fermenter #4? You would need a complex piping and pumping valve manifold matrix to cover every option. In the end of the cost-benefit factoring the extra cost of labor to move hose, most of us end up accepting hose as the better option. Now having said that... I really hate moving and connecting hose. If you had lots of capital to burn and were building a ground-up state of the art facility, maybe connecting all of that with stainless is the way to go. There are some big guys that do that. But a lot of them still use hoses.

Had my visit and learned that the problem was bad controller settings and also learned that I needed a big lesson on steam boiler control settings. This is a 1.2MBTU (30 HP) Aldrich boiler with a Riello burner. The burner has a 1-5 turndown capability that works off a pressure sensor. My problem was that the process value and the high mark were both set at 12 PSI... thus hitting and alarming the max setting at the same time, and stopping the system. Then at the bottom it was set to zero which meant it fell all the way down before it reset and started back up again. This controller has a self-learning mode, so we tried that while going through a run and it set a number of control parameters that we saved. The last run was very smooth. The steam boiler did stop at one point during the run, but kept in the 25%-50% modulation for most of it. Went out to time the gas meter and the consumption was much, much less than I had seen the prior days. So feeling good at this point that the steam boiler is dialed in. Next up... insulating all my steam and condensate return plumbing. That will likely require some more tweaking of control parameters once done. Related to high pressure, 15 PSI steam is 250 degrees. 100 PSI steam is 340 degrees. Hi pressure steam is scary stuff IMO.

Thanks. I think both vsaks and Sudzie are on to something for me. I have the boiler vendor coming out tomorrow to help with the differential settings. It has a 5-1 turndown capability, but it is still cycling to 100% modulation and then will shut off. That isn't helping our consistent heat. That is what I thought and debated it with the boiler company, but in the end agreed that the Flow-tek v-port valve was a great choice. At least that was the conclusion from research. In operation maybe I am convinced otherwise.