SLCDBD

vapor extraction is high efficiency. it's tough to get a balanced run without getting nasty terpenes in your collection. liquid-solid extraction is a lot easier to manage IMHO, and yields are much higher when you distill the macerate carefully.

take care with your end-hearts fraction. it gets hot due to the methanol concentration increasing from azeotropic release.

As someone that is primarily concerned with process efficiency (and especially process simplicity) here's why I was always turned off by arroyo's patent method: It basically plays with fire. When you are basing your method on using fractions 2, 3,4, 6, and 8 (that's probably wrong, just used as an illustrative example) you open up your product to variation via human error. As we all know volatilities of organics change depending on the relative composition of the complex mixture. It's well and good to say "well, Raffie Arroyo did it, so can you all" but expecting to not make cut point errors in such a complex cutting scenario is unrealistic at a production scale. I'm sure the birectifier provides insight into that, but I have to ask... is it valid information if your production scale equipment doesn't have exactly the same capabilities? Maybe Arroyo had the infrastructural resources to conduct his method flawlessly. Maybe he didn't and the patent was a panacea to enfranchise his company's lawyers to sue competitors that had a similar flavor profile to theirs. Who knows. All I know is that understanding the process of how esters are formed in the still from constituent products that result from fermentative biology (and conversely how they break apart via hydrolysys when the concentration of alcohol is reduced during proofing) is essential to understanding how the flavors in great rums are created. Strong acids, alcohols interacting with carboxylic acids and long durations of reflux are how these esters are created... and whether or not you have a birectifier doesn't really enable you nor does it prevent you from making these flavors present in your finished product. I must say that I'm very motivated by @bostonapothecary's body of work and it made a huge impact on my development as a distiller. Thank you sir! I'm reminded of 'lost spirits' and how they said they could make 30 year rum in 30 minutes, but couldn't present a rum under 120 proof that had a heavy ester load. That's because they were trying to sell 'accelerated aging' licenses to their so-called 'proprietary technology' which was really just a combination of a hot-process oak product extraction vessel and a large lab still that didn't do a great job of fischer esterification. They were banking on people that didn't take an o-chem class being willing to spend a lot of money on some magical way to print money. Speaking from experience... anyone interested in these topics should download some lab procedures for fischer esterification and do the work. You'll learn a lot.

No silly. rye whiskey.

We are going to market soon with a rum that's aged in cab sauv barrels that underwent no aggressive swelling prior to our refill and all the remnants from the previous fill are significantly impacting the flavor profile. It's pretty tasty.

Once I started working through fischer esterification labs the merits of sulfuric acid as a pH lowering additive became very clear and I've never looked back! Anyone doing high rye fermentations (90%+) should try sulfuric. really cool lactic esters result.

This is one of those 'defects' that distillers notice but the market doesn't give a flying f about, so nobody figures out what is going on. If I were to guess I would bet that it's higher weight oils that have significant enough partial pressure to get into vapor phase but upon condensing stick to the interior of the neck until disturbed due to their viscosity. Just a guess.

Breaking apart a tanker of molasses doesn't sound like a very fun afternoon.

Yeah, my first thought was he was shitfaced and meant to say that raising the alkalinity of your proofing water is helpful, but some garbage came out instead

99% of the time this is an issue the bottling crew is overfilling the bottles. If you aren't already do intermittent fill level tests. If you are using cheap chinese bottles, it's important to know ahead of time that the neck ID varies a lot compared to good quality european or USA glass in my experience. Sometimes cheap glass has soot or other schmutz that lubricates the neck-internal surface. rinsing your bottles before filling can fix this issue. Shrinks are really good at preventing t-tops from popping at high elevations/higher temperatures than what the product was bottled at. I've had mixed results with the 'vent groove' synthetic shank t-tops.

He's making that up.

I can process about 3 gpm of grain in (flour spec) whiskey mash / 3.5 gpm rum wash in my 12" D 28' H vendome stripping column. Taking the stripping burden off your batch still frees up a lot of spirit output. Vendome does great work. Can't go wrong with them.

What a cool setup. I'm curious, on the dephlegmation vertical riser that appears to be an allihn condenser connected to a claisen and that coiled glass space with thermometer connection: Is that a dead air space, or is it connected to a heat exchange fluid circuit of some kind?

Whatever you want. You might want to read this: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1AlINP9_IL6TlVjeWFKaGM3bEU

re: louching: If you are doing your 'demisting' test (aka where you add water to your distillate to see if it louches) to 40% abv before collecting into your hearts receiver you shouldn't have louching at 46% under any circumstance, unless you have some source of contamination that's not being mentioned. You can make your 'heads' collection smaller by using less citrus peel since that concentrates in the heads. Coriander is a good citrus booster that allows you to use less peel and hence have less N, D-limonene which is the culprit in most louching gins. re: feints processing If you have high rectification equipment you definitely should be reprocessing your feints to as close to neutral as you can and reincorporating that into your next batch's maceration. Even if you can't hit true neutral I would redistill my gin feints and keep what doesn't have the 'wet dog / barnyardy' taints for re use. Depending on your equipment, If you can increase rectification on the fly you can get pretty good % yield by increasing rectification in stages as undesirable sensory characteristics present themselves. I usually get about 85-90% yield on a proof gallon basis by doing this.

Ditto. Rufus is great to work with.

Some people do a hydroseparation on their feints before they redistill them. I.E. add water to your feints, let sit for a day or two and rack off the desired fraction before loading and redistilling. Also, the volatility of some alcohols in a complex mixture changes depending on the relative % water, so if somehow you had one or more fusels smearing into your hearts you might be able to get them to move into the heads or tails fraction by changing the % water, but that would be really tricky to do reliably.

For any novel corn strain to be organoleptically distinct from any other corn in a whiskey, I'd imagine you'd need to figure out how to get the corn to produce a fingerprint of different carboxylic acids. Found this article which describes a method to produce some of the more recognizable Carboxylic acids from hydrolyzed corn meal. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11848378

Pasteurize your wash, crash cool it in less than 6 hours, and try again and see if your pH crash goes away.

In short, if you want to make 'bitters' that belong to the same class of flavor ingredients as, say angostura, scrappy's, regan's, etc..., the real trick is convincing the TTB and the FDA that what you are making is non-potable flavor, not beverage alcohol. There are a few ways to go about this. You can make bitters that are considered beverage alcohol, but you then have to sell them the same way you sell your beverage spirits with all the proof gallon taxes, 3 tier system requirements, and similar compliance issues that relate to beverage alcohol sales in the USA. Generally if you want to make 'non-potable beverage flavorings' that are not considered beverage alcohol, you will need a separate facility from your DSP that is FDA compliant (like a commercial kitchen), and there are lots of hoops to jump through on the FDA side (are your ingredients on the GRAS list? are the concentrations of regulated ingredients compliant with the established thresholds? etc...). To go this route, i'm 99.9% sure that you would need to transfer your base spirit 'in-bond' from a DSP in small quantities (less than 50 gallons) and submit paperwork that certifies that you are 'denaturing' the spirits with ingredients that make it no longer suitable for use as a 'potable beverage spirit' (bittering agents). I'm sure that there is a lot of procedural detail I'm missing, but this is my understanding of how it works in general. Anyone that can correct or clarify on any misunderstandings I have is welcome to chime in and help educate me.

My 28' vendome 12" column came with 8 of these anchors for support, FYI

passpack v7 is alright.

If you get bigger anchor bolts than you think you need you should be fine. You might also want to support the top of the column from above if you are using washers and anchors to prevent any swaying. you catch a bad harmonic and a column can really get moving.

How off-level are we talking? If everything connects well you might get some novel refluxing.

Depth filter pads are sometimes packed with activated carbon... if your pads are carbon-free, then that would be very strange for the color to be filtered out... weird.