Jump to content

SLCDBD

Members
  • Posts

    30
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    3

Posts posted by SLCDBD

  1. 1 hour ago, bostonapothecary said:

    Esters form in the still, but they also break apart to reform later during maturation. I'm starting to see some spirits through birectifier analysis that have very significant volatile acid (non-acetic) in the last fractions and the birectifier stillage. This makes me think the producers figured out how to carefully ferment to justify distilling incredibly low so they could capture all that aroma. Unless esters are splitting apart in the birectifier, free fatty acids that meaningfully lower pH may be a defining part of the character of some spirit categories like mezcal or some fine tequilas.

    Avoiding the negative effects of citric acid is part of the puzzle to justify distilling as low as possible.

    I think Fahrasmane is concerned with helping new distillers that use no stillage and rely on citric acid because they are afraid of handling sulfuric acid and not aware of any metabolic phenomena.

    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.

  2. 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.

    • Thanks 2
  3. 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.

  4. On 5/25/2018 at 7:45 AM, Cincinnati Distiller said:

    I've seen this topic pop up a few times, but I would like to address it again.

    I am noticing condensation in our spirit bottles, specifically Gin, that are cut to 80 proof.  I don't notice it in commercial bottles on the shelf, although my last trip to the liquor store, it seemed that a lot of smaller local distilleries also had the same condensation issue.

    Looking for any help on solving this.

    Cincinnati Distiller

    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.

  5. On 7/3/2018 at 8:33 AM, Silk City Distillers said:

    Freight is really the killer when it comes to blackstrap especially.

    Wondered if there were enough of us in close proximity in the Northeast to roll a 9000 gallon tanker from Lu-west and split the costs.

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

  6. 1 hour ago, Silk City Distillers said:

    It'll certainly change the pH.

    Maybe there is a marketing angle in that, pH Neutral Vodka.

     

    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 :P

  7. 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.

     

  8. 3 hours ago, indyspirits said:

    We're again looking to increase our production capacity. Currently we have a 2500 liter pot still. Fairly certain a larger kettle is not the answer.  I'm started my list of producers thusly:

    • Vendome
    • Red Boot
    • Headframe

    Others to whom I should send an RFI?

    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.

  9. On 7/1/2018 at 2:44 PM, indyspirits said:

    Our method is roughly this: macerate 40g various botanicals (juniper comprising 47% of total botanical load)  at 70% abv for 48 hours. Dilute to 40%. Charge still (we dont filter botanicals out).  For "heads cut" dilute some volume N by 1/2 with RO water. Once that stops louching start collecting "hearts".   We stop collecting when the distillate tastes earthy / "dry" / overly savory / unpleasant.  This invariably results in a VERY flavorful gin that lightly louches at bottle strength (46% for this expression).  We then add 46% neutral until is just stops louching and then bottle. This is a very dicey proposition as we all know the oils can come out of suspension if the temp drops.  

    The volume we leave in the pot (the inconsistency really triggers my OCD) would make our finance guy's butthole pucker -- sometimes as much as 40% of the initial charge.   I ask you ginners this:  what volume are you leaving in the pot and what, if anything, are you doing about it?  Do you re-rectify in your big column?  Treat and send to waste?  Use it for the base of the next batch?  

     

    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.

     

    • Thumbs up 1
  10. 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.

  11. 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.

     

     

  12. 1 hour ago, nabtastic said:

    Thanks for the advice everybody.  These columns are heavy AF and I've been terrified of these swaying - especially since they are so top heavy.  I'll get the cables for the top and bolts for the bottom.  Please tell me these anchor bolts  work and that I won't need to tap all 16 holes per column..

    I'll get our local metal shop to cut some shims for us.

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

    20180412_152625.jpg

  13. 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.

×
×
  • Create New...