BCRob

Don't know if I can help much but I've worked at a single malt distillery out in Canada that did a bit of grain bill experimentation (we were attached to a brewery). I've also heard one of the distillers at Glenmorangie talking about this - their whisky Signet was a bit of a source of inspiration at my old place and our experiences line up pretty well. At least in my experience, I think you're probably getting a bit cute with this if you think (like in a brewery) that a change between 10% and 20% Vienna or Carapils is going to make any difference at all in an aged whisky. Off the top of my head, Signet was made with something like 40% chocolate malt, and we were pushing 50 to 60% chocolate malt in our mash. Basically, as much as we could get in the mash tun without extract falling ridiculously low. Despite this, we always wanted 'more' roast character - after a 5 year aging or whatever you need to bring the spirit to maturity, even a mashbill that tasted repulsively strong in the FV and was pot distilled and left 'rough' would lead to a subtle impact on finished spirit character. Anyway like I said I'm not an expert with non-roasted malts, but I figure if 60% chocolate malt doesn't have a massive impact on finished whisky flavour, crystal and especially Vienna/Munich malts will be almost undetectable. For what it's worth in my new job making wheat/rye whisky we did a lot of testing of yeast strains when I started and that did lead to a slightly greater impact on new make character. Plus it's much easier (and cheaper) to implement into daily production than using specialty brewing malts. Whether it'll lead to great differences after aging I'm still slightly skeptical, but that probably depends what distillation methods and cask types you are using (we use a lot of new oak and it tends to take over even pretty rough whisky after a few years.) All that said, you'll only know what works if you try it! It's definitely a lesser-explored area of whisky innovation - only, sometimes there's a reason for that.

In my experience they aren't more or less common, it just depends where the equipment comes from. I used to be a brewer and every German brewhouse I worked with was set up with DIN (it's the German standard). I'm from the UK originally and everything there is set up with RJT, then I've also worked with SMS. For what it's worth, even though DIN logically makes the most sense by far (in my opinion), I second the advice to either buy/make converters or ideally just hack off and re-weld any Euro fittings to Tri Clamp. I've found it next to impossible to find appropriate ID/OD matches for metric piping in my Italian packaging line here in Canada for one thing, and the fact I have to keep metric and imperial brewing hose around is a pita.

Sorry to say it, but you shouldn't have accepted the delivery. If the BOL stated full barrels and you signed for it even when the driver pointed out that 2/5 barrels were empty I'm afraid you can't entirely place blame on the supplier. For all you know (not saying this is likely, but it's possible) they could have been emptied in transit. If your complaints fall on deaf ears, all you can really do is vote with your feet and not use the broker/supplier again. I don't have much experience buying sourced product, but I thought normal practice anyway was to pay per proof gallon/LAA and have it delivered in a tote?

We are just re-assessing this, as recently we've had stalled fermentations and I'm pretty sure it's our gravities being too high and the yeast not coping (making 100% rye and 100% wheat whiskies). With our rye mashes we are at roughly 2:1 litres of water to kg grain, and that has always been fine. Recently increased our wheat grist bill to hit 1.5:1 to fit more in our kettle, and the resulting mash hits 12% ABV if it ferments fully. Problem is it isn't fully attenuating. Processing of very thick mashes doesn't seem to be a problem with enzymes and enough agitation. And there's obvious process benefits to high gravity mashing and stripping (I can't say anything about flavour). But you need to increase the amount of yeast you use exponentially, which gets expensive. As for how much weight, all grains are different but roughly you'll get .325-0.350 litres of alcohol per kg of grain (this is the grain spec called litre degrees/kg you might see). So a 1000kg grist would yield 325 litres of 100% ethanol. Sorry, no idea what that is in Proof Gallons or Imperial measurements. As suggested, you can use a calculator to work it out.

Thanks both for your advice. I think I am guilty here of letting old brewing habits get the better of me. Agree that taking a tank dip (which we do already) is probably sufficient. If I do install something cheap and cheerful it might be to the water inlet of our mashing vessel to at least give a metered mash size. Will look into the above systems. Coriolis meters were a new one to me and seem interesting academically even if a bit beyond my needs and budget. Thanks again!

Hi everyone, long-time listener, first time caller... Thanks for all of your excellent advice in the forum archives. Just wondering if anyone here has experience of using flow meters to measure cooled mash into their fermenters, and which ones you are using? I'm not intending to do this for any duty/compliance purposes so accuracy isn't critical, but more for my own interest and records and to help increase my FV and still charge consistencies. I'd ideally like to use a turbine flow meter for this, which I've used in breweries to measure relatively viscous yeast slurries, but which I'm not sure would be suitable for the grain-in rye/wheat mashes I would need to measure. Something along the lines of this. The main reason I'd like to use a turbine model for this obviously is cost. I'm sure there is an electromagnetic flow meter that would do the job no-question, but the price seems to be $10k rather than $2k, and they also seem to be a lot more bulky. Thanks for your advice!