CountySeat

We've done a series of malt whiskeys with a brewery in the same building. They sell well. We did a stout that came out nice, a wheated beer which was a huge hit, and an IPA beer which was niche but people liked. The IPA took much longer to age out - too harsh at first. If possible, you may want to have the brewery tweak their recipe to remove the hops which do't always distill out well and which add to the mashbill cost. All in all its a fun collaboration opportunity though if you are buying the beer you'll need to up the price a bit as the raw material costs are higher than a bourbon/rye.

What do you sell the tube in shell mash cooler for and do you have any specs on cooling time, etc?

It was Shenot Farm in Wexford, PA. https://www.shenotfarm.com/

There is a farm out in the Pittsburgh area - we were going to run a test batch but they lost their plums last year due to weather. I agree that the prices made it virtually impossible to sell for a reasonable price.

Hewn Spirit in PA does this - their owner restored barns so he has access to a lot of old woods. He uses it for a secondary infusion.

Thanks - we are looking to upgrade and are looking at that and also Toast. We did the Toast demo and was pretty impressed. It seems fairly comparable to the Square for Restaurants. We use the standard Square POS now.

What did you end up going with? We are looking to upgrade ours.

I practice as an attorney with a fair bit of experience in trademarks. While it is true that the USPTO has effectively lumped together all alcohol producers (despite claiming they they have no such de facto rule), the same is not necessarily the same for restaurants vs. manufacturers of alcohol. See - https://thettablog.blogspot.com/2017/08/ttab-test-is-cannibal-for-beer.html http://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/ttabvue-86682532-EXA-19.pdf I represented the brewery in the case linked. It is always a case by case basis and it is generally advisable to search for restaurants with the same name but they aren't always deemed confusingly similar.

If you haven't already, you should consider joining the PA Distillery Guild.

Update: We've run a few tests with meh results so far. We are actually have no problem with the ferment but not enamored with the final product (so far). For the ferment, we are running small 20G test batches using 100% Blue Agave from BSG. We quasi closed ferment (not airtight) with an aquarium heater to keep the wash right at 88-90F and dose in nutrients at pitch and around 24 hours. The first batch we tried a mix of SaftTeq Blue Tequila yeast and a C-70 yeast and monitored the PH daily to keep around 5.0. Ferment was steady and finished in about 5 days Starting SG around 1.06. We double distilled with a small potstill set up and it Came out pretty boring and neutral without much character and the cuts did seems to bleed together more than I'd like. Not sure we will keep the distillate or maybe blend and barrel. Tried a second batch which I haven't made the cuts yet. Used same basic protocol but used only the SafTeq Blue yeast. No real difference on ferment. If you keep it right 90F and 5.0 it seems to move along consistently and finish nicely. Double distilled, this time we used our plated test still and ran a little reflux for fores and heads and then cut the reflux and ran it reallllllly slow with empty plates. Haven't made the cuts yet but seems boring again. I feel pretty confident we have the ferment protocols down but just not getting the flavor we want. 'm not sure if its the Agave we are using but we don't get nearly the big tequila flavor we were hoping for. Will report back as we keep trying. Anyone have any alternative suggestions for a yeast or sourcing for agave?

Primary benefits we looked at were yield (easy to get down to a small particle size and you're getting 100% of the grain in the mash), consistency, and easier cleanup. Since it also obviates the need for a hammer mill, you may save a little space and not have to worry about the safety issues of dust. We never tested running shear pumps but if they worked, they would seem to be a really good solution to a lot of issues.

We priced some of the options a few years ago but didn't pull the trigger due to cost. The shear mixers have to be mounted pretty strongly/permanently so its not a clamp on option. We were intrigued by possibly doing it using a shear pump but not sure if the applicable has been tested. We had planned to send some grain to Admix to test but never got around to it. Shear pump could work but you'd probably need to pump back and forth or run a standard mixer to things in motion and not have all your grain sink to the bottom. If you are milling to a flour, I don't see a downside to shear mixing.

I would suggest contacting James at Cooper River in Camden, NJ - they are selling their all copper Hoga Alembic. He was originally selling as a going concern but now selling the still, etc.

We use smaller than that but we like our Letina Tanks. It looks like St. Pats have 4000L ones in stock.

Anyone find a benefit or negative to letting an agave ferment sit for a few days after the ferment completes?

We're not in Canada but we've used them. Our experience was not good. If you are going to use them, you need to be able to keep them full of ferment pretty much constantly. It is a longer story, but we had some equipment issues our first year when we had the wooden fermenters and weren't able to run them all the time. If you let them dry, they warp and dry out and need to be tightened. If you keep them full of water, they can mold up which requires extensive cleaning. Ours leaked all the time (bottoms were wooden and staves were press fit, not tongue in groove and we eventually took them out of service and went stainless. Plenty of people use wooden fermenters with great success but for us they were more of a hassle and liability than anything else. Wood are sometimes cheaper but if we had to do it again, we'd get stainless from the start. Again - others have had great success but my .02.

Thanks - We may try it that way with minimal temp control. I'm a little concerned we'll be overrun by fruit flies though!

Thanks! We are likely to go the puree route. Do you closed ferment? Temp control? It seems like the best protocol is to temp control in a sealed fermenter which we aren't really set up for now. Also - with the purees, do you find you can rack of the fruit wine and distill it like a wort? or do you have a lot of solids in your mash? We have smaller stills for direct heating and not sure if they would be suitable for this project. We have a larger still that can run solids but it would be a much bigger batch.

We are planning to add a single or multiple small fermenters for test recipes that we want to temperature control. We currently have a few 30G Speidel Plastic Fermenters we may use (https://www.morebeer.com/products/speidel-plastic-fermenter-120l-317-gal.html) -- any thoughts on the cheapest way to get temperature control? We want to keep it relatively cool for a fruit wine mash. Should we be looking at wrapping in pex with insulation or rigging up some form of drop in wort cooler with a glyocol system? Any advice appreciated!

Any thoughts on the difference in end product of starting with raw fruit vs puree vs juice vs concentrate? Obviously the juice and concentrate are less "crafty" and easier to use but does anyone have an informed opinion on the differences in end product of starting with different types of material? We will try full fruit at some point but interested in starting with a concentrate but not if the end product is likely to be poor. Thanks!

Hi - we are looking to swap out the boiler on our small test still (we have a HillyBilly Flute we use for development which currently has a 26G direct element boiler). We are looking for options for a 50-100G oil jacketed still boiler than can be utilized as a mash tun as well for on grain mashing/distillation. We are also looking for a similarly sized jacketed fermenter. Thoughts on who is making in this size ranger. We see ASD has a nice 30G we are looking at but not sure what else is around.

Set up for bain marie?

UPDATE: Thanks for all the replies. We *think* we fixed this. We still can't isolate what caused this but it appeared to form over a week or so. We dumped the bottles out, let it settle and filtered through 1 micron and .5 micron (not chill) and the filters did appear to pull out the flocking or whatever we can call it. We rebottled and it looks great. Moving forward, we will probably dilute down to bottling proof more slowly and tank and then filter before bottling and go from there. Will update again if we have the same issue.

We do not currently chill filter. We are reducing from 125 proof to 90 proof with RO/DI water. We could conceivable rest longer before filtering, although that would not be easy with our current set up. My other concern would be that when the bottles are shaken or moved, the cloudiness/sediment seems to mix back in so I'm not confident one way or the other that filtering after resting would cure the issue although it is worth a try. Any idea on why this would be happening now? We are essentially making the same product, in the same space, using the same ingredients, aging in the same conditions (albeit a little longer) and didn't have this issue for the first year or two of operations. The only thing I could think of was that our filters were getting old (although I believe the RO/DI system was showing a read out of zero on the output but we changed the filters in it regardless. I don't think it is an issue with our process (ferment, etc) because we didn't have the issue before and had it with a beer we distilled into an aged whiskey from a brewery in our same building.

So we are having a similar issue with our bourbon. We released several batches of bourbon with no issue but in the more recent bottlings, we are getting a post bottling sediment/cloudiness on the bottom of the bottles. Details (feel free to ask more): Product: Whiskey (fairly standard grain bill), aged in new charred, aged 1 to 2 years. Water: We use filtered city water through large carbon block for our process water and we run that filtered water through a RO/DI system for our proofing down water. Filters: We used cartridge filters and run a 5 micron and 1 micron in series. We had no issues for a long time and then in the last several months we have had this issue. We had thought the issue may be that our RO/DI filters were too old so we swapped them out. That seemed to work on a malt whiskey we released but the most recent bottling of bourbon has the same issue. Timing: the whiskey looks perfectly clear during and post-bottling. The haze is like a stringy cloudiness on the bottom of the bottle that clears out when shaked. Any thoughts? We have a 1/2 micron filter we can try but I am skeptical that will fix it. We already filter through a 1 micron which should be more than enough. We also waited a few days between proofing down and bottling so anything that formed should have been filtered out (unless perphaps the agitation of the bottling process hides it). TIA