Ben B

fldme- That's a good call. Definitely planning to incorporate the backset, and using it to cool makes sense.

Hey thanks for the post, Mash. Do you do a boil out at the end or just a mashout? Ferment grain-in? Cheers

I am pretty sure just about everyone is using some sort of method of crash cooling their mash/wash, but I am curious if anyone out there has tried using the no-chill method. If so, what were your results and how long did you boil out? Grain-in? I've heard there's a distillery in Seattle that isn't crash cooling and is having success. Love to hear some of your thoughts on this.

@Artisan - I was actually thinking about that, funny you mention it. Could be an interesting experiment anyhow. @smoogdog - That's a really good idea as well. At least getting some portion of the fresh juice in there could provide a good flavor dimension. And you're definitely not crazy to do a full agricole! It's damn tasty, and I'm glad to hear you're utilizing your locality to create rum like that.

Awesome, thanks very much that's a huge help! Definitely do love the vegital notes of the rhum agricoles, but those sound like more viable options that may still allow one to create a unique product.

Thanks for the advice Todd. Good to know about the spoilage factor. Getting the stuff to Idaho in frequent enough shipments to keep it fresh might well put it outside the realm of reasonable costs.

Anyone out there have any recommendations for sourcing raw cane juice for producing rum in the style of rhum agricole/cachaca? Thanks for any help/experiences you can share.

Thanks for the insights on this. Pressure9pa, how do you mean the volume is more important for barrel aged spirits? Are you saying, it's far more difficult to scale up small experimental batches of recipes that will be barrel aged? If you could expound on that a bit, I'd appreciate it.

Hey Steve, I'm hoping to do just that! Thanks for the recommendation and reply. Cheers, Ben

Looking to purchase a small still for recipe development. When it comes to scaling up experimental batches to production scale, have any of you found certain batch sizes to be too small to be indicative of the product produced on a larger still? To be specific, would a batch created on a 3 liter still be too small to bring up to a 400 L still? What size stills do you use for experimentation? Thanks for the help.

Hello to everyone. Let me start by thanking all of you for creating such a great online community and for sharing such helpful information. After many months of reading through the forum, I've finally made the decision to commit to dream. I'm excited to get to know everyone, learn from your experiences and eventually contribute my own experiences. In the coming months, I will be doing a fair bit of traveling and will hopefully be able to meet some of you face to face. Cheers, Ben

Did you guys run into certain requirements for the walls separating your tasting room from the rest of your operation? I'm in the middle of the fire/zoning process and have been told that the tasting room would be considered A-2 occupancy, with the distillery being F-1. I'm assuming once I get a fire suppression system in, the standard 1-hour walls would suffice?