60 000 bottle per year =...

[Elixir]

Hi i am trying to convert a production of 60 000 bottles.

My question is how you guys would do it? 4-5 days a week distilling? and bottleling etc?

What size of stills would you use?

 

[JustAndy]

It depends so totally on what you are making and how you are making it that your question is impossible to answer. If you wanted to sell GNS-based gin you could make that many bottles with a 50 gallon still, if you wanted to make grain-to-glass vodka you probably need 2 stills ten times that large. 

[bluefish_dist]

From last June. Still good for planning if you are making from wash/wort  

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Posted May 2, 2018

How much you can sell and how much you can make are two very different questions.  Can't help on the how much can you sell.  

To answer the how much to make I will post what I think are some good estimates.  Not perfect, but they will help you plan.  Note I have posted this before.   Start with how much you need to make (gross).  Figure you can get $100/gallon for bottled product ($20/bottle) Maybe more, maybe less, but this is a rough estimate.   So divide gross sales by 100, that is how many gallons you have to make.  So roughly every $100k is 1000 gallons.  Divide by 50 to get per week.  That's 20 gallons or 100 bottles per week to sell $100k.  Distillation is about a 10:1 reduction,  so 20 gallons bottled is about 200 gallons of wash/wort into the still.  To determine still size, decide how often to run the still.  Once per week is a 200 gallon still, twice per week is 100.  For fermenter, figure a two week turn.  Some are faster, some slower,  so that doubles the still volume.  In rough numbers 400 gallons of fermentation, 200 gallon still run weekly gets you $100k/year gross.  

 I think this shows why you need a pretty big setup to make any money.  also look at your fire code.  If you don't have sprinklers you can only have 120 gallons in a control area.  That isn't much barrel storage.  It goes to 240 gallons with sprinklers.