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Advice on Upscaling Gin Recipe


Brizee

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Hi, we are about to commission our stills in the coming months which means its time to upscale from 100L to 350L then to our 3000L.

Any advice on how to not waste a lot of NGS and botanicals as we upscale from still to still?

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Here is what I personally would do.

My first few runs in the 350L would be the same exact recipe and batch size as if you would run it in the 100L rig.  What this will hopefully show you is the profile difference you will get from the new bigger still (good bad or indifferent).  In a nut shell before trying to "upscaing", first identify if you get a slightly different profile just from running on a new/different rig and adjust for this first if needed.  I'd run at least 3 batch destined for the 100L still in your new bigger still before upscaling.

You're going to need to learn the new foreshot cuts and how much to take off the front.  Remember when running a still the first spirits through the still also does some cleaning.  With more physical material the foreshot cut will likely increase even with the same size batch and you'll want to learn to adjust for this especially with Gin.

TIP/Bit of history: For those not familiar with spirit safe use, back in the day when you couldn't actually smell or taste the spirit but only had access to it in an enclosed locked case (spirit safe) you created a sample in the safe pulling the current spirit and diluting it to 46% (temp corrected) by mixing in water. The spirit safe had both thermometers and hydrometers in "sampling jars".  You could divert both spirit and water to these "jars".  If the spirit louched you were still in foreshots.  When it no longer louched at 46% you were past the foreshots.  Then you could pull your heads and hearts by proof moving forward.

The interesting thing about this "misting" test done in the spirit safe was that the louching wasn't caused by oils in the fresh spirit but from the cleaning that took place as the first set of vapors worked their way through the still.  High proof spirits are GREAT cleaning products!  Essentially the first set of high proof spirits ran through the pot still cleaned up what was left stuck to the pot still from the tails and oils of the previous batch.  This just happened to match up really close to what we presently consider the actual foreshots you wanted to remove, so 2 birds/one stone.

What was clear from doing this with whiskey is that the size of the batch really didn't determine the foreshot to throw away as much as the "cleaning" that took place.  Bigger stills will have more crud being removed at the start and will change the initial cut volume to accommodate this "cleaning".

Now the "misting" trick worked well with grains but obviously when dealing with things like juniper will not work as the oils come over early.  You will need to nose/taste it and determine a new minimal "foreshot" cut to throw away on the bigger still.  But it will be different and not determined by the batch as much as the size/shape of the new still.  So this needs to be taken into consideration.

So now with that knowledge, the first run won't have crud/tails so the amount of foreshots to be taken won't show up until the next set of runs.  Within 3 runs as if you were running the 100L still you should have a good idea of the different initial cut needed and will give you a very good base of what the Gin is going to taste like coming off the 350L still before doing any upsizing or changes to recipe.  You may or may not need to tweak your existing recipe as the new still will produce differently.  You may get more upfront peel or juniper,  you may get more earthly or less earthy tones from the herbs/botanicals.  While the two still may look similar they may work quite differently due to different riser heights, different coolant temps, different types of condensers, different boiler shapes which can affect reflux, etc.  Tweak the 100L recipe for the new still if needed.

Tweak the foreshot cut and the gin botanical recipe and once satisfied start to scale it up.  You could try 150L (50% more botanicals) or jump to 200L (2x botanicals) depending on how good it taste at 100L.  I'd do a few step ups in size with adjustments if needed vs just going for a 350L run.  Consider it a transition or ramp up period.

If you macerate and put botanicals in the boiler you might find the additional time in the boiler changes flavor a bit, or if doing vapor infusion might find you need to change out botanicals at a certain point.  No one can tell you what to expect as all setups and stills are different.

Just try to change only 1 thing at a time per run and you shouldn't have a lot to worry about and shouldn't really have any waste.

Hope this helps.

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