Hunter Distillery (Australia)

[Rich Morgan]

Thought I would share what were doing downunder.

I started a facebook page to record our progress, it covers the last 12 months.

Love to hear what you think.

http://www.facebook.com/DistilleryMan

[JohninWV]

Looks amazing.

What is your process for condenser cooling water? I see the rainwater tanks and another image of the cooling tower. I'm curious as to you setup.

[Rich Morgan]

Thanks for the kind words,

We are not on town water, so we have about 75,000L rain water collection. We use rain water for all our processes. So far the rainfall has been such that we are good for water. In dry times we may need to get town water tanked in. However, when it rains here it really rains. We filled them completely in the first week of our rainy summer.

We use forced liquid cooling for two reasons;

1. Average summer temperature in Australia is about 35C, so air cooled condensers start to become ineffective.
   
2. For safety reasons I want my distillate cold, about 20C, means it does not create vapours.
   

We use a small 10 ton (ice tons per hour) cooling tower. It runs a closed water loop which serves both our stills, and the lab. Depending on outside temperature and humidity the cooling water enters the building at about 19-20C, and return from the stills at around 36C, depending on still load. Evaporation causes about 10L/hour of top up water. A 1HP pool circulation pump moves the water. I have a fine mesh filter to strain out any gunk (dead insects mainly) so the solenoid valves on the stills don't get fouled. We add 100ml of liquid pool chlorine every week to keep the tower base tank clean. I also add Benzotriazole (BTA) to prevent any corrosion of the copper condensers on the stills, BTA is the primary corrosion inhibitor in most car engine coolants.

I have a simple pressure switch on the cooling circuit that must see at least 20psi, before the still heaters will fire up, as cooling failure is catastrophic for any still. The only time this safety feature activated was when someone turned off the top up water supply to the tower, and it evaporated itself to almost dry, the pump lost its prime, and pressure dropped, the system then shut down. The switch was $20 on ebay. Cheap insurance.

Evaporative cooling towers are so well suited to distilleries, in climates with lower humidity. The are cheap to run, easy to fix, reliable and above all cheap to buy.

[JohninWV]

Thanks Richard.

We're going to need to look into a cooling tower if we expand again. We're limited on how much water we can put into our sewer. We're fine now, but expansion would put us over the limit.

When you say "catastrophic for any still", I understand the danger of alcohol vapor, but why would cooling failure destroy the still? It seems like alcohol vapor would just escape from the condenser (at least on our still) until someone either cut off the heat source, the building blew up, etc. It's not like there isn't an outlet for the pressure created.

[Rich Morgan]

When you say "catastrophic for any still", I understand the danger of alcohol vapor, but why would cooling failure destroy the still? It seems like alcohol vapor would just escape from the condenser (at least on our still) until someone either cut off the heat source, the building blew up, etc. It's not like there isn't an outlet for the pressure created.

Just that, a fire. Ethanol has a relativy low flash point and a ELV of 2% so, it does not require much vapour to create a potentially explosive enviroment.Maybe catastrophic was a bit dramatic, but a still fire is nothing pleasant.

[JohninWV]

Ok. We're on the same page. I was trying to come up with some mechanical.