RobertS

I believe I've heard of the 'five second rule' somewhere. Basically what Tall Ship said, have it touch oak and accurately state how long it did so. You can understate, never overstate contact time.

I would say no? We generally only reflux towards the end of the run to keep our final proof up but run the heads and most of the hearts without it. This week we experimented with distilling to 160 instead of near barrel strength, and if anything the heads were harder to pick out. That's probably just the overall profile being different from what I'm used to, though. Same? I did yield estimates for the last few batches and found that reflux didn't change how much alcohol we got out of our mash. Extraction, conversion, and attenuation are going to be bigger factors than what style of distillation you run on it, as far as I know. We generally range around 115 without reflux and running hearts way down. Which is why we usually reflux to keep it up around 125.

That's reassuring, @Afilters. Was worried to try chill filtering only to lose something in the process.

Belated update: We let the spirit sit and air out a bit and it is much more palatable. Still has a character I would call 'corn husk' but in a sorta good way. We've noted those barrels for blending later and are using a couple bags of malted corn in our batches until its used up.

How much loss of flavor or sugars do you experience when doing so? I've polished an unsweetened rum for chill haze on a 1 micron filter, which worked well. However, we're seeing our aged honey liqueur forming some nasty permanent chill haze and I'm worried that it may have important larger flavor molecules and what would happen with the sugar.

I do not. It's torn apart and stowed for now, I'll take some glamour shots next time.

12 feet of 3 inch stainless pipe with triclamp flanges with a pair of reducer caps. Valve on the bottom and meshed gaskets at either end, hoist it vertical and pump in the bottom. Stainless elbows, then a hose running back down to the tank. Other than the air pump and hose to/from the tank, it's stainless. Takes about three hours to fully filter 60 proof gallons, the volume is probably overkill for the setup.

According to that, they literally had a swimming pool on site that leaked chlorinated water into the soil around the foundation and then got into their wooden fermenters. Sounds like a unique situation to learn from.

A couple ml of Alpha Acetolactase at the start of ferment will prevent diacetyl from forming.

We just use a 12 foot x 3 inch pipe loaded with carbon, works like a charm.

As he said, it's a good one at a great price. We use an EnolMaster 4 head filler here, but it is a multi-thousand dollar machine. I can do about 10 cases an hour by myself on that, including hourly fill and proof checks. Having a second person so as to not stop to rinse and case roughly doubles that. That comes out to about 24 gallons per man hour either way. Call it three hours to do a drum by yourself? I would imagine (no experience with others) most vacuum fillers will have similar fill rates per head. You can always shop around for one with the right number of heads for you.

+1 for lees, pretty much the same story as ThomasM.

Sections A and B refer to packaged and bottled product, respectively. You would not have cases 1 through 10, then cask 11. That 'may' might also be what we had read as allowing A: 1-10 and B: 1-1, now that you mention it.

Oh dear. We had read that to allow A: 1-10 and B: 1-10, but going back I don't see any text to do so. I think "except that any series of such numbers already in use may be continued to that limit" is where we got that idea.

90 gallon stills running steam here. Stripping on the grain takes about an hour to take off and two hours to run. Spirit runs take about 40 minutes to take off and 7 hours total. A full pot through the column is about 9 hours total. Ten hours for 128 gallons doesn't surprise me at all.

We had a surplus of malted corn sitting around and tried using it as the corn component in our grain bill to use it up. I just started stripping it today and am worried about how it will turn out. My strip tastes like corn husk. I'm guessing this is not something that will be removed in the head cuts, and have no idea how this flavor will age. Is this a good thing in disguise or have we made a terrible mistake?

Poking around, I found that juicers have some numbers on yield of juice for lots of different fruit. I would believe that this would give a decent ballpark figure for various fruit wine yields. I plugged your 10 kilos into here and it spat out 995.6 g sugar in 2620.2 mL of water, 38 brix. Assuming no losses or cuts and I didn't make a typo, that would come out to 497.8 mL of 100 proof spirit. After inefficiencies, cuts, and losses, probably closer to 300 mL? For comparison I looked up wine grapes. Some conversions from here got me to 10 kilos yielding 4626.6 mL of wine. No figure on alcohol content there, I'll assume the average of 13.5 abv. That's about 624.6 mL of 100 proof spirit before inefficiencies and cuts. Obviously my numbers are pretending to be far more precise than they really are, but ~500 vs ~625 shows that the juicers probably have reasonable numbers. Juice needs a lot of fruit, and brandy needs a lot of juice. FYI: I have yet to make a brandy myself, so these numbers don't have practical experience behind them.

PBW does wonders on more permanent adhesives. Some labels come off easier than others, but I believe a second round of soaking would deal with the tougher ones. Most are just a quick wipe. We're still a small operation, so I haven't needed to go terribly mass-scale yet.

I'm assuming there are supposed to be images given the white spaces all over the place. Is it just my internet being funky? Love the descriptions, wish I could see the labels!

I use a low concentration of our CIP acid or barkeeper's friend. Brasso extends a shine but in my experience has trouble getting the shine there to start with.

We redistill with the column to make GNS. Recover about 2/3 as usable alcohol. The heads of the heads are another matter, we've just been letting those slowly pile up for now.

We had some beer turn purple from residual cleaning solution. Not sure vodka would have all the pieces for the reaction to happen, but I would say it's a solid guess.

Adding glycol and glycerine will increase the density and lower the apparent proof accordingly. You can determine how much your exact addition changes the proof by redistilling, but the ttb does not require you to account for the variance so long as you do not have "solids in excess of 600 mg per 100 ml". Which means ignore the variance and accept that you will actually have a negligible bit more alcohol per volume than listed.

I've been pondering that myself. Presently our only liqueur has the sugar added before aging with no further correction there, so I only distill it two or three times as I find out how much water to add and dial it in. So bear in mind this is theoretical, I'm hoping someone corrects whatever it is I'm missing but hopefully this helps: We all know that proof is a simple ratio of alcohol volume to total volume, and have tables giving density based on it. Degrees Brix is a measure of sugar mass to solution mass. Fortunately, we have an equation that tells us how it changes the density (at 20c) that is usually used in reverse: Brix = 231.61 × (SG − 0.9977) So if we know the brix we want in a simple sugar/water mixture, we can flip everything around and have SG = (Brix/231.61) + 0.9977 We then know the density of the sweetened water we're blending into our alcohol. Not sure how it effects blending volume reduction form here, but it's probably a small correction factor that can be nailed down after a couple of batches if it matters at all. I'll ignore it at your peril. Shall we say that we want to proof down using 5 Brix syrup? 5 / 231.61 + 0.9977 = 1.0193 So, we know that 1 liter at 20c will weigh 1.0193 kilos. What will 1 liter of ethanol weigh? TTB tables are at 60f, but this table agrees with the TTB table and provides a second set of gravities at 20c. According to this, 1 liter of 160 proof alcohol at 20c will weigh 0.8606 kilos. Again, ignoring blending volume reduction, if we mix these two volumes together we should have 1.88 kilos of 80 proof alcohol that is about 2.7 Brix (5 * 1.019 / 1.88) That final number may be a bit off, but it should be at least better than guesswork.

Warm or hot caustic water would do wonders for clearing sugar, can't speak for what it would do to the equipment. You would need to follow up with acid and probably the enol-san regimen as recommended. Do not do this without verifying your filler can handle caustic or hot liquids.