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Broken Anvil Distilleries

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Everything posted by Broken Anvil Distilleries

  1. Sorry to bring this around again. We have also had non-stop issues with our MXD. Do you know if its possible to keep the motor and replace crank case / agitator or if we have to replace all of the above in one go? The motor has been great, the bearings, seals, crankcase, etc. are not holding up like we would hope considering we only run the still 4 days a week.
  2. Thanks. The price is cheap and their direct drive pump has worked great, but I don't know beyond that.
  3. We have been running our distillery successfully using a EURO50 2" 2.5hp direct drive Impeller pump to pump our mash around for years now. We have an electrical issue which I was unable to troubleshoot and the supplier is of no help, so off to a motor company which is backlogged for weeks. To keep the place running with a minimal spend, we are looking to pick up a EURO50 belt driven impeller pump for a fraction of the cost of the direct drive. However, since I never see any other distilleries using belt drive pumps and they are cheap, I was wondering if there is a drawback that I don't know about other than maybe a small decrease in power. Anyone out there able to provide some insight?
  4. Thanks Golden Beaver, JeffW. Loving going through the Propack website; they have a lot of toys that probably only get us excited but its fun!
  5. We are looking to do a modest upgrade to our labeler and are coming up empty handed for options. We currently use a benchmate and have for several years now. It does what it is supposed to do, but we are finding that very few staff are able to get consistent results without throwing out a lot of labels. Perhaps it is the size of our label (6", almost full wrap) or our bottle (narrow, 9.75" to the neck) but we can't get consistent long term results without a lot of tweaking. We are small operation (10K bottles per year), and are looking for a semi-automatic machine that is able to deliver consistent results regardless of who is operating it. Unfortunately our bottles are too tall for the Primera 360/362. Does anyone have a recommendation in the $3K range?
  6. We have an enolmaster and after about 8000 bottles, it starts and stops when it wants. Tech support says it's likely the very expensive pump that needs to be replaced. Maybe its us, but we also have very inconsistent fills. I wouldnt do it again; it's a seriously expensive product to start having problems so quickly.
  7. Apollo econo mill with with 2hp 230-460v explosion proof UL Listed motor. Adjustable gap, 6 inch rollers 18″ extension legs (not pictured) Canadian made. Bought used from a distillery in the US but was never wired up for our use. No longer required since we use a third party to mill for us off-site. $2450 USD / $3200 CAD (Price new is $3950 /$5200 CAD) FOB P3E5P5, Ontario, Canada (Sorry about the dust and bad pics, its been in storage since purchased a couple of years back)
  8. We used a high end DIY industrial epoxy. It looks good, fills in small holes, but stains with time. One thing we were incredibly with cautious was (and the recommendation of the industrial paint store) was power washing then degreasing the heck out of it. Without doing that, oil will resurface and cause bubbling (a small amount of which we still see in trouble areas). Our biggest killer is the metal bands on IBC totes on a wet floor leaving rust marks. For about 1k plus labour, we can repaint an 1800 sq foot distilling room once a year to keep it fresh, or just let it go.
  9. Georgeous, Just as confirmation for you, we are running the exact same Fulton boiler (15hp, 2009) with a 600 gallon MT (jacket heated) and a 300 gallon still. We have no problem bringing grain in batches up to boiling in 1.5h if we want. We can even run both the still and the MT if we are patient and will often mash once the still is at temp.
  10. Plate and frame you can get from AOWilson (they are a 3rd party for an Italian company) and Criveller. I believe Bosagrape also serves as a 3rd party for some systems. We built our carbon filtration system and our inline bottling filtration setup is from the US but are happy with our plate and frame.
  11. We have used both cooling in steam jacket and by the addition of carbon filtered (ie dechlorinated) water to final volume. Is there a downside to the latter that I'm missing assuming we are tight with our volumes to ensure we arrive at our preferred pH and SG?
  12. Is anyone in Canada using the Canadian version of Hoochware? I'm looking to have a quick offline DM / phone conversation.
  13. Roger, Those of us who reside in Ontario also pay a domestic "fee" of 147% to sell through the government stores. If it gets lowered, those of you south of the border won't be the only ones happy.
  14. Reviving an old thread. We love our gin, but for yield (due basket capacity limitations) and consistency (different people grinding juniper may be resulting in differing levels if astringency), we are looking to macerate our juniper and leave the remainder of botanicals in the basket. I was curious about ballpark ratios to start our experiments at in an effort to produce a very similar (ideally identical ) gin. Would experiments of half the amount of juniper macerated (by dry weight) for 16-24h be comparable to weights used in basket or should we start at 3/4 the weight used in vapour path or above ?
  15. We tried for the same. We also have an apollo mill. There are several companies that make mash tuns and tanks like Criveller but the only Canadian still manufacturer we identified is Specifical Mechanical. Specific Mechanical is in Victoria and make a skid mounted system. Unfortunately, when we were looking at it, it didn't meet our needs as a grain to glass vodka / gin producer. They were good to talk to and are worth a call.
  16. Product of Canada Claims permit " Very low levels of ingredients that are not generally produced in Canada, including spices, food additives, vitamins, minerals, flavouring preparations, or grown in Canada such as oranges, cane sugar and coffee. Generally, the percentage referred to as very little or minor is considered to be less than a total of 2 per cent of the product. " I imagine that depending on your choice of botanicals and your sourcing of them, you will likely be playing in a grey area.
  17. When pressed, our engineer said "or you could use a non plumbed unit that hangs on the wall". We are in a different jurisdiction and I am the last to trivialize safety, but your engineer may be recommending the gold standard, not what is acceptable by regulatory bodies. It may be worth your time to make a call to a second party specializing in these matters. Note: We sadly don't have a forklift.
  18. Food for thought. We are really new but have already switched over to a hybrid system where we chill one CLT with an internal glycol loop cooled by a chiller and have a second unchilled tank of water that we let cool ambiently to the room. They both pump through the same water lines to our condensor, mash tun, etc. This allows the shop to not run the chiller any more than necessary and retain some hot water to be use for other purposes (in our case simply radiant heat).
  19. With a large charge, we can easily keep our still at the same temperature for several hours on a heavily refluxed GNS/vodka run, in part because our thermometer is in the headspace of the kettle. This is visually looking at an analogue thermometer - not the same as actual temperature changes since small increments are difficult to observe. Are you flooding one or more of your plates? What you are describing would match up with a plate being flooded then clearing, releasing a bolus of gas which would raise your condensor temp which would cool again if the plate flooded again and so forth.
  20. We've tried shoveling floor drain waste into 5g pails and garbage cans riddled with 1/16mm holes and weirdly can't get them to drain well even though it works well through for our false bottom hdpe setup that we use for our good spent grains. I can't explain why other than holes in the sides must get clogged. (We toss spent grains from floor drains since we assume them to be contaminated by floor waste and cleaning solutions and won't let that be fed to the cattle that eat our good spent grains)
  21. We've used Bosagrape and they are just down the road from you; unless of course that was your supplier that stopped supplying. They have been good to deal with.
  22. We've been running some basic experiments with fat washing distilled product. We've had some success but aren't where we need to be to guarantee long term stability. There are products on the market but may be using artificial flavoring (which isnt our thing).I was curious if there were suggestions on achieving stability (higher abv, fine filtration) etc. We are happy with flavours but are impatient and don't want to find out that everything goes nasty months in while it sits in distribution .
  23. Scrap that, we leave it overnight to drain and it's likely preferment you are asking about which would mean bacteria/yeast would make their home before you pitch.
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