jeffw

Very cool looking Joe. Are those tube in tube or tube in shell heat exchangers for the beer input/vapor output? How thick or a mash can you run through it?

Never tried but I like the idea. What percentage of the ferment did you leave in there? Did you repitch yeast at all?

Yeah, I get the cool factor of the copper ones, but I like the stainless vintner vault ones too.

I have a grist hydrator on my new mash cooker. I don't know if it is ideal or not compared to an emulsifier, but it seems to work fine. I have gotten some dough balls, but just at the side manway (might have been a bad idea to get one...) and quite minimal. This is running at 2.5# per gallon on bourbon mash. Pretty new system so I haven't run an other mash bills yet. I have been feeding my grain in pretty slow right now though, so we will see as I go up to 30# per minute how it does.

Stumpy Spirits is selling one like that. You should find the quote in equipment for sale.

The times I have done a more tradition bourbon mash I have added corn, wheat, and rye at tap temp, added sebHTL and sebFlo and heated to 190, rest. then drop to 150 for malt add, rest, drop to pitch yeast. Never seen a problem, but I haven't done many mashes with this recipe and haven't tried adding rye or wheat on the way down to see what difference it could make.

I honestly didn't think there were enzymes in rye and wheat when they are not malted.

I was reading the Artisan Spirit magazine the other day and the article written by Wilderness Trail Distillery on cranking out the maximum number of barrels on your equipment got me thinking about their mashing technique. Is there a reason to add smaller grains (rye, wheat) after gelatinizing the corn, instead of adding it at the same time. The whole article is on minimizing the cook time and overall efficiency, and I don't know what the downside of adding rye and wheat at the same temperature step as the corn would be...thoughts? Some off flavor I don't know about? I have done a few mashes with the corn and wheat/rye added at the same time and brought to 190; I have never really seen any problem with this but perhaps if I dropped temp to 170 to add rye/wheat the flavor would change.

First question would be is this gin from GNS or are you making it? If from GNS I think you gin still could be smaller than what you are planning on. 304 stainless should be fine. I really like the idea of multiple gin baskets, but it is not necessary. It could be cool though to turn off different botanicals at different points in the run. You can just as easily do a separate distillation for each if you want. I would think a batch system is just better because of cost and easy of setup and use, but I don't have experience on a continuous. The how long part is really up to you. I would say that I think gin is very competitive so just keep this in mind in your volume projections.

Quick little game of what the hell is that? The orange stuff is something new to me. This is a new equipment "sacrificial" mash with mostly corn. Smells like a normal bourbon mash. It is extremely oily. Corn oil? Otherwise, maybe some fluid leaked into the mash from the gear box on the agitator? All thoughts welcome. I did not taste it. Distilling now and I will see how the low wines taste.

Would it still even be H3? I am looking at going offsite for barrel storage now too, but I would think since you are exempt from MAQ, you would not necessarily even be H3. This is up to the fire marshal of course. They might consider you a liquid storage (NFPA 30) warehouse which is H3 and has a 300 ft setback requirement, so hopefully not.

How many gallon beer do you think you can run through it? Your cost estimate is just for the column or includes controls?

Everything is SOLD!

Sounds like a great idea Tom. I will see what a fabricator will want to charge me to manufacture the ends and try to post a followup on how it goes. It has been awhile since I did the hx calculations but I imagine that as big as the thing is it is probably still too small for a single pass on that size system in a reasonable flow rate. Frankly though, if it is too small I can use both the jacket and the tube and shell and for sure get the knockdown time pretty reasonable. Even if one ended up with 2 tube and shells stacked or side by side it would still have a pretty small footprint.

I was running my 2000L tote with the steam jacket acting as a cooling jacket and it worked fine. Winter crash time on a mash (400 gallons water 1000# grain) was about an hour and longer in the summer. I just upgraded to 4000L cooker and will start the same way but I am guessing it is gonna suck doing it this way. Way back when I quoted a tube and tube through Thermaline and it seemed pretty reasonable (I know Quincy St. is using one, care to weigh in BlueStar?). I have an extra condenser (19 1" tubes, 5 ft on a 8" shell) and am debating running this as a dedicated cooler. The debate is run it as pure shell and tube or put some sort of U-tubes on the end and have it go on one continuous path (though a labor intensive mod and if you plug it you are f*cked). I used it on small mashes when I was doing 60 gallon batches and it worked fine but it was hard to keep clean. I didn't think of putting easy to use manways on the ends but had them bolt on which made the whole breakdown a PITA. I think putting a manway on both ends and on the input end have it split the tubes in half could work well in theory and you could have the mash pump in and out of one side...Still thinking this through and would love anyone's input.

Your overall alcohol looks extremely low to me give that mash bill, I would guess it should be a little over 10% abv (at 80 gallons anyway, but if you are using grain displacement the ABV would be different, but still higher). Perhaps your hearts yield is low and tails is high due to a problem during fermentation. I would expect something more around .9 heads, 5.88 hearts, 1.1 tails. This is subjective of course and depends on your aging plan and so forth, but that would be my overall yield. That said, I double distill everything. I find that the tails separation for me was pretty poor on single distillation and stopped using it pretty quickly.

Sale Pending.

I have 8 30 gallon used Black Swan Barrels for sale (dumped about 4 weeks ago and had 100% malted rye whiskey). $400 for all or $65 a barrel. Location Wheeling, IL. Cheers, Jeff

Nice barrel porn. Those toasted?

I will call. Sorry Sophia, I have been out of state doing sales this week. Hard to stay on top of everything.

Run the mash through a coffee filter to remove the solids and you should be good to go.

I find distilling aged products usually comes out amazing; but of course, it is not cost effective. I bet it would make the coolest base possible for a genever. I took some 2.5 year old rye and distilled it as a base for a genever that got made only for me...I had and have no plans to make that an actual product because of the price involved, but I dare say it was the best damn genever I ever had.

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If you are trying to be really cheap and you have an inline filter to your bottler and your main concern is debris, just partially fill the bottle then dump it back out. This will be pretty slow though and you might get spillage on your bottle. I certainly know some people do this though.