Erik Owens

Spirit Works just released their Sloe Amaro, which uses their wheat vodka as a base. How many distilleries in the US use grain to glass spirits (instead of purchased NGS) in their base for their Amaros?

Leopold, Stone Barn and Skip Rock do, who else?

Who else?

The distilling research grant has funded research https://distillingresearch.org/research/2022-ocean-water-fermentation/

Brad Abramson will present the findings at the sustainability summit at ADI 2023.

Please feel free to leave comments here, or contact Eric Zandona directly at eric@distilling.com.

Calculators that make running your distillery easy (from Distillerly)

https://distillerly.com/home

We will be back in person Sept 14-17th in St. Louis MO!. We have a packed conference, and hope you can join us for our annual celebration of all things craft spirits and distilling. Go to: https://distilling.com/adi-conference/adi-2022/ to find out more.

A little nip, Came from a neighbors house, from the 60’s or 70’s

How much is it worth? Sell it at auction? 

We hope you can join us at the Rum Summit June 7th, New Orleans, Lula Distillery. Speakers include Karen Hoskin (Montanya Rum), Will Hoekenga (American Rum Report), Dr. Roberto J. Serralles (Don Q), Dr. Kenneth Gravois (LSU), Judy Allen & Bear Caffrey (Lula), and Olivia Stewart (Three Roll).

https://distilling.com/event/rum-summit-june-2022/

ADI will have a one day event in New Orleans June 7th at Lula Distillery. If you are a Rum enthusiast, or a Rum producer this is the event for you! 

https://distilling.com/event/rum-summit-june-2022/

We hope you can join us in New England for our 2+ day workshop. 

https://distilling.com/event/start-up-to-scale-may-2022/

Hello,

This is Erik Owens, the president of ADI and the moderator of the forums. My apologies for deleting the thread, I have not moderated before, and should have moved it. I will move this thread to Speakeasy, as you suggest. 

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to me directly.

The original barrel is an amphora. Barrels do two things when storing spirits, they add water and alcohol soluble wood components, and the provide oxidation reactions. Ceramic vessels can be made where they are essentially glass, like a porcelain tea cup, or they can be made where they leak water like with a flower pot. There are a few traditions such as awamori and pisco that use ceramic vessels for maturation. Does anyone have any information on how ceramic vessels are made for aging (types of clay, temperature fired) that can balance being porous enough to age, but not too much to loose spirit? And what the effects of maturation in a ceramic vessel are?

On 6/26/2020 at 7:29 AM, adamOVD said:

I've been thinking of doing a low tech version of something similar by building a stand with a load cell and a vessel suspended top of it, so I could weigh out my proofing water into the vessel, and use gravity and a needle valve to slowly trickle water into a spirit vessel.

I've seen using a 500 ml water bottle with a small hole in the lid, and putting it in the bung. It drips slowly in over a couple of hours. The next day, repeat. 

There are a couple of interesting ideas in here but I do not see a question being asked? One interesting topic may be the energy difference in producing vodka from sugar vs grain, but that falls more in the sustainability realm than scientific research. BTW we now have a group in ADI for Sustainability (https://distilling.site-ym.com/group/SUSTAIN), and will have an in-person meeting of the group at the conference in August. It would be interesting to trace it all the way back to farming and harvesting as well as processing to see what the energy differences are. If you would like to propose an article about what you are doing please reach out to me: https://distilling.site-ym.com/general/?type=CONTACT 

A yeast that can ferment uncooked grain is also very interesting. The cooking of grain sanitizes it, so it may be difficult to get reproducible results with all the microorganisms that live on grains. if you would like to to propose some sort of research into either topic, we will re-open our RFP Feb 15, 2021: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe2m5k37II4h7KQ8ohny0-UN1KCXA3QVs8fAvk292oShZtLSA/viewform

In 2018 the Distilling Research Grant (https://distillingresearch.org/) was formed as a 501 c3 to advance craft distilling by providing funding for academic research. The grant is funded by an annual auction and donations. 

The basic of science is to ask a question, create an experiment to test the question, run the experiment to create data, analyze the data and then determine if you have successfully proven or disproven your original question.

There are many ares of craft distilling which have unknowns, but are gigantic topics such as "does the terroir of corn affect the final flavor of barrel aged spirit?" which would take multiple years of experiments to lay the groundwork. As a start-up volunteer run organization there is not currently the resources to fund. We are looking for bite sized questions such as "How oxygen enters and interacts with distillate in whiskey barrels aged in various locations in aging warehouses (https://distillingresearch.org/research/)".

What areas of research can help you operate your distillery and/or help grow the craft distilling industry? The request for proposal re-opens February 15-April 16 2021. If you do not have a background in science, please reach out here: https://distilling.site-ym.com/general/?type=CONTACT and we will connect you with a member of the Advisory Committee to assist in the writing of the proposal.