Golden Beaver Distillery

I'm sure things like flow rates play a bigger role than temp. How slow is the mash move through the heat exchanger vs the water/glycol flow rate. Below an expert says glycol is 10% less efficient but I think that is a blank statement lacking specifics. Various expert comments found online - "water temperature capacity vs glycol" "Water has a better ability to retain and conduct heat from an associated process than a glycol mixture can. As a result, the efficiency of heat transfer for a water chiller will be higher than that of a glycol chiller." Why we have our chiller setup without glycol. "Water has superior heat transfer properties compared to propylene or ethylene glycol and is more frequently used in the southern half of the United States. Water is also cheaper than glycol and, in most cases, will result in a smaller unit selection while requiring less pumping HP." "Water is the most common heat transfer fluid because of its economy, high heat capacity and favorable transport properties." “If a system is utilizing glycol, instead of pure water, that mixture has a different heat transfer rate with potentially five to 10 percent less efficiency than water due to its viscosity,”

Water is the best way to transfer heat - more efficient than Glycol.

We use water and can drop 400 gallons of mash from 190° to pitch in about 1 1/2 - 2 hours.

You don't know what you don't know. Yes, it's worth the time and money. You get exposed to a lot of information in a short period of time, information that you will use if you decide to move forward with building a craft distillery. There were a few pitches by vendors but even those were helpful in the long run selecting products and services later down the line.

We drive down 40 or so cases at a time to their contract warehouse (Hildebrandt/DHL) in Benicia CA. Much cheaper for us to pay a small warehousing fee than deal with FedEx breakage and shipping costs - also faster turn around for our customers. We could LTL our stuff to the warehouse but we have a small van and the drive is a nice break from being in the distillery.

We mainly use GLS for DTC but I have shipped with FedEx. GLS is simple to set up and cheaper to ship within CA.

We use GLS and FedEx (take about 2 months of BS and paperwork).

Start here: https://www.aafes.com/about-exchange/doing-business/ Once registered, am sure they can help you find a distributor to work with,

Allan, We use LibDib successfully. One thing we needed to make it work is we store our product in their vendor's warehouse. This allow us to avoid FedEx/GLS bottle breakage/costs getting inventory to LibDib. We load up a pallet every so many weeks and deliver it so product is available when we get orders. The warehouse transfers the product to LibDib's portion of the warehouse for fulfillment. We have an in-house sales manager that works our market to get orders. I can say we "own our backyard" with product in the majority of independent liquor stores and most bars and restaurants. We were also successful getting into Costco (2 warehouses) for the holiday - but we do all the leg work. You have to hustle. Kris

So our still came with some healthy paddles and a simple on and off controller. If we ran still 75% full and the agitator on (full), we would generate a pressure differential keeping the return drain from working correctly. We replaced the controller with an AC drive allowing us set a slower agitation rate and now the drain works correctly.

You could also be over pressurizing your pot with too much agitation.

For your consideration, we run three stills (750g, 350g and 150g) and a 400g mash tun and have moved away from using any caustic or acid to clean our vessels. We dump the spend grains and wash into totes for a farmer and immediately pressure wash down the stills while they are still hot to remove any residual proteins or starches. It's not the most enjoyable work but we are able to collect the waste water and it goes out to water livestock which is a big help during our current drought here in CA.

PM

Anyone using Active Club Solutions (Activ8 Commerce) to run their club and DTC online commerce?

The ones I need to bend are electrical (220v).

Anyone have any success bending heating elements? We need to bend ours 75-90° to work in a new moonshine still.

We've been cashless from day one 2 1/2 years. You get the occasional moan and groan from a customer, but I love the fact my staff doesn't need to worry about counting cash at the end of their shifts, theft issues, and I do have to run to the bank to make deposits. Most customers are earning points on their cards these days anyway.

You're free to look at our offerings on LibDib.com for your consideration.

You using RO water, spring or tap water?

Are you recording data on Google Sheets? Are you displaying the data in your distillery.

Jocko, It works. Took a leap of faith on my part, but it works as designed. Sometimes we can over think this stuff before we actual see it in action. Kris

Hi We're looking for an 800 gallon mash tun and fermenters (6) Kris (at) GoldenBeaverDistillery (dot) com

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Agreed. It still seems rep-tilian works great for the reps not us so much.

Yeah, figure total cost to open a retailer is cost of the product + $200 with no guarantee of re-order.