AdamW

Can anyone here explain to me the PSY (potential spirit yield) from a malt specificiation? It simply doesn't make sense to me. I looked at a bunch of different malt specs (malt analyses). Most of them, for malted barley for example, seem to be in the 400L/tonne range, that's 400L of pure alcohol per metric tonne of grain. Specifically looking at one which was 405L/tonne, that is 405mL/kg. That is an insane number, no way can you get 405mL of pure alcohol from 1kg of grain, you can even do that with 1kg of sucrose, it takes 1.19kg of sucrose to make 405mL of pure alcohol (1mol sucrose = 2mol EtOH, 2mol CO2), and that is under realistically unlikely ideal conditions. So I don't really understand that value, there has to be something I'm missing. I'll most likely ignore the number in the future, but I'm curious what it's all about?

Greetings all, Slowly working on a business plan to start up a microdistillery here in Alberta. I believe I'm pretty competent in the art and science of distilling. It's the business side which has me mostly stumped. We'll see how things go in a few years when I actually try to get it up off the ground.