Christopher ONeal

Yeah we run independent tests because our municipal water is famous for having good numbers at the testing site (near the station) and much worse numbers at point of delivery once the water has made its way through miles of decades old pipes sunk into what is essentially swampland.

Fancy a trip to New Orleans? We are definitely running a gen 1 still (he mentioned during his visits several improvements he made to subsequent iterations), but I'm sure we'd be happy to host you.

Sorry I disappeared for a few days, we had a hard freeze here which throws the entire city into chaos. Thank you for the questions! Our AP is serviced and calibrated quarterly. We had some issues in the summer with inconsistent readings but that seems to have been due to a faulty batch of batteries. Our local AP rep loaned us a benchtop unit for a few weeks to confirm our readings and once we got a new pack of batteries from a more trusted brand we had no discrepancies. I do a weekly cleaning according to manufacturer's instructions, and we do a daily deionized water calibration. The AP is used to guage all of our spirits, but only the spirits themselves, and we have no flavored or sweetened products aside from our gin and cucumber vodka. For both of those, we use the AP only on the neutral spirit blend before adding botanicals and the final distillate, not on the maceration. The are certified, and all but one are 5 years old. We have not tested hydrometers against each other, as we do not have overlap in the measurement range except in our parrot hydrometer, which has full range but little accuracy. We use it primarily to watch for spikes or sudden drops in proof. We are able to hold 100% reflux with the steam dialed well down at the beginning of a run and with the steam fully open at the end. I have experimented with loading the plates and drawing off the heads, and usually end a run by loading the plates again to try and get the best out of the tails that I can. With the variable temperature of the input, we use the dephleg temperature guage to determine how open the flow is for the majority of the run, aiming for ~190F for the hearts, which for us gets a couple hours of ~140 proof spirits. City water run through dechlorinating filters (we have checked with the city and confirmed that chlorine rather than chloramine is the agent used). We have also had our water independently analyzed, I can send anyone who likes a copy of that.

Hopping back in to confirm that there is not active steam control to reciprocate. There are individual steam controls on the input side for the two kettles, but we have not seen enough difference between the kettles (levels after each distillation are always similar) to warrant much messing around with that.

I apologize for being imprecise with my language there re: yield. We did run out the tails a couple dozen times when we were recycling them, and with a 10 proof cutoff for tails we were getting an extra 15 gallons at ~35 proof (one of the things that genuinely has been confusing to me about these recent runs is that the tails we got previously represented approximately 10 proof gallons, us seeing a 20+ proof gallon increase without running into crazy tails flavors makes no sense to me). We don't have any info for tails in the recent exceptional runs, as we are no longer collecting them.

The method you outline above is the method I was taught when first learning to run hybrid stills (not at this distillery). Our team had the designer of the still system we use out to show us how to run the stills in December of 2022. He actually had us run the still in pot still mode to collect the fores, then swap over to the column. There was never a separate heads collection done, and he advised running extremely tight (as close to 160 proof as we could) for the majority of the hearts run, and making a cut when the proof fell below 150. We have adjusted the method in the intervening year (running the majority of the run at a lower proof, near 135, and making the tails cut at a much lower proof), based on the flavors we were tasting in the white dog and efficiency calculations I performed. Initially we were getting less than 70 proof gallons final product per ton of grain, which fell so short of industry standards that I had found in my research that we started playing with various parameters. We have had many people in the industry, including some luminaries in the world of making and blending bourbon (I hate being cryptic about this, but I don't want to name names without their permission) complement our white dog as being exceptionally tasty. This has led to some pushback from our decision makers regarding major changes of method. I would like to do a couple test runs with a separate stripping/spirit run, with the stripping done in pot still mode and the spirit run with 4 plates active in the column. The biggest challenge to that idea is that we are years away from knowing whether the whiskey we've been producing will be exceptional, average, or poor. Based on the feedback on our white dog we are certainly hopeful, but we don't know and that has kept us from making larger changes. However, small changes that have resulted in a 25% increase in efficiency have perked them up as far as investigating new ideas.

We have been on quite a merry go round regarding our corn, actually. We source everything from a local farm, and were getting some pretty bad batches in spring of last year. Lots of chaff, cobs, and even stones. Our head distiller started picking up the corn himself and spoke to the farmer (he continues to pick up the grain himself and we have developed a great relationship with the farm). We certainly started getting better corn in the late summer as a fresh harvest season came in, but we have been getting consistent starting SG numbers since then. We measure moisture content using Loss on Drying (LOD) method, and have seen little variation since summer.

I am getting the same. We are slightly overfilling the stills from their official capacity (almost entirely up to the manhole, which is about a foot above listed max), so our batch size is closer to 550 gallons. And the 10.5% is an average. We have had as low as 8% and 12%. Those were outliers and our average is pretty representative, but I still think we are getting entirely too much product on these runs. But the numbers aren't lying. I am beginning to believe we have a consistent measurement error with our initial SG. I've been insisting on using a calibrated Brix meter (which we have), but I do not run the mashes. The worker who does insists his numbers are correct and double checked based on hydrometer/thermometer method.

We were for a time collecting tails down to 10 proof, but that ended up being a total of about 15 gallons total. After factoring expected return (and actual return of batches with previous tails added vs not) the cost/benefit of the extra labor and utilities didn't justify capturing that, so we have not done that for a while.

That is the hearts cut. The abv at the parrot when we make cuts is generally around 105 proof. Yes, flow to the dephleg as high as it will go. Thermometer is in the vapor path. This is a possibility. The runs look like this: dephleg closed while collecting heads. Once we switch to main collection, dephleg is turned on very slightly, keeping vapor temp at around 190 for most of the hearts run. As vapor temp increases, dephleg is opened more until eventually the spirit flow goes down to a trickle. Then the steam gets opened up further until it is maxed out. Both dephleg and steam increase are done incrementally. Once the steam is full open and dephleg is wide open, we run until the proof at the parrot is about 105, but the final cut is made to taste.

@Kindred Spirits Thank you for that offer. Those questions are above my pay grade, but I will definitely send it up the ladder!

@Kindred Spirits Thanks for that insight! We had suspected that, as we have long theorized that better separation would be of extra importance for a single pass run, but our team here has more theoretical than actual experience. Our boiler is older. Would variations in boiler pressure be enough to explain the inconsistency?

Thanks for the quick reply! All outputs are measured by weight. For reading proof we use an Anton Parr DMA 35 during the run, with hydrometer/thermometer confirmation on final tote volume. We've not seen a difference in starting or finishing gravities. We use TILTs for overnight monitoring (we have had cooling issues and temp spikes over the summer when it gets crazy hot here) but manually check SG with hydrometer/thermometer twice daily to confirm.

Hello forum dwellers! This is my first post, though I have been lurking for quite some time. I was hoping to get some advice, or at least possibly some insight, into a yield question. We are distilling bourbon from a corn and wheat mash (64% corn, 26% wheat, 10% malted wheat) on a 6 plate hybrid still (Figgins reciprocating 2000L). We do a single pass with all plates active. Our distiler's beer averages about 10.5%, and our yield per run has been about 82 proof gallons for the last year (final distillate at ~135 proof). Some exceptional runs have made it to 94 or 95 proof gallons, but the vast majority of our runs are in the low 80s. Our heads cut is standardized at 2 gallons (true gallons, no proof measurements are taken on the heads for cutting purposes). Our tails cut has been made to taste, but with certain still parameters in place (steam open full, dephleg open wide with dephleg temp reaching approx 200 F). Within the past month, however, we have had multiple runs reach 110+ proof gallons (final distillate ~141 proof). No changes in our mashing or fermenting parameters, no changes to our yeast (we did make a yeast change 5 months ago, but this has been only in the last month) or to the source of our grains. Our mash is finishing at the same (or nearly the same) SG as our previous mashes, and our fermentations have always run to .998 or .995 as they continue to do. We have lowered the steam pressure for the majority of our run from approximately 50% full steam power to closer to 30% (our steam is controlled by a single round valve wheel that we have marked for turning correctly, but cannot be super precise with our power). Our condenser is run on a constant 41F water supply from a chiller, but our dephlegmator is piped to city water, which varies widely due to external temps. The truly confusing thing is that the runs are not consistently this high. We run 4 batches a week (one from each of our fermenters), and we never know until we do the run whether we are going to get an ~80 opg run or a ~110 pg run. There is no correlation to which fermenters the stronger runs come from, nor from time of day or any variable we can pin down. It's happening often enough, usually 1 or 2 a week, that something must have changed. We are a small crew of 3 with just 2 people ever running the still. To eliminate the possibility operator differences, for the last couple weeks we have had the same man running the still, with the same results. We are in New Orleans, and so the ambient temperature has varied widely (from as low as 45F to as high as 82F) over the last month, but we've not been able to correlate that to the yield either. Any advice or thoughts would be helpful, as we are ecstatic with the extra yield (the flavor is great as well), but are pulling out our hair wondering a)what we've been doing wrong the past year leaving so much in the still, and b)how we can get these results with any kind of consistency.