Bolverk

Not Andy, but here's a good online calculator I found. https://www.convertunits.com/from/psi/to/foot+of+water

Never seen one in person. The closest thing I can think of is the early 3 chamber designs before they added the preheater chamber at the top.

Nice! Those clean neutral hearts are probably from the panela. Panela makes a really clean (boring imo) rum... You won't get the Jamaican style funk without a fair amount of dunder (stillage) and at least some molasses. Some old recipes I've seen say as much as 40% dunder, 10% molasses, and 30% skimmings. I followed these percentages with excellent results the only difference is that since I don't live in cane country I used panela in place of skimmings. A vertical thumper will work, but I still think you'll end up with a lot of your esters in your heads, but you should have a bit more in your hearts. Your funky tails... As you found earlier you used too much butyric. Easy fix for next time. Can't really say on the barreling... my goal was always something more akin to Hampden rumfire. Barrels can clean up a lot, just don't know how much. Yeah all those heady esters are why I bypass the fore/heads before installing vapor in the thumper. Using those valves will let you put those esters where you want them instead of in the high heads.

I've read a 5-6% beer was common for the time, but percentage wise the amount of malt in each is the same whether it a 5% or a 10%. Based on the modern DP of malts these bills don't have enough enzymes to convert until you start getting closer to 25% malt. I feel like I'm missing something stupid obvious. Maybe it's a longer mash time and thin beer, like 5-6%, but mashed for several hours?

Howdy all, I'm hoping you can help me understand something... So I crunched all the numbers on the Crampton and Tolman papers, and I see that the average ratio for the ryes is 85r/15mb, and bourbons 75c/13r/11mb... but when I run the DP on those recipes, they are severely lacking in power (even using distillers malt which wasn't available until like the 1950s) needed to convert the mash . How were they getting proper conversion if they weren't using exogenous enzymes?

I'm still in the planning phases but buying premilled was where I was going to have to start if I had to spend $15k on a hammermil, but at $2500 the overage in the cost of buying premilled pays for the pellet master you linked to in the first year, I can get behind that as good investment.

Thank you! That's significantly changes things... that 198 is cheaper than the roller mill and auger I was looking at combined

Thanks for that, it helps. So I was looking at a meadows hammermill with a blower on the side and plumbing it directly into the grist hydrator like Silk has said his is set up, but this is a pretty expensive way to start and may be over kill for a small 250g setup (at least for the first year or so)... this is a setup I could definitely grow into though. So I started looking at a 3 roller mill with a screw auger but the rollers suck for corn (or so I've read) so I'm kinda at a point of decision paralysis... Maybe this is one of those thing where I just need to suck it up and get the hammermill

A "1.5" run is when you strip a portion of your beer and add that back to new beer and run that as a spirt run. Ie: For a 10g ferment, you strip 5g down to about 1g of low wines, then on your next run, you'd add 5g of the remaining beer and the 1g of low wines. 1/2 can be excessive but it depends on your initial charge and alcohol percentage. Really, a more accurate way should be your AA x 5 + whatever your initial thumper charge is. So in 10g 8% charge that's .8g AA, x 5 gets you 4g, plus your thumper charge, say 1 gallon, that's gets you to a 5g thumper. Here's Haggys thumper calculator from HD, you can play with all kinds of scenarios. https://homedistiller.org/wiki/htm/calcs/calcs_haggy_pot_plus_thumper.html

Yes acids in the thumper. If you really want to get serious save your thumper juice (lees) and calcify the acids with lime, dehydrate them and add them back to the thumper (you need to reacify them before hand) For a single thumper, the proportions that i found work the best are a 1.5 in the boiler (higher abv coming over to the thumper emulates what would be coming out of the first retort (less water)). Heads and low tails go in the boiler on the 1.5 run. 1/10 the volume in litres of the ferment, so 10g ferment = 1L in the thumper. 10% of the thumper charge is carboxylic acids (the other 90% is high heads at about 50% abv), then add about 20% of the acid charge in sulfuric. So on say a 100g fermemt I'd strip half, add those 10g low wines to my remaining 50g wash with any feints. 24 hours in advance in a separate glass container add 9l of high tails and 1l acids (900ml aceditc, 30ml butyric, 30ml lactic, 15ml propionic, and 15ml caprylic acid) and then do about 20ml of 98% sulfuric (add the first 10ml, then sneak up the the remaining amount until you start to smell the esterification). Let that sit over night then add it to the thumper when you're ready to do the run.

If you want to go all in on rum and make traditional high ester, then yes its a no brainer... you need them both. (You could do a small pilot sized double retort because if done to its extreme, you can make a 6000 g/hl aa ester rum for blending, this is so concentrated you won't need much of it to blend back to your normal stock) It requires some fanagling, but you can get something resembling a Caribbean rum with a single thumper/retort though.

Wow surprising it went completely dry.. Yeah, you're almost going to need new dunder and you can slowly feed this back into the boiler when you do your runs to recover some of the flavor. My understanding of the Hampden process is that they add 10% of their wash volume in muck right before distillation, but of that 10%, I can't imagine it being more than 3-4% acid. Smaug (Larry w/stilldragon) can probably get you a vertical thumper. Go search HD and/or SD for mention of the vertical thumper and the "humper thumper". I've seen some of his cad drawings of the professional ones floating around, i just don't know if its OK to repost them. Yes, it's definitely more heat efficient to go vertical, it's talked about a bit in some of the 3 chamber threads (basically 3 thumpers stacked on top of each other). Oh, if you start digging into the 3 chamber still... let me apologize now, it will become an addiction/new habit hole... that thing is fascinating.

1. Ive never been a fan of all panela rum, even double pot stilled is still way to light for my taste. The only way I've gotten the kind of heavy profile I wanted was using 40% dunder (clean stillage) in place of the water. The 1 plate and helmet is good but I don't think that it will be enough reaction time in the column for the Fischers to really do anything. I would seriously consider a thumper if you can find a way to swing it. The esterification will be so much more intense, the product is like concentrated ester that you can then use to blend into your other rums (this was one of the real reasons for the super high ester rums in the first place). 2. No, definitely add them after primary fermentation is complete. I was honestly surprised your fermentation finished at all. All those acids add a tremendous amount of VA to the wash that will hinder a healthy fermentation... ask me how I know 😂 3. Haha yes it does 4. By running a thumper with bypass valves it would allow you to take of your fores/heads before installing the vapor into the thumper so you maximize the amount of butyric esters carrying over into your desired cuts 5. Can't speak to the use of the dephleg, I'm glad it worked though. Looking forward to your tasting notes.

Nice! Glad to hear it worked for you too! Good call on the lactic Cool, looking forward to reading it

You run it yet?

If you're talking plate, plate, helmet, plate, plate? I don't see how it could hurt. I don't have any experience running it that way, but it makes sense to have some sort of copper reaction chamber.

Of the methods above, I still think the 4 plate is the way to go You probably won't notice much until you get the acids and alcohol out of the water.

Yes the Derek Bell one Yes, HD is homedistiller, and SD is stilldragon forum.

The esters "should" stick as long as you keep your proof above 95. I haven't seen the results at 2+ years though...

Thanks, I've been using bread yeast for a while and I agree they make a good whiskey, im just curious if there are others that give more of a heavier flavor profile.

Being 100% honest, I've learned more reading ADI, SD, HD, Boston Apothecary, and old tax documents than any of the dozens of books I've picked up. 10 10 would buy alt whiskeys again though I'm really tempted to pick up distillery finance, but the reviews aren't great, so I'm hesitant to spend the $100.

Howdy all, If you were trying to make a reproduction of a pre-prohibition whiskey what yeast/s strains would you be looking at? Thanks in advance

Hey Al, do you have any of the butyric left? Here's a really cool experiment... take like 50l of some high proof alcohol (higher the better), add like 3ml of if butyric, and slowly (carefully) add a few drops of sulfuric, and give her a stir.... keep doing that until it goes from smelling like blue cheese to fruit. Eventually it'll start to smell like a nondescript fruit candy.... it's crazy!

There's a thread over on SD where Cotherman says he gets his sulfuric 35% from a pool supply place... I don't know if that helps you at all? Just a thought, if storage is a problem buy in the quantity for a single use. 30ml of 98% is like $10 and is enough to treat 30g of what you have there. Sounds like a solid plan. Yeah thumpers, while an old technology they are really pretty special when it comes to exploiting certain inefficiencies and processes. Lemons are like 3.2, I think you could reasonably drop it to at least that to promote that higher acid environment after fermentation is complete. For safety sake i would test the ph of the distillate before you try tasting it thought lol Cool, looking forward to updates

I dont know if this will pass on the professional side, but this is the sulfuric I use. https://www.dudadiesel.com/choose_item.php?id=sa950