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NorthStar

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    http://dunordcraftspirits.com/

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    Whiskey, Gin, Rugby, Lebowski

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  1. Called, but VM is full. Also interested if still available. chris.montana@dunordcraftspirits.com
  2. NorthStar

    Maceration

    You may find some reluctance on this forum to giving advice to hobbie distillers. There is a wealth of information on other sites (http://homedistiller.org/forum/) that may be a better place to mine for information. Good luck
  3. I could see some wiggle room where taste is not the only thing being judged. We just did the Micro Liquor awards and half of their competition is on package design. Aside from something like that, entering someone else's hooch for a taste competition is solid B.S.
  4. I have nothing to add to the cooling conversation, but I do want to offer my congratulations to John on the expansion. This guy's distillery could eat my little fledgling shop for lunch, but he spent hours with me talking gin and brainstorming ways to improve my formula. All this on an unannounced visit. I truly believe that it's attitudes like John's that make this industry accessible and fun to be in. I applaud your success.
  5. I can't answer your question directly, but I question the value of the data you are looking for. As an aside, if you are talking seasons, my first question is "what are you making?" If you are a making booze that has a season (e.g., gin) you should adjust your projections to weight the time that the particular spirit is in season. Second, bottle shops and distributors have this info (even if anecdotal). You may be too early for a distributor, but a 10 minute conversation with your local bottle shop should tell you all you need to know about seasonal adjustments by product. This approach seems most appropriate for a tourist-y area as your customer base is unique to the population of persons attracted to your particular tourist attraction; in other words, your experience will be vastly different than the broad U.S. average sales or even the sales from a region. There are a ton of posts looking for biz plan help. Problem is, most of what anyone could tell you isn't worth half of what you can figure on your own because you know your market. Best of luck to you. -Chris
  6. I use two milk tanks: one for mashing and one for mixing (where appropriate). Heritage distilling in Washington took a milk tank and ran pipes through it for steam; mine is not so fancy as I just pour hot h2o into it. They are meant to cool, but this insulation holds heat pretty well. You can always find the tanks on ebay. I run mine with the original agitator. I don't expect this to last as it was not made to push 400lbs of corn around. Still, the attached motor does a pretty decent job.
  7. Revival:We used super sacks for a while. Mice can get into them pretty easily. They are also a pain to empty when they are almost empty but still to heavy to lift. This solution may not be useful for the OP, but we have switched to using a gravity box with the wheels removed. Farmers have these things sitting around (often with busted axles or bad wheels), and you can pick one up for cheap. They are steel, so the critters have a hard time climbing them. Our 250 bushel box is only 400-700 lbs empty and is sitting on casters. When it is full, you can't move it. You can raise the box and use the grain chute to fill your mill or buckets. I plan to put an auger in but haven't had the time yet. The tricky thing is filling it. If you have a forklift, just lift superbags over it and pull the cord. If you are filling it with 50# sacks, it would be a nightmare. Also, can't put this in a high moisture environment if you plan on sitting on it for long as the boxes usually don't have a cover.
  8. I would pay $500 or more for a locally stored, periodically updated system. I looked into distillery solutions as well, but the price is brutal for folks like me who started with a small budget. The monthly subscription is the killer. I am not particularly concerned about the cloud as long as there is local back up. If you create this product, I will happily buy it from you.
  9. I thought about the washing machine option but never took the dive. We have a pneumatic press that presses our grain into a modified washing machine basket. It works well for small batches, but is a massive bottleneck for us (we do 2000+ gallons of mash per weekend at the moment). At 250 gal a week, you might consider a similar press. If you can't find the proper cylinder, I assume a screw press with a screen would work just as well.
  10. Welcome to the forum Nathan! Best of luck to you.
  11. Our product comes out in a couple weeks; we would not have made it this far but for the information and contacts we gained through this forum. I am, like most new folks, a parasitic user; though I hope to give back where I can. It occurs to me that a fundamental problem here is that the forum is both very successful and improperly placed. As subscribers grow, the forum will become too difficult to manage--certainly to difficult for one person. And there is the embedded problem: only one person (or very few) have both the responsibility and the power to manage the forum. The response to this move is overwhelmingly negative. If this were a democracy, the policy would be reversed. But it is not a democracy; it is the product of one man's work and thus is his to dispose of as he sees fit. I come here to find the right tool for the job and advice on how to use it. Removing reviews kills half of the utility. I don't think that segmenting reviews out to a yelp or similar site will accomplish the same goal; we are all busy and this forum is an efficient delivery of damn near everything. That said, who are we to insist that Guy make a change? Are we not guests on his forum? I see two options: 1. Deal with it 2. Take our marbles elsewhere/buy it. If we do option 2, we might want to solve the democracy thing, that is, we might want a forum that is run by an entity that is directed by a membership of DSPs, not a for profit company or one tired man. I don't know of an ACDA forum, but perhaps that is what is needed (not a member of ACDA and I express no opinion on them. My understanding is that they are member directed). Otherwise, there needs to be some other forum that, in my mind serves the combined purposes of letting people know about the equipment out there and sharing tips/experience/etc about how to survive in this business. Talk is cheapest when the story is good right? We are willing to put up some money for the forum, we are also willing to help with other tasks as needed, but we will not give money to a forum or organization that is not responsive to the community it serves. Perhaps the thing to do is buy the thing and wrap it into a non-profit member organization. If we aren't willing to take that step and do the work Guy has been doing, I think we should hush up and do as Guy says.
  12. We cold cook, so removing solids after mashing is not a real option for us. The cold crashing should help. These days the temp rarely gets above zero so freezing ice blocks is no problem. I have considered some type of screen that could lift the solids and let them drain back into the vessel overnight (we use 275 gal IBCs), but I haven't yet thought up a set up that wouldn't rip the screens apart when it tried to support hundreds of lbs of wet corn nor do I know where to get a screen that big. NEPA: interested to hear how your screen set up works out Panoscape: where did you get your plate filter?
  13. My systems are all electric, so separation is a must. At the moment, I have a way to separate via a press, but the press requires a hiccup in the process flow while it is filled/pressed/emptied. I would love to have a Russell Finex machine, but 20k (as I hear they cost) is not a doable number right now. I know Dehner started a thread about a version of this that he is designing, but does anyone know of a secondary market for equipment like this? Are there any other manufacturers making something like this for a lower price? Alternatively, for those unable to distill on grain, how are you separating solids from your wash? Any input appreciated. ( )
  14. One guy sent in over 20 submissions and all of them were "colorful."
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