Max Action

We've got a small appliance with an electric heating element submerged in an oil bath acting as a heat transfer fluid. We've been using vegetable oil due to it being food-grade, but we've been having trouble with some smoking when we run it at 170 degrees C. Looking at other alternatives, and curious about food-grade mineral oil or glycerine. Both of which I can get in gallon quantities at a reasonable price, and both seem to have higher flash points than cooking oil. Any opinions of these, or any suggestions for other alternatives?

Direct fire or steam coils?

Yes, we had one about 2 years. Probably labeled about 50K bottles with it, front and back label sets. First 25K bottles labelled fine, the last 25K had incrementally worse problems. It's probably nearing the end of it's useful life, or at least needing a rebuild of rollers and guides. The rubber rollers eventually get worn out and less effective. This leads to labels slipping and the back label applied inconsistently off-center. Primera has a handful of tricks the can suggest to offer some temporary fixes, but it continues to degrade in performance. Also the label sensor tab gets gummed up and requiring periodic cleaning, or it rips labels. Of course it's not terribly expensive as far as equipment goes, so even if you have to throw it in the garbage after 25-50K bottles you can do the math yourself to see what it costs per label and if that's worth it to you. We do like the convenience of the electric motor compared to a fully manual system like Race.

I've always been skeptical about the claim that the whiskey stops aging after it's bottled. I doubt any cork or modern closure is 100% impermeable to oxygen, especially when you're talking about decades of exposure. Then you've still got compounds that can react non-oxidatively with each other, and then over the course of years you can't ignore how much ionizing radiation your whiskey is going to be bombarded with if you're not storing it in a lead box.

Let's say that at 10% at the parrot, you've got roughly 0.5% in the pot. If you're mash starts at 10%, you're throwing away roughly 5% of your batch. How much do your raw materials and labor cost to make a batch? Compare that cost to the cost your energy and labor to run the still another hour or two to get to zero...

Be mindful of labor laws. I'm sure Illinois has some complicated rules...

18 to 28 hours to distill 60 gallons of low wines isn't normal. With 13500 watts of heat, I know from personal experience you can distill that much low wines in less than 8 hours. I agree that increasing column diameter from 4" to 8" should help achieve that. As for the controversy of pot diameter, I think the confusion lies with the fact that normal evaporation is dependent on surface area. It's certainly logical that a glass of water will take longer to evaporate than the same volume of water poured on the floor or other larger area. I'm sure that's true with propane tanks as well, but those are not boiling. Once you've reached the boiling point, the vapor pressure exceeds the atmospheric pressure, and surface area doesn't matter anymore. When it boils, all those internal bubbles are creating their own surface area, and it doesn't make a practical difference on how much area there is at the top of the liquid.

Just curious, how did you calculate your 155K BTU input? Is that before or after you remove a lot of heat from the system via dephlegmator? Also, are you using copper? 175 heat transfer coefficient seems high for stainless steel? Also, that coefficient is itself variable depending on the temperature differential between shell and tube. If you're figuring an average 30F differential, is your coefficient value still in the ballpark. Another factor is the vapor velocity of the vapor entering the condenser. If you're using a narrow lyne arm it could be possible for your vapor to be moving too fast for your condenser (a problem I've experienced). I'm no engineer, but I've often tried (and continue to try) to engineer systems using similar calcs, but I've found it's almost always more predictable to extrapolate from data you get from similar real world systems rather than calculating from scratch.

Thanks for the tips everyone. I called Sulzer and talked to their sales rep for my area and now waiting for him to "get back to me," so we'll see. I don't think copper mesh will work for my application, and not interested in ceramic.

Can anyone suggest a source that stocks column packing in smaller (much less than a cubic meter) quantities? Mostly looking for stainless steel, but would be interested in copper options too.

How about your starting and finishing gravity? If your overall yield is down then my first guess is your fermentation is stopping short of where it used to.

With some of the feed-grade steam rolled corn I've seen, it's got occasional bits of dirt and cob, but we can get a decent starch conversion and product yield from it.

Any thoughts or comments regarding cost/quality tradeoffs?

having trouble visualizing this. do you have a sketch? just test it like you would a spirit with high obscuration. distill that waste stillage in your bench-top still and gauge proof of distillate with your 0-20 proof precision hydrometer.

Found it, thanks for the link: http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/publications/thesis/2004_skouras/Trial%20_lecture_presentation.ppt

I missed your last reply before responding. Glad you found some info. Would you mind pasting the full link? That shortened one isn't working for me.

Good question. I can't cite any literature, as I'm relying on how it was explained to me by a German engineer. You might be right regarding a single phase change of a vapor back to a liquid. However a real world condenser is much more dynamic with the vapor stream and condensate interacting over a range of surface areas and temperatures. It doesn't seem illogical to me that you could have two different condensers that provide the same amount of latent cooling but could have different reflux compositions. For instance, a lower volume of reflux at a cooler temperature compared to a higher volume of reflux at a higher temperature. A different reflux composition would mean a different vapor composition going to the product condenser.

I see a lot of people referring to their reflux condensers as dephlegmators, which is inaccurate considering the way they're using them. While the dephlegmators provide reflux, not all reflux condensers are dephlegmators. Dephlegmators use warmer/hot water (and generally more surface area) to selectively condense higher weight compounds, and causing more specific separation of components. While a typical reflux condenser does allow you to control the reflux ratio and keep your plates/packing filled, it isn't as finely tuned. It's why a lot of German stills use hot condenser water to feed their dephlegmators, rather than a separate cold water feed.

Please keep in mind a lot of these wine fillers use PVC hose that isn't rated for high proof spirits. Even though they might tell you it's "food grade" it could still be prone to leaching chemicals into your product. We purchased a filler from XpressFill and we specifically requested they construct it with braided polyethylene tubing rather than their usual PVC.

sdmc5769, I've been dealing with an SKS sales rep named Jules the last month, trying to get the most basic of info, but I'm still waiting. I'm not sure if this is a good sign for future business.

Let's say you're a licensed DSP that re-distills NGS to make gin, and you need to switch to a new bulk spirits supplier. You're in a hurry and don't want to wait 2-3 weeks for a new transfer in bond application. Can you just pay the excise taxes at the time of purchase and later receive a credit on your own excise tax return? How would you go about doing that? Would there be any issue processing tax-paid spirits in your bonded area? The TTB monthly reports don't exactly have an obvious field to account for and track tax-paid bulk spirits. The excise tax return has a section for credits decreasing amount of tax due, but the instructions don't explicitly detail this sort of scenario. Thanks!

We're thinking about doing some brandy soaked cherries, and possibly some other liquor soaked fruit combinations. Does anyone have any reliable information on minimum alcohol proof (and maybe sugar content) to avoid spoilage? We want to avoid any sort of hot-fill packaging or other preservatives, but don't want to go overboard with extremely alcoholic content either.

No, I don't have such a bottle example since I have yet to find one. What I have in mind is just a very generic flask (as you'll find anywhere) but with CT cap threads rather than the more typical ropp or bartop finishes. I'm not interested in custom bottle, just trying to exhaust my options looking for something in stock.

Does anyone know of any glass bottle suppliers that have a 375ml flask style bottle with a continuous thread top (preferably 28/400)? Thanks!

This still seems to be an issue for this forum.