Natrat

USPS will ship alcohol, but the receiving party needs to have their age verified. There's a bit of a rigamarole to go through. This was changed last year. UPS will also ship alcohol, but you need to get a waiver signed by your rep, and have a shipping account set up with their global tracking stuff. It costs a little more because it gets labelled hazardous. FedEx I have also shipped with, and there is a form to fill out in triplicate each time. Interestingly, once I contracted to freightquote.com, and the LTL load of 3 pallets of whisky was picked up by a FedEx truck. Also, I have found DHL to be easy to work with on this...you may want to find out if DHL will do pickups in your area. When I ordered from Leopold Bros, they stuffed a crate full of bottles and shipped it UPS. The tag said "bottle samples." Good Luck!

Dreamweaver is much better than it was, as are the current generation of Adobe products. They spit out much less gobbeldygook HTML than they used to. It's not hard to learn HTML and CSS, but you have to add that to the list of new skills you need to run your own distillery! A reasonably well-maintained, active content site shouldn't cost you more than about $800 or so, unless you are trying to have product finders, mobile pages, and custom apps. Search optimization can cost more, but I find that a good cross section of metatags and frequent updating of content works better for getting your site at the top of google's hitpage! Blog once a week, and that will do far more for your optimization than paying someone to think of every term that might be searched and then submitting those to the GIGO guys. Most of our action seems to happen on Facebook ( I hate Facebook, for the record) and the website doesn't see that kind of traffic.

Mineral oil works fine, but often leaves a stinky smell behind in your brewery that seems to take forever to dissipate. Just get a good veg-based fryer oil from a restaurant supply (canola, peanut, soy...) and use that. As long as you keep the temps under the smoking point for those, it will stay clean in the jacket.

Hey Dave, they've partnered with Cargill. I was brought on to work alongside Bio-Process on a reactor plant in Alberta, once. Professional company.

A gloomy post, but I respectfully disagree. I don't seem to have any trouble finding fresh dumped bourbon barrels...priced a little higher than I'm used to, but the market quickens!

Electric jacket works fine, but the heat up times are longer than steam. I suggest you use oil as your transfer liquid, rather than water. Glycol will damage your elements, unless they are clad in stainless steel. Generally, steam jackets are designed a little differently, and electrically heated jackets have more volume. Another option is a static steam jacket fired by natural gas...this is essentially a double boiler on an industrial scale. I've used them in brewing and they work very well, but I've not seen one on a still, yet. If your still is bigger than 75 gallon, or so, then a steam solution will cause you far less frustration!

Electric - Reimers Model RH60-25 Natural Gas - Fulton ICS or ICX 6 Those are two that I've had good luck with, and there should be a dealer nearby no matter where you live in the USA. Both of those sizes would be adequate for your numbers. I recommend you get a vertical configuration, condensate return, and a dedicated boiler room/closet with temperature controlled shutters for make up air on the NG boiler. Both are reasonably priced, new, and usually deliver within 12 weeks of ordering. There are tons of options...PM me if you need any assistance :-)

Wilbur-Ellis in Portland? There's also Commodoties Plus, but I don't think they mill local corn.

You'll be happy with the chill and flow unit. ProRefrigeration is a great company to deal with, and when you're ready to move up to a bigger chiller, Damon will probably buy it back from you. Their ChillStar units are perfect for most small distilleries, and I've had great customer service and support from them over the years. If you're in a humid area, those dimple jackets will sweat like crazy :-) Make sure you have good drainage under your fermenters, or you'll have a mold problem. Also, beware of ice buildup where you plumb the glycol into the jacket.

Depends on quantities...I don't actually recommend warehousing labels, since the adhesive and any aqueous coatings will degrade over time. If you order a million labels to get a low price, and 700000 get turfed after 2 years, that's a net loss. It depends on your paper/plastic stock, adhesive, and backing, but I find that labels tend to degrade quickly past the 9 month mark. If you are using cold glue and paper labels, they last for decades. If you are using pressure sensitive labels on a small diameter body, 9 months. The thing about glass is that many of the resellers dropship from the manufacturer (there are a few exceptions) once you hit a certain volume. If you can take full-height pallets of bulk glass, you save considerably. On one bottle style I saw a drop from 207.36/gross to 112.32/gross just by agreeing to take a full truckload of bulk glass. That, in fact, meant I could take 26 pallets full height for the price I was paying for 12 pallets half height! (once you factored in shipping) If you have spare warehouse for cooperage that isn't full of barrels, yet, warehousing 4 or 8 pallets is not a big deal, and you will save on shipping.

I've had best results with locals I met in Kentucky. One of my best sources is a brewery in the Louisville area, and contacting the big distilleries directly has also yielded good results, but you have to be willing to purchase in 25+ quantities. Prices drop drastically once you agree to take full truckloads.

MaskCraft, the TTB's business is not to regulate what you do at your distillery...just to properly collect all the taxes, under their tax structure. Even the labeling isn't specifically about the consumer, but ultimately, about taxation.

Smaller ferments don't generate enough heat to require cooling to keep their heat down. The best reason to have a jacket is to crash cool your beer if you can't get to it with the still...so it doesn't get infected with something that can potentially eat your alcohol or make narsty tastes. If your ferments are bigger than 300-400 gallons, I'd go with a jacket to regulate your ferment. Single zone should be enough.

jamesbednar, it's a viable option, but an even better way to go (though it costs a lot more) is to invest in a hot liquor tank, which is essentially a big hot water storage tank. If you size it big enough, it can hold hot process water for your entire day, and be heating at night when your still is down. Typically they are set to 185-202 F, and if you strike it at 190-195 with corn, it's at cooking temp. If a steam jacketed cooker is not in the cards, or your boiler can't run cooker and still at the same time, then HL is the way to go. Even if you just get a well-insulated tank, you can put a tube-and-shell steam heat exchanger in a pump loop, and heat the water that way. Works great. The issue with tankless heaters is that they are limited to a certain delta T at reasonable flow. There are recirculators and daisy chain systems that work, but the cost goes up fast. One option is to put an tankless inline with the hot water from a conventional hot water tank, and since the incoming water is already 120-130 F, your tankless can bump it up to 185 at full flow. But only until your HW goes dry! Then you have to preheat the water in the tank using the tankless for 10 min before you can go again! In addition, if you're in a moderately sunny place, solar heat tubes with a glycol loop in the HL tank can help maintain the water temp if it's a bit undersized. I've often toyed with using a solar-powered still using glycol as my heat transfer liquid. I'd have to call it sunshine instead of moonshine, though!

These guys are in the right of it. For a 250 gallon still and similar mash tun, 500k btu is plenty plenty. 350k would probably get you by. If you're calculating for boiler spec, one BHP is about 33475 btu per hour. It's based on the amount of heat needed to convert 34.5 lbs of water to steam at theoretical absence of pressure. IME, only boiler guys use the term...stick to BTU per hour and you should be ok. Very few LP boilers are specced to run at 15 psi...usually they will be rated for 80-100 psi, and you can run them around 30-45, and regulate the steam for a lower pressure delivery...which works well because you get a pressure loss over your piping. If your steam jacket is rated for 15 psi, you'll probably want to run between 12 and 13.5...which is plenty. If you do all your figuring for heating water, you'll be building in a good safety factor, since we don't usually run to the boiling temp of water for all day :-) Right there you've saved $50k!

The honeycomb barrels oak too fast for me. It's way easy to overoak with any small barrel, and the drillings aren't charred...so you get super resinous oaky character. If you want to bump up that characteristic in your blended batch because you're using second-use bourbon barrels or something, then it's a good tool to get a few gallons of superoak to add to the rest, but as a single barrel it's sort of overwhelming. The Standard barrels (grooves in every other stave) work pretty well for accelerating the oaking a moderate amount. If you're leaving your new make in the barrel for 10 months, a Standard might cut it down to 8...but you'll have less body. I quite like the Black Swan Standard barrels. The Traditional barrels are nice...the oak they use seems to have a different character than some of the other small barrel manufacturers...it's hard to describe, but the tastes come out a little more earthy, or umami... My advice is to buy one of each all in the same size, and stuff the same new make in all three...but if you're just going to buy one, go with the traditional...it's easier to control "slow" than "holy-crap-rapid."

If you're moving into a space that adjoins a dance studio or other "public gathering place, " then you may be required to add additional fire protection to the shared wall...typically two extra layers of drywall, and a liquid impermeable barrier, such as FRP.

Hear, hear! Be proud of what you do, and the others doing it with you! I'm all for sentiments like these, and cooperation and humility only benefits us.

Justin, I'm not sure what state you're in, or why you need a million btus, but the last install that I was part of (1.2 million btu, North Carolina) was $98k, including all process piping, condensate, water treatment, insulation, regulators, and boiler room temp controlled shutters. That was for a brand new Fulton. If you buy a used boiler, you can probably cut 30k off that, but you get what you pay for. The most important thing is to have a boiler installer you trust...and that might be yourself, in the end. But boiler sizing, pipe sizing, local and state codes, insulation, and effective condensate systems is yet ANOTHER thing to learn about if you do it that way...and unless you have prior knowledge, it makes the climb to being a distiller even steeper. How did you determine you need a 15 hp system?

Beer minus hops is best for them and for you. Hops are expensive! And when you run beer in a still, the hop oils foul the still pretty well, and it requires a bit more cleaning than usual. I've distilled quite a lot of finished beer, and great tasting beers don't necessarily make great whiskies. In fact, it's the sort of plain beers that make the great whisky, IME. If they don't have to boil the wort, and just sparge the heck out of it into totes, then this is something they can fit in on the tail end of a double-brew shift without adding more than an hour or two onto schedule. Not only that, but it's a great way to give an assistant brewer extra mashing experience without having QC issues on the line if they miss the numbers. But using finished beer works. When I have to do that, I find that running all of the beer through in fast stripping runs is best, and then do a complete teardown and cleaning of the still. I've found that a good detergent like C16 or Simple Green works well for removing the hop oils. Then reassemble and do your standard CIP with caustic and acid. Make sure you do a really good job on shotgun condensers and dephleg units. Then you can run spirit and just acid rinses after spirit runs can remove any hop resins that get in there. Obviously, hoppier beers like IPA's are going to foul your still more. Here's a hint....porters make really nice whisky, as do big belgian beers. Pales not so much. Flavored beers and hefeweizens are not much fun. YMMV. You have a lot of great breweries near you that might be willing to deal. In the Triangle, I'd maybe approach CrankArm or maybe talk to the guy at the Busy Bee (who owns Trophy.) A bit further out, maybe Deep River in Clayton would work, or talk to Seth at Bull City. Most of the others probably don't have much time in their schedule for that. Double Barley might. If you need intros to NC breweries, let me know...I've got numbers for most of those guys. Actually, I'd go talk to Steven Lyerly at Olde Hickory. He self distributes, and trucking wort on his vans wouldn't be out of line. Not only that, but he has an extensive cooperage and even a foeder, and owns a couple of pubs. He's cool beans, too!

Spitfire, do a search on the forum. There's a ton of data about how much grain to water people use, and their ratios. On a typical mash, the grain will increase the volume of the water by a third, or so. Well, more like a quarter, but I like to have space :-) Your 3 to 1 ratio sounds like you plan to strip 3 days, run spirit one, and mash on the fifth. I'd suggest that you will probably be able to do 2 stripping runs in a day, and that a 6:1 mash:still volume ratio is more in line with a production environment on a one week cycle.

I think most of us divert the heads into one container, hearts to another, and tails to a third...by making the cuts at the parrot. I try to size my heart container to the amount I expect (or sometimes two smaller containers if I need to move them around a lot) and collect heads and tails directly to their respective containers. I then distill the tails down to low wines about once every 3 months, and have enough low wines to do a batch of recovery spirit every 6 to 8 months. Right now, I take it to 190 and it goes to vodka, but I plan to use it for a whisky later on. This is the reason I advocate deep, deep cuts. Because you can recover the alcohol you've made, and meanwhile your main product is yummy!

Red Pig, are you saving your tails for redistillation?

I meant cutting out your tails, and after your tails has run, cutting back in and recovering some of the sweetwater (usually about 10-30 proof) back into the whisky.

New Hampshire, here I come!!!