JustAndy

Are those numbers for unmalted rye just the hearts, or total yield. We get around 3.7 PG / 56 lb bushel - 7 liter pure alcohol per 25 kg

I've professionally used home-built 55-gal drum electric stills, 3 different simple pot stills (800L, 1500L, 2500L) built by inexperienced US fabricators, a steam-heated CARL with brandy & vodka columns, and a 4-plate electric water-bath KOTHE. While it is possible to make good spirits on all of them, the carl and kothe both dramatically expand the options of the types of things you can distill and the different methods you can do it by. They are also significantly safer, faster to heat, and easier to clean. Knowing what you plan to produce is the biggest factor in what type of still you should look for. If you plan to make gin from redistilled GNS, you don't need much. If you want to make pear brandy from whole fruit, you need either something more sophisticated or the hands-on experience you'll only gain from ruining a batch I've heard of several people finding deals on used german stills, both in the US as people outgrow them or go out of business (how we got the CARL) and abroad as the brandy market continues to shrivel. That is the path I would take, as I think there will be a pretty regular clip of closures in the next few years.

In a related note there is a brewery in Portland that ships in high Grav wort from New Zealand, there must be some surprising economy to it that I don't realize. http://brewpublic.com/beer-news/splash-brewery-opens-in-portlands-pearl-district/

I've never heard of someone cooking the fruit first to make Brandy, we just mash the fruit then depit once fermentation has begun. Wild yeasts are usually less efficient in alcohol production and if the apricots aren't low enough in pH you can have VA and mold issues. Wild yeast works well for our plum and grape ferments, okay for Apple, and not well for pears, cherries, quince.

A good rule of them is about 25-30 lb of fruit to produce 1 750 ml bottle at 40%. There is a lot of variation to that depending on the sugar level of the fruit, weight of pits/stems/seeds, fermentation and distillation techniques (single pass and discard tails, or double distill with recycled tails), etc. To fill a 150 L still with apple, pear, or plum mash takes about 300 lb of fruit.

Liquor company?

It's easier to scorch in a bain marie if you have a lot of unconverted starch. You could try re-distilling it but I've never heard that to help.

As an Oregon distiller, I would say you don't really have a much of a chance at this stage in the game with distilling a vodka. If you are interested in importing tequila & gin, find an existing distillery and partner with them to import & bottle it for you.

Some details about who you are, where you are, and what you can make would be helpful - your website is under construction and has no information.

We originally opened to make fruit brandy and if we hadn't started making whiskey after two years we would have gone out of business. The market isn't there for fruit brandies, and even when the fruit is free it is difficult to compete pricewise because processing the fruit takes a lot of logistics and labor. I love making it, but we do less and less each year as even just doing a couple of batches of plum or cherries a year is more than we can sell.

How much of that is the cost of using oregon oak vs the labor of doing it?

What type of filter did you try? You probably want to do a shelf stability test before deciding to leave a lot of solids/pulp in the bottle. They will likely settle out over time and form a disgusting clump at the top or bottom of your bottle.

It depends a lot on your process, but if it needs to sit a while you can acidify the mash with acid. The lower pH can help prevent some things from growing in it. Keeping oxygen out / co2 in is also important.

It sounds like they are describing a valve installed with a bulk-head fitting. I would ask them to email you a photo of what they are talking about, it sounds like a translation difficulty.

1.5" seems like overkill, on a 700 gal still doing a strip run in 7 hours we used municipal water off a 1/2" garden hose and the water flow on that was throttled way down.

We adjust the pH with either malic acid or backset, depending on the product & production cycle. The MSU distillation guide (http://www.artisandistilling.org/ARTISANDISTILLING1.0.0.pdf) says this about citric acid "The bacterial decomposition of citric acid leads to formation of lactic acid, acetic acid, formic acid, and acetaldehyde which can be detrimental to the mash and can appear in the resulting distillate." so it doesn't seem like citric is a great option. Malic is easier/safer for us to handle than more powerful options like sulfuric or phosphoric. We adjust the pH inbetween the liquidification step and saccrification, as the enzyemes we use have different pH requirements. When using backset its about 10-15% by volume, but needs to be added in stages and measured with pH meter as it can be variable (for us, because we make ~8 different mash bills irregularly).

I'm looking for a source for wooden barrel bungs for standard size 53 gal barrels. The place we used to get them stopped carrying wood and only has silicone bungs which don't work for my purposes.

Once it was into the still, it would be in open system unless you have a vacuum still or a spirit safe. We've had to dilute our spirit runs to 19.9% charge to avoid going over the 30 gal open system (under 20% isn't counted) until we get a spirit safe.

You can have all sorts of different experiences with what you need to label things, a quick spin at the liquor store will show you all sorts of white/unaged whiskies which are labelled "whiskey". My advice would be to study their labels, and also to not expect many people to be interested in an unaged single malt.

We use silicone defoamer in the mash if the foaming is too much, which works well. I've tried vegetable oil but didn't like the results and it is a challenge to apply in some circumstances.

How did you mill the raw rye? I don't imagine you'll ever have much luck separating the liquid from a mash like that unless you have equipment designed for separating the liquid from a mash like that. The spec sheet for Seb-flo TL says it starts to get denatured at 65C (149F), so it's possible your heat was too high for the Seb-flo to do much. We make a 100% rye mash using Seb-flo but distill on the grain.

From the articles comments "The “scare” was caused by nothing more than water boiling in a still, causing excessive steam. There was never a danger presented to the public. We do not use any type of pressurized equipment so there is no chance of anything ever being able to “explode” under pressure. We understand the concerns that folks had when they saw the windows steamed up and appreciate the response from the Olympia fire department so they could investigate the situation and assure the neighborhood that there was no threat. – Lesa Givens, co-owner, Blind Pig Spirits"

Yes to what GeekSpirits says, that is how our still is setup. Seems like an expensive way to collect water, but its sort of nice as space is pretty tight in the still area.

The dead/historical threads are still useful for researching the asking price or value of different equipment. Perhaps they could just be "locked" after 3 months of inactivity rather than removed entirely?

Well it made sense to me at the time. It's amazing how alcohol can alter ones understanding of physics.