JustAndy

I think yes: How will it become slurry? It seems like without agitation/mixing/blending create a slurry of grain and water I would be concerned at the start you'll have super high viscosity pump clogging dough balls.

The advice I would add is a regimented cleaning schedule only works when you are running a consistent product. Maybe you are planning to, but most small distilleries don't. We can distill pear brandy for two months without needing to use anything more than a brush and hot water, but distilling wine with sulfites requires refreshing the copper with citric after a week. Running rye mash might require using caustic if there is an issue with mash conversion, but bourbon never does. Unnecessary cleaning with caustic and citric will wear the copper. If you only wash your jeans when they are dirty they will last longer than if you wash them every week.

If you haven't worked in a production environment or in spirit sales the sooner you engage with a professional the better. I've been involved in a handful of projects where an inexperienced owner/founder bought the equipment & designed the layout and it always works out to be much more expensive and less functional than if they had spent $500 or whatever right out of the gate to get quality input rather than listening to equipment reps & engineers.

If the wine has been treated with so2 you will want to distill it in two passes.

It is impossible to say, as you don't say the volume or gravity of the wash it was distilled from.

Is it possible you have water/mineral scale that built up inside the steam jacket that is obstructing heat transfer? Scale inside the pot is possible too but that would be more obvious.

Again, what are you wanting to make? Almost all Bourbon and Rye produced in the last hundred years was made on continuous stills, it's only in the last 5-10 years that even a small amount of Bourbon or Rye was distilled on pot stills. Similarly, all Scotch malt whisky must be made in potstill and generally Scotch grain whisky is produced on a continuous column from wheat or maize. It is certainly possible to distill a lautered malt wash on a continuous still (it is done in Japan and at a few odd places in Scotland like Loch Lomond) but not common.

What kind of whisky do you want to make? Almost all Rye, Wheat, Bourbon, and Scotch "Grain" whisky are distilled with the grain solids going in to the still. Almost all Malted whisky is produced from a lautered beer where the grain has been separated from the liquid.

Depending on how engaged your plates are and the dephleg setting, ending your strip run at 40 proof you'll leave behind a fair bit of the ethanol. If you elect to take a heads cut on the stripping run, collect it all separately and rerun it when you have enough volume as there will be quite a bit of usable alcohol in there if you have a clean ferment.

We custom produce an arak (anise flavored grape distillate) for someone; it's pretty simple but it really helps to have a bain marie still as to get the expected loucheing using only aniseed (and no star anise) the botanical loading is very high and if the aniseeds get cooked/toasted the flavor is noticeable and bad. The culture used to produce baijiu is much more diverse than a single-strain koji, and the distillation schemes are significantly complicated. I worked on developing one but after visiting baijiu producer in China pretty much gave up, strong aroma & sauce aroma baijiu have the most complex production process of any distilled spirit and it's not something that would be easy to credibly replicate.

I don't know anyone who has used one, but Detroit Stillworks (https://detroitstillworks.com/) had a continuous gin basket setup at the trade shows 5+ years ago.

My understanding is that to use sugar the 'standard wine' must be prepared under a winery license and transferred to the distillery license, and without a winery license sugar cannot be added to a fruit mash for brandy distillation (as a distillery cannot prepare a 'standard wine'). There was a thread on this several years ago, but I would inquire with your TTB agent. I know Copper & Kings produces their Apple Brandy from chaptalized 'apple wine' produced at a winery and it requires no additional label disclosure for brandy. I think the brandy distilled to 189 proof will need to be classed as "Neutral Apple Brandy - Any type of brandy, e.g., “Fruit Brandy,” “Residue Brandy,” etc., distilled at more than 85% alcohol by volume (170 proof) but less than 95% alcohol by volume (190 proof) "

I haven't had to make sugar washes for 5+ years, and now I see there are some nutrients formulated specifically for hard seltzer https://bsgcraftbrewing.com/pathfinder-n-pure-seltzer-nutrient-1-kg/ (which is close to what you are making) that I would explore if I were ever going to make a sugar wash again (unlikely though!)

Someone will hopefully chime in with more detailed calculations but the yeast pitch is about half what I would target and the yeast nutrient in your protocol is pretty low. You'll also likely want additional DAP and some kind of water additive to provide some pH buffering. https://bsgcraftbrewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/4.26.18-Nutrient-Addition-Charts.pdf

With sugar washes I have found a lower starting gravity with incremental feeding seems to be more successful. As Silk suggests, post your actual protocol: saying appropriate per spec sheet is not helpful for diagnosis. What kind of water are you using, what yeast strain, how are you prepping it, what is the nutrient addition regime, what is your starting pH, how are you managing pH and with what additive.

Every distillery I've ever worked at uses separate pumps for wash/mash and spirits; the capabilities of the pump aside you are very likely to contaminate spirits through poor cleaning of the mash pump, and in production you'll likely need to move both mash & spirits everyday and possibly near the same time.

Another potential cause is the fluid/fill level in the still dropping below the steam jacket, and the bubbling foam/solids cooking on to the still wall.

The obvious questions are how is the still heated, and was there any residue on the heating surface when the still was emptied.

When you say schnapps do you mean a fermented and distilled spirit, or a liqueur?

I am about to receive a few pallets of mangoes and am working out how to best process them. Did you find you needed to remove the skins, or just the seeds? We have a water-bath / bain marie still and a machine that I think will puree them after fermentation has broken them down, but would be a lot easier if we didn't need to remove the skins.

Is the 33ppm the free or total SO2? 33 TOTAL ppm is not very much, but it is high enough that it will be detectable in the distillate. SO2 does not smell like rotten eggs, it is a piercing, irritating chemical odor like a struck match. Some of the so2 odor in the distillate will dissipate with oxygenation, or the wine and/or distillate can be treated with hydrogen peroxide prior to distillation. Generally wine with so2 makes brandy best suited for use in fortification, as treatment with hydrogen peroxide seems to destroy much the floral and fruit aromas that make brandy good. If there is a problem with acrolein the distillate will have a low level of contamination a distinct horseradish, mustard sensation which becomes tear inducingly painful at higher levels. The aroma will dissipate with several years of aging but it is very unpleasant to deal with and better to not take the wine. VA (volatile acidity) in wine smells like vinegar, it can give the distillate an acetone / nail polish remover aroma but it is generally less of a problem than so2 or acrolein as it can be mostly removed in the heads cut and a good portion of it will evolve away with sufficient aging.

We've done it both ways; we don't make that much malt whiskey each year so a brewery produces the wash and sometimes they pitch the yeast and sometimes I do. The brewery usually way over pitches yeast and its a few generations on so I prefer to rack off most of it as you can taste it to some extent in the whiskey. If I pitch the yeast there usually isn't the same yeast biomass and the yeast is better smelling so I'll leave it in. The inclusion of yeast or not might be some part of the difference in flavor I get between grain-in and off-grain but I don't feel it's the main difference. I mostly make brandy and the inclusion and amount of lees/yeast in the wine is a big topic. I have done some lees only distillations which really give a sense memory for the flavor of distilled yeast. The flavor of the yeast is highly variable based on conditions of the ferment as well as how old it is (but that is much less relevant to malt whiskey).

Do you have already have centrifuge that is capable of this? It seems like it would be cheaper, easier, and more effective to get a lauter tun

My .02$ : I've made malt whiskey both ways, and I much prefer malt whiskey made off the grain. The whiskey ends up with clearer, brighter flavor with more fruity and floral notes. The malt whiskey distilled on the grain is muddier and funkier by comparison. If your equipment requires you to make it on the grain then so be it, but if you have a choice I think it makes a better product from clear wash.

We have an amphora that we use for a liqueur, and a colleague uses one for Arak. The material, porousness, and vitrification of the clay all have a pretty big impact on what is happening to the spirit and it will be hard to say whats going to happen without trying it as there are significant difference between the materials each manufacturer uses. Some traditional clay vessels are lined with beeswax to prevent interaction with the clay, others are not, and the pH may change from absorption of minerals in the clay. There is a long history of aging spirits in clay pots (shochu, baijiu, arak, arrak, tsipouro, some grappa, etc), it definitely does something but there are too many variables to say what would happen with your rum.