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JustAndy

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Everything posted by JustAndy

  1. Peach brandy is pretty delicate in flavor, even more so than grape brandy and I wouldn't be surprised if after 2-3 years in a new heavy char barrel no one could tell it was made from peaches. I interviewed half a dozen peach brandy producers last year, I would need to look at my notes but I think just about all of them were aging in used whiskey barrels (https://issuu.com/artisanspiritmag/docs/artisanspirit_issue027_web/50) . If I was doing it, I would probably use medium toast french oak. You must have a lot of peaches if you are looking at making multiple barrels of it, I figure its around 8000 lb to the barrel.
  2. As pointed out above you have to specify your process, product, and equipment to make a fair comparison. The practices of the scotch whiskey industry are fundamentally different from the bourbon industry which is different than the cognac industry etc. If you are looking at heads cut as 'loss' this especially matters as how the heads cut is reprocessed will radically alter this number.
  3. In some markets there would be questions about the legality of what you are proposing.
  4. Sorry, I didn't realize they sold materials separately, it's definitely worth $100, the in-person course is something like $1500 which might be hard to justify depending on your company / role. You'll generally want to add the feints to the spirit run, as the idea is getting some esterification and other reactions between the fatty acids and higher alcohols in the feints with the abundant ethanol in the spirit run. Some of the feints are sometimes recycled to the mash/wine in brandy production and perhaps in other distillation protocols but the results and goals are different. Adding the feints to the mash for stripping will conversely (perhaps counter intuitively) produce a less flavorful spirit in a pot still, as you are significantly raising the abv of the mash which results in less concentration and higher abv average of the strip. It's more relevant to fruit brandy production, where you might have a mash with an alcohol content of 2-4% which doesn't give enough alcohol to fraction correctly, or to supress certain characters in wine brandy (cognac) and make a more neutral brandy.
  5. I took the WSET 3 for spirits last year, and thought it was a good overview of spirits production in general. The brevity of the course (1 week) and the audience it focuses on means it's not very technical though, so it's utility will really depend on your expectations and experience. I took it as someone wanted me to teach the level 1 & 2 (now cancelled indefinitely due to covid 😒), and it was great to get a framework for how to explain some aspects of distilling, but I didn't take away much specific info from it. Although midway through this post I just looked something up in it for my wife about pisco, so I guess it's more useful than I said. RE:methanol cut - 1 to 2 gallons per stripping run is way too much, there is little methanol in grain spirits and the separation you'll get on the first distillation of a potstill is not enough to concentrate them meaningfully. There are some reasons to take a heads cut on a stripping run; if there were fermentation issues or if you are trying to balance the abv of your spirit run on a simple pot still (it's sometimes done this way with Cognac) but most people don't take one. You might think it's essentially the same to take it on the stripping run vs the spirits run, but it's not as the higher abv charge of the spirit run will allow for greater separation & concentration of compounds by boiling point, which will allow for a smaller heads cut with less good ethanol & other stuff mixed in. For recycling the feints, there are a few points to consider. On a pot still charge strength makes a big difference, it's something you can play with but likely around 30% abv is what you want. So you'll need to balance out your system so that strip run + feints = still volume @ 30%. If you are stopping your strip run at 20% abv (which is much too high on a simple pot still), if you recombine the spirit run feints with your stripping run, the abv charge to the still will likely be too high. You can choose to dilute down with water, but that might mean rebalancing things so the volumes work for your equipment. If you make a regular product (not a lot of one off batches) I would endeavor to recycle all of the feints, even the first fraction/fores can be recycled to the ferment. There is a lot of interesting stuff that comes out at the end of the tails, oils, waxes, acids, etc which can have a role in the spirit depending on the style. There is some cost/benefit analysis to do about the value of what you are recovering, but both cognac and scotch malt whisky are distilled down to 1% at the parrot. I generally go down to 5% as the place I work now has a water bath still which makes it slow to run out the tails. RE:filtering - I'm not going to look it up, but I would guess coconut charcoal has an order of magnitude (maybe more!) greater surface area and adsorptive capacity than sugar maple charcoal, and I would be concerned with stripping too much out of the spirit. It might be appropriate if you wanted to age in toasted barrels that don't have a char layer which will help remediate fusel oils, or if you had good QA and process controls and could dial-in how much filtering is happening, but I personally wouldn't do it prior to aging.
  6. There is a lot of good advice already in this thread, but I have a few comments to add. What is the methanol cut you mention, and how is it different than your heads cut? How much are you collecting? Is the spirit run happening on a pot still or similar low-rectification still? If so, recycling all of your feints to a different product is robbing the spirit many of the components that provide complexity, weight, and flavor to the spirit. This is likely also why you are only yielding 1 barrel of product instead of 2 from 900 gallons of mash. I've worked a place that used a similar protocol, and the resultant whiskies are pretty grainy, awkward, and simple. Changing to recycle the feints made a huge difference in the quality of their spirits, especially as they increased in barrel age. I am also surprised to see that you are charcoal filtering the spirit prior to barreling. Depending on your filtering process, coconut charcoal could be stripping out some-to-much of what will make the whiskey interesting after maturation. It's appropriate for some product styles, but hard to imagine doing it with rye whiskey unless there were serious flavor issues you are trying to mitigate. As you've probably grasped, everything is connected to everything else. Making wider or narrow cuts is one element, but it's important to understand how those connect to the compounds & flavors created from the processing of the raw material and fermentation, and your plans for maturation. Each step changes the decisions at the next step. It's fun.
  7. If they were originally bourbon casks, what were fills 2, 3, and 4? What is was and how long it was in there will have a big impact on what the barrels have to offer. In Scotland, 3rd and 4th fill ex-bourbon will still be very pale and have pretty slight oak character at 10 years. Rejuvenated casks will give more character, but depending on who and is doing them and how they can be very smoky or inconsistent. I've used shaved and recharred wine casks for some stuff, and they give a pretty intense character which can be nice. If you plan to age them 10 years, you can always start them in something active and transfer them to something inactive later.
  8. I have the 2L pellet labs still, and it does indeed experience flooding/surging due to condenser design, as well as bumping in the still because there is no stir bar in the heating mantle. The bumping can be resolved by using boiling stones / copper mesh to give it something to nucleate around, and the condenser works but I would be happier with a liebig.
  9. Hopefully the attached helps. We do 2 different mash schedules depending, as some of our whiskey gets made in a 500 L wood butt that can't be heated, so we use a falling temperature mash for that. But a more typical approach would be mixing in grains & water, adding an initial dose of visco and termamyl and adjusting pH and starting to heat, bringing up to 180+, cooling back down to 140-160, adjusting pH and adding visco & sacyme.
  10. From your description the grain cap is from not milling fine enough and not cooking to a high enough temp. The amount of heat work (time x temp) needed for gelatinzation depends hugely on particle size and physical disruption of the starch matrix in the grain. Imagine you are cooking breakfast porrage. If you take raw, unmilled rye and put it in a pot of 160 water, the grain will get a bit slimy on the outside but never cook through. I agree with SlickFloss about needing to take it up to at least 180F, and there really isn't a harm in taking it to 200 if your AA can tolerate it. I also have never seen a need for GoFerm or similar nutrients in a grain ferment. And the concern about foaming is the more foaming you have the more fouling and not every column is designed correctly to be cleaned easily and completely. If you are only getting 1x 53 barrel at 120p out of 900 gal mash you've got some serious yield issues, maybe that was a typo? at 750 lb per 300 gal, that's 2,250 lb per barrel, for our 100% rye it's something closer to 800ish lb per barrel not accounting for feints from previous runs.
  11. Had a similar experience with Black Swan barrels 3 or 4 years ago at a place I worked, they were the worst built barrels I have ever seen. The barrels were never sanded so it was 26 sided rather than round which causes the hoops to not function correctly, so they were screwed into place. The barrels from Seguin Moreau are great, but are definitely on the pricier side. Have had good results with Kelvin barrels although they can have a very smoky profile which doesn't work for everything. The barrels from The Oak Cooperage have also been pretty good, but we moved to ISC to get more toasting options the last 2 or 3 years. The ISC barrels aren't as well finished and nothing is mature yet but they seem fine so far.
  12. 😁 I was just surprised to see photos from my last vacation on this site.
  13. These are actually nearly new Forsyth stills at Lindores Abbey (my wife took this photo...)
  14. I've seen cognac producers altering their condenser temperature to change the distillate, specifically using a higher condensing temperature when dealing with wine that has elevated levels of VA to allow some of those components to offgas/volatilize back out of the spirit more easily. Similarly, I've experienced that a difference of 60 vs 80 F spirit out temp very much changes the aroma profile of gin, with the hotter spirit having less floral and fruit notes. There are quite a few scotch malt distilleries which have a 2nd condenser or 'sub-cooler', and I imagine its common in rum distilleries. It might be useful for hotter incoming water temps but the systems I've seen in Scotland were being used to get hotter process water out. Glenallachie was using a sub-cooler to alter the condensation point within the condenser to change the amount of copper contact the spirit was reaching, which is a very interesting concept.
  15. I think that more draws from etymology, the root arabic word moving into different cultures as distillation spread ending up with very different local alcohols all having similar names arak, araq, arragh, arrack, etc, basically depending on what the local feedstock was.
  16. That's probably true as well, but I assumed that use of koji rice in brown sugar shochu was to provide some yeast nutrients and acid modulation, as sugar can be deficient in both.
  17. https://www.ttb.gov/images/industry_circulars/archives/2007/pre-cola_eval_spirits.pdf A formula is required for many spirit categories that contain botanicals or flavoring ingredients to make sure they don't contain prohibited ingredients.
  18. Yes, whether it was occurring in a traditional mash tun or a modern lauter tun for scotch malt whisky the sugary liquid is being separated from the grain residue. Some are even using mash filters now (a press) but with the same objective. If you go waaaaay back there was likely whisky distilled in Scotland which was distilled on grain and included grains like oats and rye, but that's not really relevant to what's called scotch today. Blended scotch contains some amount of column distilled grain whisky, which is made similar to bourbon (unmalted grains cooked and then cooled and converted with malted barley) albeit distilled to a typically much higher strength.
  19. I think you might be misunderstanding something; malt whiskey in Scotland is (and has been for a couple hundred years) produced from a lautered wort. The grain whisky component of blended scotch is produced from an 'on-grain' mash which is distilled in a continuous column, but it's principally either wheat or corn with malted barley in a small proportion to provide enzymes. There are a couple of distilleries doing something aberrant to that like Loch Lomond, but I don't believe distilling malt whisky 'on-grain' has ever been remotely common in the commercial scotch whisky industry. If you have evidence to the contrary I'd love to see it, as I'm proof reading someone's manuscript on Scotch whisky right now
  20. I've tried some malt whiskeys that were produced 'on-grain' from hammer-milled barley malt and I thought the flavor was not good, very harsh, bitter, and funky. But it's hard to say if that was because they were made ongrain or if they were just badly made whiskeys. RE the new or used barrels, the american single malt commission is pushing for the definition to allow used barrels http://www.americansinglemaltwhiskey.org/ and several notable producers including Westland already incorporate used barrels into their releases, you just have to have the language right on your label.
  21. There is a style of shochu made with koji-rice and sugar (kokuto shocho), as well a sort of similar process for batavia Arrack made with molasses and an inoculated rice starter.
  22. Do you know anyone who has done the distillery specific courses at Siebel's and their feedback on it? I know plenty of people who have gone for their brewing training which is very credible but the distilling courses are relatively new I think.
  23. I think what you are describing is similar to the machine built by Detroit Still Works, http://detroitstillworks.com/ , I'm not positive of anyone that installed one but I vaguely remember hearing that Graton Distilling had one.
  24. That seems like an insane amount of filters to process 240 gal of whiskey. If only some of the bottles get hazy are they the first ones you bottled or the last ones? Do you have pressure gauges on the filters to make sure you aren't exceeding their functional pressures?
  25. I would say if you are having troubles, you should change your process; at the small distillery where I work we make about 75-100 100% rye mashes a year without any more difficulty and than bourbon, oats, wheat, etc.
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