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Silk City Distillers

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Everything posted by Silk City Distillers

  1. General Carbon in Paterson, NJ has designed and fabricated large scale carbon filtration systems for a number of Caribbean rum distilleries. No affiliation, but hung out with them for an afternoon. They know their stuff when it comes to activated carbon. No frills, don't wear white if you ever go.
  2. Nice data sheet from Eaton on turbidity in whiskey. https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/markets/food-beverage/knowledge-center/white-papers/as-clear-as-amber-turbidity-in-whiskey-flaws-or-taste-criterion.pdf
  3. Messaged both of you on this deal.
  4. Careful with staging production with the direct steam, those steam eductors can easily consume 100% of all the steam you generate, regardless of how large the boiler is. If you are heating up the still, and you open that direct steam injection valve full open, you’ll stall the still heat up. It’s great if the only thing you are doing is mashing, you can push more heat than is possible with a jacket. We ran direct steam for a few years, mashing and distilling at the same time required a little bit of a balancing act.
  5. 15hp, or 20hp if you need a little upside. You should be feeding your HLT hot water from your condensers or mash cooler to conserve energy. And you wouldn’t be heating the HLT concurrently, so exclude that from your maximum demand calculation. We run a 1200 gallon hlt that’s fed from our mash tun cooling jacket water. Steam coils in the tank are only for temp control. Keeping this tank hot saves us significant time on the heat up stage for mashing. Tank brought to temp by the morning for mashing. This time of year our water is 50f, great for mash cooling, awful for heat up time in a mash tun.
  6. Macerate each part of the cucumber separately, and distill them separately. It will be obvious which parts you want and don't want in your distillate. Depending on the varietal, you might want only 1 part, some varietals 2 parts. One of the offending culprits is sulfur. Once you know which parts you want, scale it up. I don't love cucumber distilled at normal "distilling" temperatures, we distill it under deep vacuum on the rotovap. I don't want that cucumber seeing temperatures any higher than it would on a warm summer day in the field. We rotovap with solids. There is a night and day difference in flavor of the distillate, and especially the aroma. No stew or pickle here, clean, sweet, fresh cut cucumber. This also applies to peppers like Serrano and Jalapeño, which also retain it's crisp, bright flavors when distilled this way. You might find it easiest to distill out a cucumber concentrate first, and then determine how much liquid volume you need to add to get the flavor profile you are looking for, as opposed to trying to figure out how to do a single-pass distillation with other components (which will almost always be a compromise if you do it at normal temp).
  7. Assuming fresh, not dry, yeah? I'll have to make a trip to the grocery, but I can fire it up later. Let me see if I can find a good video on the soxhlet measurement. You'll be using a different solvent than ethanol (usually hexane), and the measurement is based on before and after weights. Steps would be along the lines of: Dry botanicals, weigh, load the soxhlet, run the soxhlet, remove the botanicals, dry again to remove the solvent, and weigh again. Compare the weights. Rotovap or vacuum distill off the hexane to separate the solvent from the extract, weigh that product, which should correspond with the botanicals weight difference. You can't really weigh the solvent, because you are going to lose some during the soxhlet process, and in the wet botanicals. Alternatively, you can use the "Clevenger Method" - https://faculty.uobasrah.edu.iq/uploads/teaching/1652045269.pdf - this is safer, it's just using steam distillation and takes advantage of the oils separating from water. Downside though, this needs to be babysat. Oldie but goodie from 1937 - https://www.stilldragon.org/uploads/FileUpload/13/97075c1c9998a51c7bcf39564a78e0.pdf
  8. i can throw a jar in the ultrasonic, give me a rough recipe to try out. A good use case for soxhlet is determining the oil content of a botanical prior to large scale gin distillation to establish high batch to batch consistency, especially if you have multiple botanical suppliers or if there are seasonal impacts. Test a small sample, verify the oil %, if it’s in range, run, otherwise adjust botanical weights to account for the oil content differences. You generally don’t see soxhlet being used for pilot development, and seeing that same approach being scaled upwards. I’ve seen some large glass soxhlet units, but they cost a fortune, and are probably incredibly fragile. Even the one I’m thinking of was only a 2 liter flask on the bottom.
  9. Far more likely that the reactions are taking place in higher alcohol environment of the lower trays, with the newly formed esters riding the escalator up and out of the column, or as vapor phase reactions in the headspace of the pot or the headspace of the trays (also lower-water environments compared to the pot itself). Low alcohol washes still do contain esters, and ester precursors, but yeah, the equilibrium point is not going to be favoring esters, as you move into the vapor phase, or up the trays, the concentration of alcohol increases, as well the equilibrium point to favor esters. Would be really curious to know if the sulfur compounds on the copper could potentially be acting as catalysts in the reactions. If this is the case, dirty copper might yield a superior spirit vs. clean copper. Plenty of old references indicating an aversion to bright copper.
  10. What are you extracting and what's your solvent? There is nothing magical about the soxhlet apparatus. It's really cool to watch, but realistically, it's just maceration with a solvent and a fun toilet bowl flush. There is no difference between manually doing this with large glass beakers and filter paper, other than the manual labor. Heck, you could fig up a pump to eliminate the need to make vapor and reflux, and automate most of the process. Alternatives might be a Coffee Percolator, Ultrasonic bath, water bath, rotovap, vacuum distillation, etc etc etc. Seeing the 2-4 weeks, it sounds like we're talking about very hard, thick botanicals (barks, roots, etc) - I'd say ultrasonic bath is going to be far more interesting to speed things up than soxhlet. I'm not a huge fan of high temperature extractions like soxhlet, you are cooking your extract for a long duration. Anything thermally sensitive doesn't stand a chance. Using a warm ultrasonic bath gets you speed, efficiency, volume, with far less thermal degradation. Grinding to powder than vacuum filtration to remove particulate also an option to speed things up - not possible in a soxhlet, you'd just clog it all up.
  11. $1,700 FOB 07014/NJ Four spouts, Electronic level control and pump, tabletop, fine level adjustment. It's our main filler, so we'd need to receive Rye's before shipping out.
  12. I can vouch for the design on that mash tun if it helps. We run the Kothe mash tun, same as that one, and love it. We are also using a grain blower setup, with the cyclone mounted above the tun in a similar fashion, but fed from a Hammer Mill. We did need to retrofit a bit to get it to work, since we didn't have the Kothe-designed bits. Heats fast, cools fast, and the mixer is brutal. We mill to flour and have zero issues with grain balls. Very solid, very well designed. Dual jacket design, no internal coils, so easy to clean. Good workflow, no gremlins (though, the euro-threads on some of the parts are a PITA if you didn't realize they weren't NPT). Solid piece of gear.
  13. https://www.tcwequipment.com/products/mori-filler 4 head tabletop with the electronic level sensor and fine adjustment height modification.
  14. Rye - Interested in that TCW if CTcraft isn't. I'm in NJ. CT - If the 6 head Mori works out, I'll have a 4 head Mori tabletop (with the fine adjustment) available.
  15. Are you guys disclosing fruit to the TTB? How are you labeling this? Flavored Rum?
  16. Also keep in mind, heads cut is more of a state of mind than a manifestation of physical activity, if you get my drift.
  17. Potential solutions for water impacting esterification efficiency like in a retort still would be to use a column in 100% reflux with sulfuric acid as the catalyst. The higher concentration of alcohol as you ascend the column preserves the esters, which will be trapped in the upper stages of the column (assuming you have sufficient plates and hold up volume). Did a few really fun experiments with Dow Amberlyst 15 esterification catalyst, packing a small column in reflux with slow takeoff.
  18. Acids only half the battle, you need a rich set of heavier alcohols as well. The isoamyl alcohol esters as important as the simple ethyl esters. Deep tails.
  19. The option exists to ferment these bacterially using pure cultures of acids producing bacteria like Propionibacterium Shermanii, Clostridium Butyricum, and other Lactobacilli. Shermanii is what is used to give Swiss cheese its holes. Butyricum is butyric producing strain that does not produce botulinum toxin, often used in probiotic supplements in other countries. Lacto needs no introduction. I personally felt these were the 3 'safe' options that could easily be dosed into a fermentation. In terms of sourcing acids. Lactic is obviously the easiest, Propionic would be second, as it's used as a food preservative, Butyric probably third, as it's not necessarily used as a flavoring or additive. Propionic and Buytric stink to high heaven. God forbid you spill some. Get it on your clothes or shoes, just throw them in the garbage, you will not get the smell out, or you will ruin your clothes washer (and everything else in it). Even opening their container is going to have people looking around for vomit and rotten, spoiled food. This is often why glass containers of butyric acid are often used by activists and rioters as stink bombs.
  20. Your local chemical supply house. I don't think you'll find a 'food grade' version of these things, they aren't typically food additives. More likely that you'll see terms like ACS, USP, NF, or Reagent. These are more commonly used to describe purity. Not every chemical is available in every flavor, and the price will vary significantly. You may fall off your chair when you see pricing on some of the highest grade chemicals. You may find it to be cheaper to produce these acids yourself bacterially... This is the foundation of the "cousins process". You can titrate to determine your acid concentrations to be allow for adjustment/consistency.
  21. Absolutely love Larry and the Stilldragon crew. I can't begin to say how happy we are working with them for nearly 10 years now.
  22. This doesn’t follow strict rules like math or logic, these terms often only have a specific meaning only when used in a specific context. Sour mash describes the technique, the process of souring (acidifying) the mash, either through bacteria or backset. Sour mash is also sometimes, but not always, used to describe the resulting whiskey that was made using the sour mash process. I suppose someone could point to a fermenter and mutter the words sour mash, and we’d understand that too. Even though it’s not mash, it’s wash. Afaik, nobody is using the words sour mash to describe the backset, thin stillage, or spent mash. None of this makes perfect sense, but that especially doesn’t make sense.
  23. Oh I agree, using this sort of thing for regulatory or legal direction is going to be very problematic. TTB isn’t going to care what the AI told you.
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