Silk City Distillers

I have to smirk a little bit about throwing solar panels on a roof and saying that it's an effective strategy towards reducing environmental impact (aka Greening). Solar feels like the easiest of "cheats", compared to where the real work, and impact, is. Heat Recovery & Storage vs. Chillers Carbon Dioxide Capture/Recovery for Fermentation Energy efficient distillation processes (read: Continuous distillation with heat recovery, low NOX high efficiency steam boilers (Miura, etc), highly insulated steam lines, etc) - none of this batch distillation on an uninsulated still. On-site Wastewater Processing, Waste alcohol processing Post-consumer recycled glass bottles and/or bottle re-use where legal Local sourcing of all raw materials High efficiency CIP

Yep, Teton imported them and sold them to a couple places.

Picked up some awesome cognac barrels from Rocky Mountain recently. Got an apple brandy from Keystone that we finished bourbon in that was really nice as well.

Why not just buy ex-brandy/cognac barrels from someone like Northeast Barrel, Rocky Mountain Barrel, Keystone or others and just cut them down to what you need?

There are already a number of low cost and even “free” open source solutions for controlling mashing and fermenting processes - so 2/3 of the “problem” have already been solved. Many of these platforms can be easily used to allow for monitoring of the still as well. Plenty of folks here already using them. You’ll find that many here, and in the industry in general, are strongly against remote still control, because it enables reckless behaviors, that when go bad, impact all of us from a liability, regulatory, and scrutiny perspective.

Good intel, thanks Paul. On another note, I cringe at worm condensers. More and more I don’t think they belong in modern commercial distilling. Their design is a hazard - long narrow vapor path, narrow diameter soft copper prone to kinking. It becomes very easy to overwhelm and easily achieve vapor speeds high enough to blow vapor through a cool tank. In a puke scenario, clogging is a very real possibility, and cleaning them afterwards is difficult. Shotgun style condensers offer redundancy and a far larger vapor path, easy to clean, incredibly difficult to clog when properly sized. Sorry if I offend the traditionalists. In the hands of an expert it’s probably a non-issue.

Could have been diatomaceous earth. It’s what I would recommend, along with sub-micron filtration, ideally 0.1 micron. Pitch enough it would look like milk, fine DE powder looks like milk powder. DE is commonly used in spirits filtration, it's customary, nobody would raise a concern about additives.

This is true, some recent photos show more than one still - one of the old ones doesn’t even appear to be plumbed.

Google the name and use the Images tab, you’ll find photos there. Appears to be “home” built or some mashup of components.

Prayers go out to the individual air lifted to a burn center. That's never, ever positive. I hear one other individual was subsequently transferred to the burn center, guessing that person was a bit more stable after the incident, but again, having to go to a burn center is never a positive. There were a total of 3 people treated, so it wasn't a matter of an empty facility. There are some other photos online, the damage to the building appear fairly substantial, clearly we're talking damage sustained from explosion and not necessarily from fire, so again, prayers for the two folks in burn, this is a life changer for them. There is a gofundme for the two folks hospitalized.. https://www.gofundme.com/f/medical-expenses-for-local-friends?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=m_pd+share-sheet

Perhaps the issue is the same - they expect the ingredients to be only gin and tonic?

Interesting, there are a number of Manhattan RTDs that I would have guessed contained Vermouth.

Lol, you need to call.

Try Greenfield Global/Pharmco. https://www.pharmco.com

Lallemand Distilamax GW

Lots of folks are using the mobile canning options that are nearly everywhere these days.

Keep in mind though, the rate of vaporization of stored/barreled ethanol. Typically, distilleries see barrel evaporation at 10% volume per year. Based on this, we're talking about 0.03% evaporation per day. If we look at this in the context of a single day evaporation - 98.7kg of ethanol (total kg necessary to be vaporized) / 0.03% (average vaporization a day) = 329,000 kg of ethanol stored in average conditions (roughly 1500-2000 53 gallon barrels). Not even sure it's physically possible to store this many barrels in 1600 cubic meters. In addition, as little as 2 complete air changes *per day* would mean LFL would not be hit.

You missed a step - 1 liter of ethanol liquid is not 1 liter of ethanol vapor.

The impact is not as significant as you might think, as pH is not linear. You also need to consider the buffering capability of the remaining water. If you were mixing 10-20% backset with RO water (which you wouldn’t do), you might have a problem, otherwise, nah. Grain adds buffering capacity as well, if you mashed into 100% backset, the pH would rise. 4.8-5.2 is a good starting pH range. Don’t be afraid to pitch low - this allows yeast to thrive as they will outcompete bacteria (which can crash the ph). This is totally counterintuitive, but one of the solutions to crashing pH is to start at a lower pH. We add backset to the mash at the start of the cook, not after, I would never add it straight to the fermenter without additional pasteurization unless you can store backset somewhat sterile. For some products we add lactobacillus to the fermentation. We’ve found lactobacillus brevis and plantarum to be positives if you are shooting for a creamy, toffee, buttery flavor profile. They are both called sour - but the end results are very very different.

"Hey, Mr. Manufacturer, why is this 304 rusting?" "It's not 304, you are reading the markings upside down, it's marked h0E, we never said it was 304."

I'm the king of cheap solutions, lol. By the way, the Mori adjustable tray continues to be a game changer.

What size is your plate/frame? Full size 40x40, or one of the 1/4 size smaller jobs (20x20)? Could be simply a matter of having more filter area. I think that's the reason, because based on what you've said, I'd bet you are blinding with tiny bits of impermeable skin and pump (which if you've ever eaten an orange you'll realize they do a great job of keeping the juice in). We had similar challenges filtering powdered carbon from white rum. We just needed to step up to larger media to eliminate the mid-batch filter cleaning. Going from a 10" Code-7 cartridge to a 30" cartridge did the trick. Just not enough surface area before we would completely blind the filter. If we step up even larger, we're going to need to add more filter, no way to get around it. What you might try is to do some gross filtration using a poly filter bag or EZ-Strainer (25-50 micron, maybe smaller, they are cheap enough to try). Don't rinse it, see if you can get some of the particulate to stay behind as part of the screener. Sticky stuff that likes to blind filter media usually likes to stick together as well. Pour through slow, then, filter in steps. If you can get it to 1 micron, get it there, then filter again with half micron. Again, we realized it was far easier to refilter multiple times with progressively smaller cartridges, than go through Big Bang, with all the filter cartridges in series (pressure issue as the first cartridge would blind up, making the rest of them irrelevant). Which raises another question, are you monitoring pressure on the filter input? Is your pump putting out sufficient pressure that's closer to the top of the recommended range for your media than the bottom.

Some brewing studies indicating that olive oil is beneficial for fermentation, would be doing double duty. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.2050-0416.2011.tb00472.x

Zook/Good Food in PA has nice quality blackstrap and fancy. The blackstrap is baking grade and not industrial sludge.

Are you taking into account supply and delivery? Lately electric companies have gotten clever in splitting these up to make the numbers seem smaller and more competitive.