Silk City Distillers

No, not that fancy, they were all different.

4"

I have a matching Hillbilly 4 plate column/condensers/parrot that would look nice on top of this one if anyone is interested.

Came to me by way of a police auction, so it's got street cred.  Never used, still in a crate.

Distilling on grain.

Have used Danko (Semican), Brasetto and non-distinguished cover crop rye (left to seed) raw, as well as malted varieties from Breiss and Canada Malt.

My two cents.

The differences between malted and unmalted rye are far greater than the differences between the varietals.

Unmalted rye being milder, less assertive, fruitier when young.  Malted rye coming across far more assertive, maybe even a touch harsh when compared side by side, with spice developing far earlier.  They are very, very different.  Your ratio of raw/malt is going to have a major impact on flavor profile.

Our Rye Whiskey is 100% unmalted, entirely enzyme mash.  At 1-2 years it's extremely fruity, dark fruit, dried fruit, honey.  At 2 years spice begins to dominate over fruit.  By 3 years, fruit is gone.  Interestingly, we have a number of rye-sipping customers that prefer the younger aged rye, because of the very unique fruitiness.

If I recall - Far North in Minnesota was doing a lot of work on Rye varietals.  Maybe they'll share a few nuggets?

And in case anyone wonders why I am asking - FD&C Red 3 is the least light-stable common reds, it's known to fade very quickly.  You'll commonly find on grocery shelves - often times though it's blended with FD&C Red 40 - which is far more stable (which would mean partially fading).

Does it say FD&C Red No. 3 in the ingredients?

What coloring did you use?  And what’s the pH of the spirit?

$20 of cheap lab glassware is the cheapest method.

Love my Buchi, but it's overkill.

All food colors, natural and synthetic, will fade in light.  Yes, there are some differences in stability based on the color source, especially for natural colors.

Carmine is considered stable compared to most other natural reds.

There are 4 factors that can impact color stability:

pH, Light, Heat, and Oxygen.

Did you use carmine or another red?

What's curious is we are generally talking about fading over weeks, not two days.  Which makes me think there may have been a few factors in play, not just the light.

You can get a RO/DI unit for less than the price of that tote that can make you thousands of gallons of higher purity water.

Thanks Jedd - Making it easy:

Hugely insightful analysis - as always Mr Dunbar, you are a treasure to this community.

Why?

Might have been a rule, but wonder if it was ever really enforced.  Those attributes are largely individually subjective, what’s distinctive to me might not be distinctive to you.

There are already plenty of distinctive vodkas on the market.  Of course prior to this, they would argue they were not.  Now they can argue they are, as marketing advantage.

Anyone that has attempted to run neutral-proof on a low number of plates knows it’s very easy to hit the necessary proof minimum yet still be choc-full o’ “distinctive” flavor.

I’d argue some feedstock is almost impossible to really make completely neutral.  Cane sugar neutral for example, even after carbon treatment, still retains a rummy top note.

We just run water, we don’t ever chill below 55f.  Works fine for us.  But - our chillers are indoors - no freeze risk.

Also let’s us dump tanks if we need to.

12 hours ago, Rodney said:

 I think it is a great idea unless there is any chance of the condenser cracking and alowing glycol into your product. That would be deadly.

We're talking about propylene glycol, correct?  And not ethylene glycol, which should never be used.  PG is considered GRAS and commonly found in food, EG is automotive/industrial anti-freeze, is indeed poisonous, and should never be used in a food plant.

Cooking cracked corn generally takes significantly longer, has lower overall efficiency, and tends to create batch consistency issues as you have no control over the milling process.  Pre-cracked grain is also subject to spoilage and moisture issues, and in some cases it's the lower quality grain that's getting cracked.

There is zero reason why cracked corn is better, only that it's generally available.  If you have the ability to crack corn yourself, you probably have the ability to mill it finer.

Can you make it work?  Sure.  We ran using farmer-milled corn for a few years.  He hammer milled it for us using a slightly smaller screen than he used for general cracking.  As long as your agitator isn't undersized, you would be fine.  We used direct steam injection, so we didn't really have issues with corn sitting on the hot jacket at the bottom of a tun and gelling though.

Just to be clear, most of us are not milling to "flour".  For us, it's more like grits.  Moving to a hammer mill was a game changer for us, pay itself back in less than a year.

On 10/21/2020 at 11:47 AM, Pollyanna Ed said:

Thanks for that. Any idea what the treatment would be? I would like to see what you have for ozone injection.

You can find small ozone generators with air pumps available on ebay that should be more than sufficient.

However, be very careful generating free ozone in tank headspace.  Ozone as a gas is dangerous.

One option that's a bit safer, is to use an ORP controller (Oxidation Reduction Potential) to measure the ORP of the holding tank water, and to use the controller to dose ozone into the water, via an airstone.

This is an ORP controller, they are similar to pH controllers:

https://pentairaes.com/milwaukee-orp-controller.html

You can find tons of small ozone generators on eBay, with integrated air pumps.  Depending on the depth of your tank, you might need something larger, or with a bigger pump.  For under 1000 gallons of clean water, you should be good with 100mg/hr, if you recycle water more often, you might require 200mg/hr.  Here is an example of a generator with air pump (this is cheapy stuff, it'll probably last a year and need to be replaced):

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Ozone-Generator-Redox-Water-Aquarium-Ozonizer-Purifier-w-Air-Pump-200mg-hr/231358883252?hash=item35de1065b4:g:-qEAAOSwizlazt8K

Set your ORP controller to 500-600mV, it will turn the ozone unit on and off as necessary.  The nice thing about this, is that it only uses ozone when necessary, doesn't over dose ozone (safer), and ensures you are always holding water in a state that's antimicrobial.  The meter will give you a real time readout of water quality.  You can dial back or up the ozone as necessary to safely maintain water quality.

Just keep in mind, you aren't using something like this to clean or disinfect stank water, if you get to that point, you need to dump, clean, sanitize, and start over.  The ozone is good enough to maintain, but not correct.  Otherwise, you need significantly more ozone capacity, and you move into a more dangerous territory.

Michael at TCW was able to modify my tray to make it far more flexible from a bottle perspective.  We had issues with our bottles initially, but with the new adjustable bottle tray it's perfect.

Otherwise, killer deal.

Really interesting that they retrofitted all those stills with long Liebig style tube in tube condensers.

On 11/15/2020 at 11:56 PM, keriruri said:

QUESTION: What micron filter for an Enolmatic might assist in removing this haze (non-soluble oils), does between micron 2 and micron 3 sound reasonable to remove some of these oils without stripping too much flavour?

No, there is no standard particulate filtration micron rating that will remove haze.  What you see as haze will easily flow through a typical particulate filter, even something very tight, at 0.1 micron (I know, I've tried).

TCW sells a Code 7 cartridge by Graver - GFC that has an ionic charge capable of filtering out some haze, however, you likely need to chill for maximum impact:

https://www.tcwequipment.com/products/graver-gfc-haze-pre-filters?taxon_id=59

It's the only thing I've found that's available in a cost-effective enough package to use at small scale.

Some of the big plants use cellulose sheet filters in a filter press, along with diatomaceous earth (kieselguhr) and perlite, for chill filtration.

I have not found carbon to be a reasonable way to removing chill haze, the impact to flavor is massive before it even begins to make a difference.

I second the shift to move to RO water - we're talking about the Ions that can make an impact here, not anything that can be easily removed through mechanical filtration - water quality can have significant variability in many places.  For example, our water goes through the roof from TDS perspective in the late winter, when the salt water runoff from the winter roads reaches the aquifers.  Looks the same, and the impact to taste is gradual, so not something that is really noticeable, to the point of potentially arguing that nothing changed.

22 hours ago, kkbodine said:

pain in the ass having sexed fittings

Have a strict no sex with fittings policy...

Din is nice for fixed assemblies, it doesn’t hold a candle to the flexibility of triclamp otherwise.

Camlock is an interesting option for hoses, but like Michael says, most everything is triclamp by default.

They do make spring clip triclamp clamps that does make tricky connections easier when you don’t have a third hand.

You don’t need a lock nut on a tapered thread.  You aren’t holding pressure so a few wraps  of Teflon tape and just snug it down well.