Silk City Distillers

Paul has got the Marijuana oil production market locked up.  Like the dealer to the dealers!

Actually, we have a comparison case - we had the jacket ball valve fail on a ferment and it ran uncontrolled to about 93f, finished fermentation about a day faster.

Looking at the numbers, about 12-15% lower product yield on a proof gallon basis with a noticeably larger heads cut.

Distillate quality was nearly indistinguishable from a normal ferment, post cut.  Which was pretty surprising.  Had I not taken that larger heads/tails cut, it would have been pretty rough.

Friends don't let friends run stills unattended, any questions?

We don’t like pushing grain ferments above 82f, we run actively cooled fermenters.

Does it matter?  Who knows.

Think @captnKB nailed it, larger heads cut due to both higher yield and greater yeast stress.  Also keep in mind, higher starting gravities - in non-temperature controlled fermentations, can result in higher temperature spikes, which would impact heads volume.  What's the increase in product yield - the same 10-20%?

We saw roughly the same increase in product yield moving from a roller mill to a finer grind hammer mill.

Methanol generally results from high pectin fermentations, not cellulose - at least I'm not aware of why cellulose would easily be fermented into methanol.  There's lots of work being done on cellulosic fuel creation, most of it - methanol/ethanol - use highly complex processes to break down the cellulose.  Pectin contains the precursors to form methanol (methanol esters) - cellulose or hemicellulose doesn't.

Having eaten a mouthful of malt, and a been hit by a wave big enough to leave me with a mouthful of ocean water ... I don’t quite follow.

One is delicious, the other leaves you nearly vomiting.

So why does the ocean make great whiskey, if it tastes so terrible.  But grain, which is god damned delicious, makes the whiskey taste bad?

On 4/27/2019 at 11:11 AM, Julius said:

No ability for offsite barrel storage? Fermenters within line of sight of barrels is generally not ideal. I know plenty of people do it though. 

Why?

The costly items are the hammer mill, displacement pump, and a steam boiler big enough to run the whole shebang.  Everything else is incidental.

The static mixer might be kind of spendy, but I don't see why you really need it - generally this type of setup doesn't use it.

The metal fabrication and welding is going to be expensive if you don't have a guy next door that likes to weld.

For the backwash - read the comment about freeboard (empty space) and check that last curve.

Cabot is a gold standard in the industry.

Cabot sells carbon by the bag, not the skid, but it is very expensive (more expensive).  1240plus is around $7.00 a pound, plus freight.  While that's expensive, it's not even considered their expensive stuff (Ultra pure Norit ROX at $23.00 a pound - sells for $1,000 for a 40 pound bag).

The two vessel approach is to avoid breakthrough, that is, product making its way through the filter untreated.  The point of a primary and a secondary is that you can replace/refill the primary when it's exhausted, without risking unfiltered product from making its way through the filter, as the second would catch it.  It works because at slow flow rates, the first vessel will become exhausted long before the second vessel would.

Cabot would never recommend cleaning carbon, they sell carbon.  That said, nobody here would recommend cleaning carbon either.  It's not worth the time or energy.

The reason for the down flow is explained in the docs they would have sent you on the pilot column design (I'm guessing maybe they didn't)?

Yeah I agree - Out here in the Northeast, I suspect brewery startup costs are going to exceed distillery, just due to the startup scale necessary for a brewery to be competitive.  A "minimum viable" distillery seems much easier than a "minimum viable" brewery.

Nominal < 99%, that's the reason for the lower sub-micron sizes.

You could probably use a .45 micron absolute rated filter if you had sufficient pre-filtration to not trash the filter cartridges in a single batch.

I usually use Millipore Polygard.

You didn't get all of the carbon out.  Submicron carbon will make the spirit look cloudy.  1 micron is not sufficient to remove small carbon fines.

We use powdered activated carbon for decolorization, and it requires filtration down to .2 or even .1 micron to regain a bright, sparkling, clear appearance.

Rinsing carbon is critical to remove sub-micron fines, which are very, very difficult to filter.  It will never settle out, so don't bother.  If all you have are 1 micron filters, you can try filtering with brand new filters, at a very slow flow rate.  However, the better fix is to filter again with smaller pore filters (.2 or .1 micron).

Too bad the alcohol retail and distribution model is prime for disruption and disintermediation.

Young consumers have zero desire for brick and mortar retail, especially undifferentiated retail.

We know these new generations are heavily motivated by experience, and that plays a major role in the brands they associate with, and buy from.

That said, the destination distillery, brewery, winery, cidery, or meadery represent a major threat to both retailers and distributors.  This is disintermediation.

I live in a major metro, I can buy from Amazon in the morning, and have it on my steps in the afternoon, even on Sunday, yes Sunday.  I have to drive to 5 different stores to find the bottle I want?  That's just f*cking stupid.

I don't have cable TV, I don't watch any of the channels they want to shove down my throat with their packages.  I want what I want, when I want it.  This applies to everything today, it's not just cord cutting.

If you don't have the beer I want, when I want it, I won't ever come back.  I don't care that you have 300 cases of Bud and Coors stacked up, or that you have 100 other craft brews.  I'll drive two hours, stand in line for two hours, get what I really want, post about it online, and not give a crap about your corner store ever again.  This is disruption.

Spend 15 minutes on the secondary market forums/communities online.  You'll see everything you need to about how passionate consumers can be about products.  Bourbon, beer, rum, wine, etc etc.   You'll also see everything about why alcohol retail will die.  Limited allocation, you need to spend thousands of dollars at a store to even have a chance at getting an allocated bottle, retailers charging absurd markups.  If you aren't lucky enough to live in a major metro, with a good retailer, you don't stand a chance at being able to purchase many products. There are dozens of large distilleries that would be immensely more profitable if they could sell direct to consumer.  There are probably hundreds of products that would  be wildly successful, but can't make it there, because the distribution and retail model will never allow for it.

Wineries are making a major push for direct to consumer, I suspect breweries will as well.  Recreational pot is passing around the country.  Sorry, but the protectionist, prohibitionalist, monopolistic alcohol distribution models are not long for this world.

Yeah it's rare to get such a behind the scenes glimpse into a large commercial operation like that.

Is the filter/system or carbon being rinsed with water prior to filtration?  Sounds like there is residual water in the system that isn't drained, or can't be drained.

It is customary for carbon to be rinsed with water prior to use, to reduce the level of small carbon particulate (fines).  Water logged carbon, even if not obvious, will impact proof.

From a filtration loss perspective, you might consider first running RO through the filtration system to purge.  Followed by your alcohol at a higher proof -  to compensate for the water, run RO again at the end of filtration to ensure alcohol isn't remaining in the system.  This will require some trial and error to understand what proof level you'll need to compensate for pre and post-purge.

Always target a final filtration proof slightly above bottling proof, and do your final gauge/proof after filtration to ensure hitting target proof with no issues.

Can't imagine how upset the OP will be when some kid becomes a multi-millionaire overnight by rebubbling GNS into CBD Vodka.

There is a beautiful thesis published by Victoria Green a few years back that looked at Bundaberg in Australia, it contains a wealth of fantastic information, and touches on the topic of bulk molasses storage quite a bit.  This is absolutely a must-read paper.

http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/fapi/datastream/unsworks:36385/SOURCE02?view=true

20 hours ago, Georgeous said:

So when geletanizing how do you keep from releasing non fermentable sugars at these high temps? 

We're mostly talking about cereal mashes of unmalted grains here - rye, corn, etc.  There is no enzyme to denature, causing non-fermentable sugars.  Malt and Enzymes are added after the cereal mash has been cooled to temperatures (and pH adjusted) to convert all the gelatinized starch to fermentable sugars.  Using something like Glucoamylase, the potential for non-fermentable sugar is just about nil.

When we're talking about cereal mashes, realize that unmalted grain generally requires higher gelatinization temperatures than unmalted grain - and be careful referring to brewing literature that doesn't specify, often times they are mainly referring to malted grain, or even pre-gelatinized adjunct.  Also realize, the higher the temperature, the faster the gelatinization process.  There are large commercial distilleries that use pressure cookers, or inline jet cookers, to heat the mash far above 212F (boiling point) - which results in near instantaneous gelatinization of starch.

Usually most mash tun/stripping combination are jacket heated, so why bother lautering?  Even with a lauter tun, a mash bill of predominantly wheat, with low barley, may have challenges lautering without adding rice hulls, as wheat has no husk.  I think it's easier to separate after distillation, not to mention your yields will likely be better.

Never tried it, who wants to submit a recipe and see what happens?

Keep in mind, Ethanol+Water is not the only azeotrope that exists in beverage distillation, it's just the one that's most obvious to us.  There are probably dozens of different two and three component azeotropes that can impact the character of distillate.

91-Salt-Distillation.pdf

We've been following a routine very similar to @JustAndy, we gel much higher than 158, which IMHO, is far too cool for unmalted rye.  I'll echo the double BG additions as well, we've been doing a 30 minute glucan rest at the start, and then we add again during the cool down.  Prior to this, we risked erupting out of the top of our fermenters, since we started this, we haven't had any issues.

During our first rye mashes, where we didn't use BG, and were a little bit light on the High Temp Amylase - we ran into issues during cool down.  Our jacketed mash tun simply refused to cool rye mash.  The agitator was not effective, and you needed to scrape away the sides of the tun with a paddle.  From what I could tell, the sticky rye was gelling/solidifying near the edges and acting as an insulator.  Taking it up to the 180-190f level makes the mash process much quicker.

Sounds similar to what you might have been experiencing in the still, rye mash acting as an insulator to prevent heating.

Yeah, while the approach here is inline starch cooking, it's still very much a batch mash and fermentation process.  Ideally, we're running the inline starch cook around 5-10psi, where we can push the inline temperature to the 220-240 range, above atmospheric boiling, where starch gelatinization is essentially instantaneous.