Silk City Distillers

Used to giggle a little when I’d see a new distiller using sanitizer in their still as part of their CIP routine. The end products of distillation are going to be effectively sterile when the distillation is complete, both stillage and distillate. Not much is going to survive that much time at temp. Earlier in the process? That’s a whole different matter. The best sanitary welder I’ve ever seen used almost zero filler wire. Every joint was perfect, impeccably clean, before the torch was even within reach. Most joints were torch only, no wire. It didn’t need it. That guy was an artist - spent decades as a house welder at a major pharma plant. Obsessive purging, he was telling me about how he’d pull vacuum on pipelines and then refill with argon to be sure.

Make sure the bottom mount agitator has all the parts and is completely functioning with no leaks or other problems. You'll also want to ensure the seal materials are compatible with alcohols and acids - since this is outside of what the tank was originally intended to do. Depending on your jurisdiction/authorities, you may run into inspection problems with a vessel of that size that doesn't have a manufacturer nameplate with the tank design specs.

Regarding cucumber and apple - very commonly used foods are not included on the lists. They tend to focus more on things like spices, flavors, additives, etc. I imagine if you wanted to flavor your gin with pork belly, it would be approved (by the TTB, maybe not your customers). But yes, this makes for a very gray area. Mint a bit more complex, since there are many different plants called "mint" or sub variant of. That's why you see Peppermint (Mentha piperita L.) and Spearmint (Mentha spicata L.) called out. So, in the case of mint, it better fall to one of these two. On the Birch Leaves - My gut is that it'll get flagged, this is not a common food ingredient. Meaning if you want to use them, you'll need to make a substantial investment to get them approved: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=170.30 Butterfly Pea Flower is a good example of one that many of us have been following for a few years. It was an ingredient not on the GRAS list, not specifically approved, but commonly used outside of the US. Interestingly enough, it was used in cocktails by many, many establishments for years, despite *NOT* being permitted. A commercial entity make the investment in time and effort to get the approval. This was despite the fact that butterfly pea was occasionally used as an ingredient in food in some asian countries historically. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/02/2021-18995/listing-of-color-additives-exempt-from-certification-butterfly-pea-flower-extract

Following, this thread has so much potential.

Just given the time of year, I have to wonder if it coincides with it getting colder, as opposed to bacterial action. High oil content, lower proof, even a few degrees colder could cause the oils to separate if you are on the edge. Heat a bottle up, give it a good shake, see if it clears.

All those wires, seems easier to just put a door there and put the still outside. Zambia's nice all year long, no?

Optimally - you'd maximize cross-tray flow by clustering the downcomers together at the edge of each tray, and then stagger the downcomers left and right, or front and back. Real world, it's not going to matter all that much on an 8" tray, but don't go out of your way to locate them directly above/below each other, that's just counterproductive. Pretty sure I just took 2 minutes to regurgitate the same recommendation. So, snug 'em up tight - you don't want them coming loose once the column is together.

Not alone, we split our production capacity commitments across two suppliers to be safe, and got that same email the other day. I was fairly confident as well, we're talking 7 year business relationship at that point, paid up front always. Business is business I guess.

The missing part is that this is as much a building/fire code question as it is a best-practices question around tank venting. I don't claim to have the answers there, but the questions I might ask are - can I vent the tank indoors, or does the tank vent need to exhaust to the exterior? Are listed flame arrestors required? Should stainless IBC that are being used as tanks indoors be subject to portable tank rules, or permanent tank rules?

Interested in the double retort if you've still got it.

Your math is in-line for vapor-infused gin with no macerated botanicals (that can be excluded from the basket). It's quite a large volume. At that scale, dynamics of vapor flow through the basket is going to be a concern. A tall, columnar basket might not be ideal at that scale, without a mechanism to ensure vapor distribution). A shorter, squat basket might be more ideal to ensure you don't get vapor channeling and dead spots in tall column, or having your botanicals get packed down under their own saturated weight. There's a good photo from Hendricks that shows a great example of a an extremely large squat-style basket for a similar sized still (in this case, 1000 liters).

I would imagine they are exactly what you want to compare to.

Yep. We did exactly the same. 2" Female Camlock to Female NPT adapter, and screwed in a 2" NPT threaded to Triclamp adapter. Easy to just reduce from there. Go with a plastic (Poly) camlock adapter, NOT aluminum. Dixon makes a fancy stainless unit, but I don't think you want to spend $200 on what should be $30 in parts. https://www.jmesales.com/bradford-316-stainless-cam-groove-coupler-x-clamp-ends/?sku=DXRC150SE&gclid=CjwKCAjw5P2aBhAlEiwAAdY7dIs6Oc_CFkz7dfJ_cHksHpBpU6GYKjAmnHve3opcW_dfk-GW_CDu1hoCB0wQAvD_BwE

I'll second that. It's not ideal to take all your grain to 190, but you can do it as long as your enzyme additions are sufficient for the amount of starch. Your problem though, is that you are likely denaturing the glucoamylase by going in at 170f. Dosing at a lower temperature may result in longer conversion time, but keep in mind that glucoamylase will remain active through fermentation. In your model, I'd split your high temperature alpha amylase addition in half. Add half on the way up to 190, add the other half after you've begun cooling, add it back at a slightly lower temp, 170f or so, this way you can start breaking down some of the starches in prep for the glucoamylase.

Gin's just a brutally complicated category. Not because it's hard to make gin, but because there is such an enormous variety of flavor profiles, and such an incredible amount of preference. You also have to straddle the challenge of either being broadly appealing or being creative/unique enough to appeal to gin drinkers. Y'all know it, just distillasplaining. Anecdotal tasting feedback is interesting, but is going to be all over the map, and to get reliable results would probably require some large sample sizes and more rigorous sampling methodologies, etc. Even when you get that all correct, how the hell do you communicate all of that in your marketing message? Like @Foreshot said, you really need to start with the broader product strategy, are you attempting to be broadly appealing or are you trying to own a niche sub-category, flavor profile, or market segment. In those scenarios, the target customer personas can be very different. Feedback, even anecdotal, should be aligned to those. On the G&T front - yeah that's a tough one. In the tasting room, we carry only one tonic, and it's the one that showcases the product the best (we think), even if it's not the patron's preference. We joke and say we make gin for people who hate gin, but that was exactly our point. When a gin enthusiast tries it, the usual feedback we get is something along the lines of "eh, it's ok", which is totally fine. But when someone who isn't a gin drinker comes in and tries it, gets curious, loves a gin cocktail we make, and says something like "oh my god, I didn't even know I liked gin" - for us, that's our home run. Find your angle, run with it.

Still the long heat-up time?

What diameter and lengths are your plumbing? What's your required flow rate? Trying to push high flow rates into small diameter plumbing with high back pressures is almost always going to be a screamer. Iwaki makes some great mag-drive centrifugals that are very quiet. It's why you see them very often in high-end home aquarium setups. On the positive, you can often find them on eBay for good prices. The other option is opting for an oversized three phase pump, and use a frequency drive to dial it back to the bare minimum you need.

Well done @Kindred Spirits on the condensate line recco.

It’s unlikely you have scale buildup in the jacket, steam is pure enough that you shouldn’t be seeing any kind of deposits. At least not before a decade of regular use. Rent or buy a cheap borescope from Amazon before you spend the time and money. If your steam lines are black pipe, I’ll put my money on clogged valves. Historically, you would have seen a strainer on the input of every valve to prevent this. You don’t see that as often these days. Is your agitator working well? I’ve seen systems really see efficiency fall off a cliff when their mixers weren’t working.

Assuming you've got no issues with your steam supply - all the other equipment is working properly? No boiler issues, etc etc? Also assume that your heat up time has increased dramatically (this would indicate a steam flow issue, not a distillation/condenser/reflux issue). I'd take off the upstream steam valves and check for blockages/restrictions on the inputs to the valve. There may be screens, globe valves are easily clogged, etc. Are you running the steam valves open wider than you normally would have previously? I've got to assume you were turning down the steam flow once you hit boil.

Anyone using Estal catalog glass styles? Curious your experiences working with them. Working through a US-based intermediary or direct?

It doesn't matter, either is fine. It's going to be easier to titrate your caustic additions. Measure pH and add caustic until you get a stable pH of around 8.0-8.5, that should be high enough based on my own testing.

This technique goes back a long time in the hobby distilling community - using an alkaline substance (usually baking soda) to increase pH to the point at which you cause ester hydrolysis (breaking volatile esters into their acid and alcohol constiuents) followed by re-distillation to separate those volatile acids. It's an effective way to remove esters from heads. I'm pretty sure I wasn't the first to suggest using sodium hydroxide instead of sodium bicarbonate - and I made that suggestion in 2015: https://www.stilldragon.org/discussion/1440/the-big-ester-hydrolysis-thread "We invented"? Come on now, this was "invented" by chemists a long time ago, even if they made this claim in the context of beverage distilling, it's not new.

I got into an argument with someone a few years back on whether or not there is any difference in making a heads cut on a strip. My position was that it could be beneficial to do it, theirs was that it made no sense whatsoever to cut heads on a strip, even with plates. Their rationale was that it's far more efficient to cut heads on a high plate count relative to low plate count, otherwise you risked simply wasting ethanol. My position was that if you were doing multiple strips per spirit, cutting heads could maximize the usable ethanol in the still, increasing overall yield (obviously, if you had enough stripped wash to completely fill the still). I gave them the win in that argument. While it does make sense to maximize output purity on the strip, it's easier to optimize for the tails cut, and output proof, but not necessarily a heads perspective.

Depends - are you making cuts on the strip? Increasing reflux through the stripping run to push back tails and then cutting before completely stripping the wash? Diluting before spirit runs? Guess I should have asked first - is this a question about output purity/proof or making a marketing claim?