Silk City Distillers

pH is usually never the problem.  It can be a symptom,  but seldom the cause.

I agree with nutrient additions for an entirely raw (non-malt) batch, especially if you aren't using backset.

If your end result is neutral, you might opt to go the route of a small addition of DAP vs. using a fancy organic/amino acid-based nutrient.

Try something like 470g of DAP per 1000l of mash - that will add 100mg/l FAN.  You might be able to pull that back to 235g/1000l.  Hard to estimate since you don't know the starting FAN of the mash.

In addition, if neutral is your goal,  you might want to consider dialing back that starting gravity to 1.055-1.06 and trading a faster fermentation for a higher yield, especially if you are just stripping anyway.  Duration of fermentation isn't linear, once you start pushing near 10%, you risk protracted/long fermentation times.  Protracted/long fermentations emphasize bacterial flavor contributions (positive or negative).  The pH dropping is a sign of this, and means hitting terminal gravity is going to draw out as the lower pH starts to stress yeast.

HTFs are ideal, but what people found out was that the thermal mass of the HTF (Mineral oil, heavy glycol, etc), in addition to mash/wash being heated, made their already slow heat up times even worse - because they were already running undersized.  This was especially so when they filled their big fat steam jackets with gallons and gallons of additional liquid for the little elements to heat.

The other factor to consider, is the thermal mass of hot HTF means that you need to anticipate your heat input changes far in advance.  If you were used to driving a still with immersion elements, this is a big difference, because it's like piloting a cruise ship vs a speedboat.

I  know a local place that uses a circulated hot oil system, they use a massive 3 phase 480v circulation heater and their tanks have coils.  They make asphalt sealer, steam can't get hot enough.

Interested - location?

Another fairly successful test run today.  Clear, though, that we can't squeeze any more out of this boiler, even tempering the brutally cold ground water, we're still ending up around 140f output, at the 7gpm rate.  Given I'm using the same boiler to heat the water as I'm using to drive the steam injector, should be no surprise since a BTU is a BTU.

Tempted to preheat some water in a holding tank, but that goes against the whole idea.  Once we've got this in a more permanent arrangement, we'll see if we can slow down the mill speed and water flow rates to get closer to boiling.

Square fermenters look great.

SG of 1.005, if that’s the actual SG, is the number to watch.

For us, complete fermentation is 1.000 or slightly below for grain.

One of my biggest regrets, get to go to Copenhagen and they were closed.

Are you guys consistently soaking?  Or going in dry?

@indyspirits - Wow, we are very very similar to you.  20% loss in 2y in 30g, with the 53g being roughly half.

We have heat, but it runs sporadically.  Coldest winter temperatures are around 55 degrees, and we have hit 100 in the summer.  Probably similar to you, winters are very very dry.  Low outdoor relative humidity in the winter means even lower, bone-dry, relative humidity indoors at warmer temps.\

We've considered humidifying to reduce losses, but we really get some fabulous color and flavor at the 2 year mark, which makes me hesitate to change any of that.

To some extent, evaporation of liquid means some intensification of flavor, especially as it relates to the non-volatiles.

Our proof slightly increases in 2 years, but it's fairly minor, maybe and increase of 2 proof.  Looking at some of the high proof KY Bourbons, seeing proofs at 130+, wouldn't it mean KY is too dry?

I don't know the method used, but it was a saponin-removed ready-to-cook variation.  I know a co-packer who imports in bulk and repackages for retail and food-service use, he was able to pull in some extra for us.  The mash was not at all bitter.

Whiskey flavored with venomous ants

Either phosphoric or sulfuric acid will act as catalysts for Fischer esterification.

I’m not sure there is precedent to use formic acid for pH adjustment, TTB may take issue with that.

Yep.

About 7gpm.

Bulk?  Like jerry can sizes?  J Tech Sales or Gusmer

No.

Also understand the irony that most electric fillers are not explosion proof, nor do they use explosion proof pumps inside.  Some of the most common ones we use, either pumped or vacuum - not explosion proof.  Even gravity fillers with bottom-mount feed pumps, usually not explosion proof.

That said, Flojet makes AC120v or 12/24v DC diaphragm pumps with compatible plastics that have a pressure switch shutoff.  It will pump as long as the output is open.  You might find a very similar pump within a very commonly used filler.

If I wanted to get really, really creative with that G70 pump...

I'd run it with Nitrogen or CO2, only from a tank.  No electrics.

I'd also remove the exhaust muffler, and instead plumb the gas exhaust to a second nozzle to act as an inert gas purge.

This way, you aren't wasting the inert gas you are using the power the pump.  You get to eat your cake and eat it too.

Sure, managing bottled gas is a real pain in the a$$, but if inert gas purge is something you feel is important, you could probably do something really slick with this.

One nozzle wash, the second nozzle purge.  Workflow is simple, place bottle on wash, move wash bottle to purge.  

For the gas flow control, use something like a gas whisker valve, again - no electrics, just use it on the wash port, the purge port simple runs as a slave.  Or even a simple pneumatic/gas foot switch.

https://powermatic.net/whisker-valve

Simple recirculating system, with the pump pushing through a filter cartridge prior to the nozzle.

Brass has questionable compatibility with many different liquids.  Also, unless you have documentation saying otherwise, you'll need to assume it could contain lead.

Washing bottles with soap and water seems like it could be hugely problematic.

As quinoa is one of the least-utilized grains in alcohol production, we thought we'd give it a go.  I thought I'd share some of our experience trying to make a go of it, since so little is out there.

We experimented with quinoa as an adjunct, flavoring grain, in a predominantly corn mash bill.  Even in smaller quantities, quinoa dominates the aroma and flavor.  It has an incredibly distinctive nose, and if you've ever cooked quinoa at home, eaten quinoa, you'll be familiar with it, because that aroma dominates the distillate.  I really need to emphasize this, we talk about tasing and smelling aromas of the underlying base grains in whiskies, corn, wheat, this is an entirely different level.  The distillate is amplified quinoa.  It permeates.  Everything.  Clothes.  Hair.  Quinoa.  Everywhere.

As terrible as it sounds, there is this very redeeming nutty, caramel, chocolate, roasty flavor.  Doing some research, I came across some old brewing articles that referenced 2-pentylfuran as being a key contributor to the quinoa aroma.  2-pentylfuran not very common among conventional grain, but prevalent in some of the ancient grains (Kamut).  Also very common as a Malliard reaction output, common in other roasted items like bread, coffee, chocolate.  It's a really appealing profile.  We tried experimenting a bit with chocolate, coffee - the problem is they amplify the flavor profile to the point at which the distillate starts to get this kind of savory flavor profile (think the savory aspect of a roast).  Very interesting, screws with your mind, because there is something, almost a kind of umami, in the flavor profile of the distillate.

In the end we gave up on trying to build a corn-based mash bill - it was impossible to dial back the quinoa impact without distilling far above 160.  After a few more trials, we started to like distilled far cleaner.  Ultimately we decided to go 100% quinoa, and use the very unpopular light whiskey category, stripping, then distilling it a hair above 180 proof.  It's still choc-ful of quinoa flavor, very, very strong.  However, much more approachable as a whiskey.  Went to sleep in some fresh dump used char-4s.

Operationally, quinoa is incredibly difficult to work with.  The tiny size makes milling very, very difficult.  We couldn't get a tight enough gap on the roller mill to get a good crack, the 1/8th inch screen on the hammer mill really didn't do a good job.  The flour screen we have on the mill is painfully slow, and is a dusty mess.

If you look at the structure of quinoa, it's a little different from a typical cereal grain.  There isn't a big pocket of starch, with the germ off to the end.  The starch is encapsulated at the center of the quinoa seed.

The tiny size, the grain structure, made the cereal mash among the worst we've ever mashed.  It simply does not mash.  We held it in the 190-195 range for more than 6 hours, impossible to get a negative starch test.  We ended up letting the cook go overnight, yes, overnight.  In the morning, still could not get a negative starch test.  Lots of high temp alpha amylase, glucoamylase, beta glucanase, protease, xylanase - we finally decided to call it quits and cool to pitch.

The best we can surmise is that without milling it to micron-sized flour, the tight pocket of starch gets trapped by the seed structure, and slowly "leaks" out as it hydrolyzes.  Anyone who thinks that protracted cooking will simply cause the seed to expand, burst, and fall apart - nope, sorry, there was still obvious whole quinoa particles in the mash, after nearly 18 hours of cooking.

We didn't notice it so obviously during the test batches, however most of the test batches were corn-predominant, so the lower-yield wasn't as obvious.

Yield was mostly terrible.  1200 pounds of quinoa in, roughly 35 proof gallons out.

We fermented down to about 1.01, on the grain, with active enzyme.

What was really interesting was the amount of bulk that was remaining in the mash.  Attribute this to the much lower starch content of quinoa relative to other grains.

We had another 1200 pounds of quinoa for batch 2, we decided to give it to our farmer as feed.  The effort involved is simply not worth it.  To get any chance of reasonable yield, we'd need to have gone to fine flour, even then I think we'd be dealing with an impossible to dewater stillage/sludge.

We'll see how the distillate ends up, I think there will be fans, but ultimately, it'll be a very polarizing whiskey.  Maybe I'll be wrong, and maybe it'll be fabulous, and maybe I'll regret giving away a metric ton of quinoa as goat feed (they love it by the way).

That said, if you really want to try it, go for it.  You'd probably get enough impact with as little as 5% of the mash bill - given the high price of quinoa, it's a much more cost effective approach.

The most difficult grain we've ever worked with, and we've worked with Millet (Size challenges) and Whole Oats (worse than rye)

Ordered some phosphoric from my chem supply.  Will compare.

The still geometry is a major factor of foam.

IMHO - foams tend to climb walls easier than expanding in open space.  

Tall narrow stills will have more problems than fat squat stills.

The nearer you get to the top, the more surface area to stabilize the foam, this includes the roof of the kettle.

You will hit a point where no amount of antifoam will prevent puking, as the high vapor speeds in that limited remaining volume will start to pull what little foam there is - and entrained liquid up the column.

Why exactly are you trying to reinvent something?  There are scientists and companies that devote huge time and resources into this.  Just buy Patcote or another Simethecone and call it a day?  No?

I'm a sucker for a great deal, but if they are asking $15k for that piece of work, I highly doubt anything else is going to be worth it.

Can you even run that still in a single day?  18kw on 300 gallons is a 5 hour heat time (optimistically), probably another 8-10 hours running time if that's a 6" packed column with a dephleg, probably another hour or two if you want to collect tails.  Condenser looks way undersized to be able to support fast stripping, not that those heating elements will do anything fast.  Sounds like a fun day, get in at 5am, leave at 10pm.  Like the folks above said, put in a few modifications, and you are in the territory of a new still, exactly the way you want it.

Adding an agitator to that still is a cool $5k in labor and materials, and I'd argue it's throwing good money after bad.  New heating system, column, condenser.  

God I hope you didn't already buy that thing.

I would imagine, with a set of reference compounds, you could run trials to establish exactly where in your  birectifier fractions specific constituents would fall.

You could pair that with reference samples of these compounds, and it would be a very interesting organoleptic tool.

For example, just making things up, if damascenone falls in fraction X, you could do a test birectifier distillation, check fraction X against a sample of damascenone, and establish not only presence, but an idea of rough quantity.  It would take some significant legwork to run all the test distillations (ethyl alcohol+Compound).

A nice set of references - positives and faults, would build out a very nice little analytical kit.

Have you considered adding damascenone to a sample of fairly pedestrian rum?  Maybe a quick and dirty blind tasting.

I've done this myself with many other esters.  It's fairly insightful, or at least helps establish a sort of confirmation of the relative importance of a component.

I see that Aldrich has small samples available for $40, relatively cheap test.