Silk City Distillers

I also have a similar style trap (Armstrong) - it does look curiously backwards.  What’s the make and model?

Do you really think there is some sort of strain-specific phenomenon?  At the time most of these bacteria were in the very broad 'bacillus' category.  Clostridium is a fairly common soil bacterium, it's arguable that in the history of muck pits, there were likely multiple strains involved.  Propionibacteria are every bit as interesting as Clostridium in mixed culture fermentation.  I might try to argue that the propionic acid esters are more "rummy" than butyric, which are largely just "pineapple" - yawn, boring.  It's fairly easy for me to create pineapple-bomb like rums with clostridium.

Arguable that to some extent, many of these bacterium are producing their own unique ratio of our favorite carboxylics, the specific selection of bacteria directly influencing ester ratios in ways the old guys could never imagine.  Combine this with the Rochte/Berglund approach to catalytic distillation, and can control the process in ways never before imagined.

I’ve spent 3 years working on mixed culture rum.  Getting your hands on cultures is the easy part.

Don’t believe everything in the old rum papers.  Some theories are outright wrong, some are right but for the wrong reasons, some are right but the non-standard terminology make it difficult to understand what they mean (eg. what’s “low wines” and “high wines” mean in high-ester rum distillation), and just about everything not from a direct source is a misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or just complete nonsense.

Half the fun of old rum is trying to decipher the mystery.

In obvious quantities, it's a major fault.  The game is to create and capture the esters, but not the acids.  You've got 3 opportunities to create esters from the acids, fermentation, distillation, and maturation.  Even still, it'll be there.  Spend some time with some really funky Jamaicans and you can pick it out amongst the funk.  Some of the “buttery” flavor of old rums is butyric in very low concs.  Butyric distills primarily in the late tails, but starts to pick up as ethanol concentration starts dropping quickly near the end of the run.

Miyarisan C. Butyricum from Japan.

It’s a well studied strain from a biological perspective, used as a probiotic there - so you have no worries about botulinum toxin.   Readily available, you can buy it on eBay or Amazon, ferments glucose, produces enough butyric acid to hate yourself.  Most of the lab culture suppliers have numerous strains available, but you will need to propagate from slants.

17 hours ago, SlickFloss said:

You can trigger faults in distillate judgings when adjusting with citric.

You have a source for this?

Formic Acid is a carboxylic acid that can form an ester with ethanol - ethyl formate.  This might have potential flavor implications for the distillate.  Has a rummy, winey, cognac, heady aroma.

Sulfuric may have implications as well.  In the old Arroyo papers, he utilizes sulfuric acid to adjust pH for his heavy rums.  I often wondered if the reason was simple economy, inexpensive and smaller quantities needed, or if using sulfuric acid drove higher levels of ester formation during distillation, as would be characteristic of the style.   Mineral acids like sulfuric are Fischer Esterification catalysts during reflux, and can drive higher levels of ester creation during distillation.

Ran across this a few months back and thought it was an interesting alternative to using straight whey.  The premise is to use lactose-converted whey as a substitute for a portion of water in a grain mash.  This somewhat solves for the issue of very low alcohol yields.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030215009480

Yeah, I'd also assume you could infer the concentration by measuring the temperature at boiling point at a specific pressure.  It might be easier to do this under vacuum.  Measure the boiling point of a laboratory tested sample - and compare subsequent samples to this boiling point.  The BP is not likely to be a simple linear function though, so you wouldn't necessarily be able to easily determine the concentration, unless you had a table to compare against.

That said, you could just get some 200 proof ethanol, some heptane, mix them in known ratios, and test the boiling point of each at a specific pressure.  Then, plot out a graph of the boiling point vs concentration.

However, this is pretty crude, assumes only a binary azeotrope, adding water to the mixture complicates this immensely.  So old solvent that has absorbed water, will likely read as having a higher percentage of heptane than it actually does.

I thought the cannabis extractors didn't care about heptane in their denatured alcohol, since in the rotovap or vac still it distills with the ethanol and doesn't remain in the product.  It forms a difficult azeotrope, that's why it's used for denatured alcohol.

Seems like heptane denatured ethanol is becoming the defacto standard for tax-free ethanol in that market.

https://ultrapure-usa.com/marijuana-solvent-extraction-botanasolv/

https://710spirits.com/tell-me-more/

Cointreau is known to be made using beet ethanol.  Stroh from Austria was widely reputed to be "rum" distilled from beet sugar.  I hear that many French Liqueurs use beet ethanol as the base.

On 7/18/2018 at 8:10 PM, bostonapothecary said:

Lots of people are buying big ticket u-tube densitometers before they buy other tools like automatic titrators, but is that a good idea? One of my projects is trying to add pycnometry to my analysis tool set as a stepping stone before a u-tube densitometer.

Nobody really considers the u-tube densitometer an analytical tool, it's a productivity tool.  It does not tell you anything you don't already know, or can't determine with a glass hydrometer and thermometer (more accurately), it just does it faster.  The value of the tool, and why so many people invest in them, is time savings and ease-of-use.  Sure, the larger benchtop units give you a very accurate and reliable measurement, but even in this case, it's still not new information.  While the expensive benchtop units are more about assurance (insurance?), the handhelds are about time, and time is always at a premium in a craft distillery.  Paar probably sells hundreds of handheld units to every benchtop unit.

Call your local elected representatives and let them know it’s impacting your business.

SR/46edv was isolated in France from beet molasses fermentation.  It’s goal is high ethanol yield fermentation, with low congener production.  In addition to beverage production, it’s also sold for fuel ethanol.

RM/edv493 was isolated in the Carribean from Molasses fermentation.  It’s goal is a congener profile characteristic of rum.

Edv493 is Distillimax RM, I think it makes a nice rum.  I don’t like SR - aka 46edv.

You can coax a clean white rum from ec1118 - aka Distillamax LS.

Regarding the ancillary products.  We did a collaboration with a local farmer, we aged his maple syrup in our bourbon barrels.  We sold it under our brand/label.  While it was a great seller, selling hundreds of bottles over the course of two weeks, the biggest benefit was the draw and exposure from via social media, we immediately attracted a customer base who wouldn't have normally walked in the door, and it didn't cannibalize other product sales. 

Q-655G Surge Protective Devices BR.pdf

Blown boards sound more like transient voltage spikes, not noise.  Noisy lines aren't going to fry boards.  It would be easy to tell looking at the boards, if you had a good electrician.  The fact that a number of these have been damaged makes me believe this is a spike issue, not a noise issue - bar cooler boards don't give a crap about noise.

Talk to your electrician about potentially considering a panel-mount surge protector/noise filter, this is a unit that would wire into your main panel.  Typically you see them more often in places that have very sensitive electrical equipment, hospitals, labs, data centers.

They aren't cheap, but they are cheaper than replacing equipment.

This doesn't mean you can skip thoroughly reviewing the electrical installation.  VFDs can throw off very high voltage spikes, 4x the line voltage, however it's typically only the motor that's subjected to it.

If in your state the wholesaler/distributor is responsible for collecting and paying excise taxes, in your case the excise tax would payable when bottles are transferred from the distillery to the tasting room.  This would be the equivalent "event" in that situation.

The way we work, the distillery invoices the tasting room and "distributes" to them.  Liability for the excise tax occurs as soon as the bottle moves out of the bonded area, regardless of when it's poured or sold.

This also keeps state and federal excise taxes synchronized, otherwise you are tracking both excise taxes separately.

We were able to (somewhat) easily upgrade the agitator on our Mueller with a larger unit.

Worth noting, we are using a rectangular tank (converted dairy tank).

In a cylindrical tank with tangental injection, you might be able to get the liquid spinning fast enough to keep suspension with a very fine grind.

And keep in mind, it's very, very loud.  Even fully submerged, zero hammer, you are in the range of requiring ear protection.

I don't think you can get good tank mixing without running high pressure steam, probably using multiple injectors based on tank geometry.

We push about 550 pounds an hour of steam through a single eductor.  We stagger water additions to help speed cooling, so we'll typically start with 700 pounds of corn in 300 gallons volume.  Until the corn is gelatinized, it tends to want to fall out of suspension and sit along the tank bottom.  The eductor alone won't mix.  Once we've gelled and ready to start cooling, we've got good suspension with just the steam mixing.  For us, we run the agitator from the start of the mash to the finish.

We use injection for heating, and the jacket for cooling.  Without the agitator running during the cooling phases, cooling the mash with the jacket would take hours longer, it's that significant.

Heating rum wash, on the other hand, the eductor alone in the ~500g total volume works just fine.

You running any inverters/motor drives?  

They can be very “noisy”.

Mashing a metric ton (2200lb) of Quinoa this morning.

Despite the pending rule change, we submitted formula and TTB says it's whiskey, so let's make 100% Quinoa whiskey.

Humans drink beer, yeast drink mash.