Silk City Distillers

Depends on why you are cleaning bottles - are you removing dust and particulate, or are you trying to wash the bottle walls with some kind of solvent (water, alcohol, etc) to remove something.

Never had a TIB take more than a few days...

Nah, we have played around with numbers and high 140s seems to take much longer to convert, with no real impact to final yield.  We ferment on grain and obviously don’t boil, so we aren’t denaturing any remaining active enzyme.

I’be found that adding Gluco positively impacts yield in either case.  Though it’s fairly minor.

We treat all malt the same way, not based on ideal gelatinization temp but the denature temp of the enzymes.

We tend to mash in malt around 156-158, which gives us a mash temp around 152.

4.6 is a little low, but your yeast should be fine.

Wouldn’t say the same about pitching into 100f though, that’s problematic.

Your enzyme, if HTAA and GA, are perfectly fine closer to 5.0.  You should not need to screw around with adjusting pH once you’ve pitched.

Your yields don’t look low, imho.

Do they want an answer from you, or do they want an answer from an engineer?

Reserve some wash and introduce it back into the spirit run.  The ratio will depend on the flavor profile you are targeting.

Just to be clear - you are looking to make a fuller flavored white rum?

Have the same setup.  Generally use the large valve during heat up, and close it down, just using the small valve during a spirit run.

Just got a sample of the Signature Spirits/Ultrapure cream base.

It’s surprisingly nice, haven’t done much with it but at first taste, it seems fairly versatile.  Max abv is around 17 I believe.

Only challenge is MOQ is a tote.

It was a snarky comment against people using sorghum syrup to make whiskey is all.

Going to submit a recipe for bourbon using high fructose corn syrup.  Same thing as sorghum syrup whiskey.

Haze, Floc, Colloid, can look like fluffy clouds, can look like fog at the bottom.

Take a bottle and put it in the freezer for a few days.  You'll get more of it.

If you warm it up, and shake it, it should completely disappear, only to return again over time, or when forced through cooling.

Saponification is a one-way, irreversible reaction, it is the process of turning the fatty acids into soap.  This is a flavor impact more than a visual impact, and essentially ruins the spirit.  Some people would say that saponification borders on pseudoscience, especially when people argue that you need to proof over decades time.

Saponification and haze/colloids are two different things.

It's haze - usually fatty acids, fatty acid esters, fusels, etc.  It's absolutely not biological.

Assuming your RO is good, you could chill filter (complicated), bottle at a higher proof (probably undesirable), cut tails earlier (but what about all the barreled product?).

It's common though, warm it up and shake the bottle, it'll go away.  Put the bottle in the freezer for a few days, it'll come back.

Volume for fill, weight for everything else.  Even in the case of fill, you verify your volume by weight.

To accurately calibrate your volume scale on that tank would still require you have some mechanism to weigh it.

The volume scale on those tanks is usually just a sticker, randomly applied, to hide the weld/seam under it.  It’s not intended for measuring.

We CIP the column every time we switch spirit types, so we'll CIP between rum and bourbon and rye for example.  We don't usually go more than 4 runs without CIP.

At 12", we don't generally look forward to disassembling columns, most commercial columns don't come apart at all, even when they don't have a CIP spray ball for each plate.

We don't aim for shiny copper.

Why reintroduce the heads as a single dose?  I would imagine the impact to yeast stress could be minimized by metering in the heads over a 12 or 24 hour period.

On 9/29/2018 at 8:52 AM, Hudson bay distillers said:

this takes about 6 hours . so last night before leaving we put water and grain in mashtun to pre heat over night expecting to wake up and have 400 gallons of mash almost to temp , inject the rest of the heat and done deal .

You will have bacterial fermentation taking place here, probably generating co2.

Youll spend lots of time in temp ranges that the lacto and other bacteria on the grain will be very happy in.

Is your hydronic system using a gas fired boiler?  Where is the boiler in proximity to the mash room?  Why is your mash room air tight?

You folks care to share some Agave sources?

Also consider that there may be insurance implications for the policies that cover the other units in the building.  Meaning, not you or your policies, but them and their policies.

One of the other tenants in our building had their insurance policy declined because there was a distillery in the building.

You have matching closures?

Rhubarb is a tough flavor, you could easily mistake it for sour green apple.

Boiling to make a syrup is challenging, because you are losing volatile components through the boiling process, in addition, thermal degradation of flavor is always a problem.  However, most people know the flavor of rhubarb not as the raw vegetable, but the syrup.  So lucky that rhubarb isn't known for delicate volatile aromas.

Acidity is a really big factor in the flavor profile of rhubarb, without the sour/tart, you are left  with a kind of a (blah) green, vegetal flavor, through vapor distillation that would  probably come across as cooked.

Hate to say it, but a commercial flavor is probably going to be much closer to what people expect than using fresh rhubarb.  Otherwise, ensure you are getting enough acidity in the product, maybe some additional citric acid, or try adding a little green apple as well.   The actual acid in rhubarb is going to be oxalic acid, but I'm not sure on the TTB position of using that as an additive (vs citric which is fairly common).

Sometimes these differences are driven by the measured tolerances of the physical measuring components as they come out of manufacturing.  While the specific part may look identical, through testing some units meet tighter tolerance ranges than others.  Instead of scrapping manufactured units, they are put to use in lower-cost devices.  I don't know that this is the case with Anton Paar, but I've seen this kind of thing done elsewhere, especially when the unit manufacturing costs are very high, and either scrapping or fixing reliability in software is not possible.