Silk City Distillers

1000 gallon chiller tank for fermenters?

How much fermentation capacity - how many active ferments at once, crash cooling in the fermenters?

Our Rye is 100% unmalted, and our Oat Bourbon is 100% unmalted oat and corn (no malt) - both get overwhelmingly positive reviews.

The big question I raised is can you really do a comparison unless you can source grain grown in a similar manner, this applies to the end distillate being better or worse.

A typical enzyme mash for us is to add grain around 120, adjust ph to 5.2-5.4, add Beta Glucanase and half of the high temp amylase.  Raise to the upper end of the gelatinization temperate range from the grain, hold for 1.5-2 hours, start dropping temperature.  Add the second half of the amylase.  Recheck pH and adjust to 5.2 if necessary, add glucoamylase at 140 - hold for 1.5 hours, cool, pitch.

You absolutely need to add nutrient when using unmalted grain, especially so if you are not using backset.  Unmalted grain will be too low in FAN for a healthy fermentation.

Zero Bulk Milk Tanks.

Following, I was hoping to move to a Level Filler, specifically the Mori, and am now questioning it.

We use a volumetric filler that's highly accurate.  Problem is, we now realize that bottles are not even remotely close.  Fill height is visibly inconsistent due to variation in bottle volumes.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Suspect it's not so easy to detect via simple methodologies or observations.  Looks like at a minimum, you'd need to do some analytics.  Here is a more recent study looking at this, which looks specifically at the ratio of Furfural to 5-HMF to determine if caramel is added.  The big issue is that a big component of the color is 5-HMF, which comes from the charred barrel in the exact same way as from the charred sugar.

http://lib3.dss.go.th/fulltext/Journal/J.AOAC 1999-2003/J.AOAC1999/v82n4(jul-aug)/v82n4p997.pdf

Keep in mind this is from the TTB.

8 hours ago, Huffy2k said:

Depending on the objective for your rye whiskey, this may or may not be a good thing.. 

It's still unmistakably rye.

WhistlePig's 10+ year old Ryes sourced from Alberta Distillers are all 100% unmalted enzyme converted ryes.

I would have imagined there would be a ton of literature from the Irish whiskey distillers - since they use high proportions of unmalted grain, compared to say Scotch, but surprisingly there is not.

None - nobody grows any around here.

But I thought this  one was interesting, brewing related but clearly related.  Look at the congener composition of malt barley beer vs enzyme converted barley beer.  Unmalted is cleaner from a congener perspective.  Keep in mind, unmalted raw grain is low in FAN (aka Amino Acids) - Amino acids are necessary precursors to many higher alcohols/aldehydes/etc.  

brewing_unmalted.pdf

Probably going to be strung up for even suggesting this, but in doing a bunch of work with 100% malted and unmalted rye - I find the flavor profile of enzyme converted unmalted rye to be far superior to malt rye.  Granted, there is a huge difference in the location and grower of the base grain, and that may be a big factor, but the difference is not subtle.  To me, unmalted grains come across smoother, more subtle, the rye is substantially less peppery and assertive.

For years I bought into the common thought that malt was far superior to unmalt+enzyme in every single way, no question...  But is it really?

Fire away.

We've been beating the hell out of Glidetech Distillery for 2 and a half years and the hoses still look brand new.

Yeah agree - focus has been on sharing cooperage as well as co-ideation.

Beers aged in our barrels, whiskies finished in their barrels.

Thr breweries have done a number of them, using bourbon, rye, and rum casks.

Rum cask IPAs are really nice, we have had great luck with IPA cask finished bourbons.  Will do some whiskey in stout and dark barrels, and I’d love to do a gin in an juicy citrus NEIPA or a Farmhouse cask.

The marketing value of aligning/collaborating with a well known/respected local brewery is far the most valuable part this kind of thing.

We did a brewery collaboration last year, sold 300+ bottles out of the tasting room in 4 days.  The vast majority of the customer base were brewery regulars and folks close to the local craft beer scene.

Check the plumbing and RO housing while you are at it.  That high of a TDS sometimes means untreated water is bypassing the membrane to the output.

Also - if you have a holding tank or final polish carbon filter - those could be a problem.

Depends on the grain being mashed and your overall mash efficiency.  If you are talking corn, with solid mash efficiency, maybe 1.13 or 1.14.  Keep in mind that's more than 3 pounds a gallon ...  not a fun mash.

Anyone have the newer Snap 41?  For $1500 it seems like a bargain for quick measurements (non gauging).  Believe the 41 does compensate for temperature now as well.

Can I mash it calculator:

https://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml

Simple, it works to get an idea.

Using 1200 pounds with 600 gallons of water (2lb/gallon ratio - 2 quarts per pound) -  you get a total mash volume of 696 gallons.

Just to put Fighting Creek plant into perspective - completely theoretical discussion.

100,000 Gallons a day capacity, assuming this is for residential sewerage, meaning an average BOD of 250mg/l and TSS of 250mg/l.

That's handling something like 210 pounds of BOD and 210 pounds of TSS a day. 

Rum Stillage could be as high as 50,000mg/l of BOD and a TSS of 10,000mg/l.

So, lets say you are dumping 250 gallons of rum stillage.  That's 103 pounds of BOD and 20 pounds of TSS hitting the plant in one big slug in a worst-case scenario.

Just to be clear - Does your local county have sufficient capacity at their sewage treatment plant to handle the additional load?  Or are they saying no because they can’t handle it?  Usually,  for the right amount of $$, they'll gladly take it.

Not sure what plant you connect to, but in the grand scheme of things these two treatment plants are fairly small.

http://www.powhatanva.gov/309/Utilities

What percentage of the stillage are you currently recycling as backset/dunder?

13 hours ago, daveflintstone said:

I understand the necessity of complying with bureaucratic nonsense, just real curious why you consider that to be a good news thing.

Regulators gotta regulate.

Concur, it's always a bad thing when regulators have no understanding of what's being regulated.  While this specific decision might not mean much for you, what about the next one?  Or the one after that, which puts you out of business?

Ice and rock salt, shake like hell.

I'll say the same thing to everyone I talk to about starting a distillery.

The still and the act of distilling the two least important parts of the whole enterprise.  Hell, washing the toilets is more important than the still.  Not saying you are in this camp, but there are tons of people who fantasize about distilling and stills, where they should be fantasizing about scrubbing floor drains, because that's where the real joy of distilling lies.  Drain grates so clean you can lick sweet mash right off them.  You can know everything you need to know about how good the head distiller is by their floor drains.

We have 1.5" drain on a dairy tank converted to a mash tun.  We use a reducer to step up to a 2" valve, as we've found that a 1.5" butterfly is fairly restrictive compared to the port alone.

We do all on-grain, no lautering, and for the most part the 1.5" drain works fine as long as we use that 2" butterfly, otherwise we see the mash start self-lautering, and the liquid drains faster than the grain.  This is especially so with heavy husk loads in the tun (roller milled whole oat husk is can be a headache, it would lauter just fine, with no screen at all).

Also worth noting, we use a displacement/lobe pump, so it can pull serious suction.

I would say 2" really should be the bare minimum.  If you are milling to flour, I don't see why you wouldn't at least try a 1" port.  Keep a few buckets handy otherwise, or pump out of the manhole/access.

I think I want to know. ?

If repurposing tanks is an option as well, and if you are dead set about Canada manufacture, DeLaval has been making beautiful sanitary dairy tanks, blend tanks, jacketed pasteurizers, etc for decades.  Bulk Tanks are easily repurposed as jacketed fermenters.  As a bonus, they are usually insulated as well.  Larger steam jacket pasteurizers are easily converted into mash tuns.  Most all of their tanks are heavy gauge stainless and will probably last a century, no tinfoil-thin stainless here.  Just a thought.