Silk City Distillers

Pretty sure he didn't mean to add fish.  I mean, totally cool idea, but I think he meant to keep your cooling system running in a reasonable temp range, keep pumps running to keep the system from becoming stagnant/anoxic.  Nothing worse than letting it go anoxic, and then cooking your bacteria soup with high temps.

Yeah that’s your problem, noncondensable gasses are coming through the parrot without a way to vent.

Easy process adjustment is to run out the drain for a little bit before you close the valve and run through the parrot.

Does your parrot attach via fittings?  If so you can improvise a vent.

Caveat - assuming you are not blowing vapor through.

Does your parrot have a surge breaker/vent tube?  Post a pic.

I’ve seen quite a few Hogas, and I’ve never seen a jacket.  So I don’t believe the hoga has one, and the coil is in the kettle proper.  Could the seller be confusing jacket with the direct fire skirt?

On the boiler - just keep in mind that there is barely any price difference between a 250kbtu and a somewhat larger boiler.  Sizing for minimum is asking for regret.  One you factor in labor, steam trim, traps, condensate, it’s only going to be $1000-$2000 more to go double the size.

Guy who manages cooling systems told me to treat it like a fish tank.

I thought antimicrobial hop extracts like Betatec Isostab had no distinctive flavor or aroma impacts.

Flavored whiskey.

Don’t over think it, sure the milk calibration is complicated, but keep in mind it’s because it’s a legal-for-trade situation.

Milk is roughly 1.03, so it’s not far off. 

Here is ours - laminated and up on the wall next to the tank.

You will not find a chart - you need to make  it yourself.

Do it by weight and interpolate the curve.

The dairy would have had a calibration chart provided by a third party to go along with that specific tank.

There was a little back and forth necessary for the COLA for our IPA-cask finished bourbon, but they approved after we provided all clarifications.  Not quite the same, but not so different either.

Just make up your own serial numbers.  We got really really creative and original with them.

Mash Tun - M1

Fermenter - F1 and F2

Still - S1 and S2

Looking for Western Square style double or quad racks somewhere closer to the Northeast.  53g or 30g sizes.

Thanks!

Ah, just be careful you don't need the PC interface kit to program the valve, it's another $400.

Rafael Arroyo laid out the framework for mixed-culture bacterial fermentation and ester-selective fermentation in his 1945 patent, "The Production of Heavy Rums".  He showed how the rum industry had been building specific congener profiles through the selective use of bacteria in fermentation, even though they didn't have a good idea of what the microbiology was when they were doing it.  From the 50s on, there were numerous attempts to artificially replicate whiskies through adulteration, or somehow accelerate maturation.  However, all of these techniques, good or bad, still required mashing, fermentation, distillation, maturation, and perhaps adulteration to yield a final product.  Last year Robert Freitas laid out his spirits nanofactory concept, to completely build any spirit from molecular scratch, completely eliminating all the steps prior.  Sure, the process is nostalgic, especially for us, but perhaps completely extraneous if one wishes to have full control.  

The Whiskey Nanofactory concept makes your proposed product look completely outdated.

http://www.imm.org/Reports/rep047.pdf

So, I'm not sure where you are going with this, but your argument that these technological trends are somehow ignored by the distilling community is a little misguided.

We have a few more years left, Freitas estimated the cost to replicate 1 whiskey at $10 million, and at least 2 years - and still the bottle cost would be $1000.

Really depends on your mash efficiency, and process consistency.  At a 1.04sg with 5kg in 27l, you are about 68% efficiency.  There's lots of room to improve there.  It might not make a difference in your test mashes, but at 50x volumes, you are talking real money.

This one?  The 5 second full swing proportional actuation makes other valves look like dinosaurs trying to crawl out of a tar pit.  I don't think you can use PWM directly, only 4-20ma/2-10vdc proportional like you've got with your Omega today.  If you are looking to use PWM out of a micro controller and have no other option, you are going to need a PWM to Proportional converter (sometimes called a valve driver).  You trying to build something with a little micro controller kit like an Arduino?  I suspect it's going to be much easier to find a way to add an analog voltage output and control the valve directly versus trying to use a converter (which needs to be tuned typically).   What are you trying to do anyway?  

I haven't swapped out my slower dephlegmator actuator for this one yet, on the list of projects.  No spring control, it fails in place.  We use recirculating water anyhow, so if we lose power we lose pump, so spring return open isn't much of a failsafe.  Something like a PWM controlled solenoid - you absolutely want that to fail open.

Sure, you can eliminate the fungamyl if you are using enough wheat malt.  Wheat's significantly lower gelatinization temperature means the enzymes will stay active longer.  You can keep it under ~160F, you aren't going to be denaturing your enzyme, unlike with corn, where you are near 200f, way above what the enzyme can withstand.  Add your Glucoamylase during the cool-down, not mashing, keeping in mind the appropriate temp and pH ranges.

In addition to being a dextrin ninja, glucoamylase also has the ability to hydrolyze some starches that were not converted during mashing, so it's a bit of a one-two-punch when it comes to improving yields.  Because of this, you are better off adding Glucoamylase at a lower temperature, keeping in mind that it will remain active through fermentation (if you are fementing on grain).

In Jersey?  Gino Pinto down in Hammonton.  Much better pricing than online.

Glucoamylase is more effective at saccharification than the beta amylase in malt.  

It’s common for the amylases in malt to create nonfermentable dextrins.  Glucoamylase can reduce these dextrins to fermentable sugars - thus giving you a higher yield when combined.

its also common to use high temp fungal amylases during cereal mashing, where regular malt amylases would be quickly denatured by the high temps.

Use them alone with unmalted grains, or together with malt, there are good reasons in both cases.

Exactly why not to bother with paying for "refurbished" kegs.  You can get all necessary o-rings in EPDM easily and relatively inexpensively.  Fusti tanks (aka olive oil tanks) also work well, look better, and come in slightly larger sizes.

Beautiful space by the way, The Chapel of Our Lady of Perpetual Buzz.

This doesn't address your issue, and I think you do have an issue, but ... your still has a CIP system, it will be more effective to use that compared to doing any kind of "cleaning run".

How much room do you have on your property?  You can potentially expand your bonded area to extend outside the walls of your facility, which may allow you to use shipping containers as mini-rickhouses.  I remember years back at Tuthilltown, they had a couple of shipping containers they were using for barrel storage.