Silk City Distillers

Aaron and team.

How many agents would call you back to tell you that you need to pay a lower premium?

Stop by I'm around this afternoon.

On 5/31/2017 at 10:50 AM, Skaalvenn said:

@Silk City.  I'd be cautious with the "it's a small surface area" argument. While 100% true, we as craft distillers should be trying to make the best, and safest product we possibly can.  You are exactly right about platinum cured and reputable sellers, it's like trusting your eyes to a pair of $1 sunglasses that say "100% UV blocking".  Platinum cured costs an arm and a leg, but it's worth using.

 

Just to be clear, in my opinion, PTFE/Teflon is superior to platinum cured silicone. If the goal is cost-no-object dedication to purity, fluoropolymers like PTFE, FEP, and PFA are the plastics of choice.

You see this when looking at the pumps used in high purity operations, for example, something like the Yamada High Purity pumps (DP-20F) - which has all wetted surfaces, gaskets, and check valve balls manufactured out of PTFE.   Same for the others like St. Gobain, White Knight, etc etc, very common in the biomedical, pharma, semiconductor, etc. etc.  Generally in these kinds of ultra high purity processes, even metals like stainless begin to be questioned.

Alcohol in a tote?  You are going to have at least 3, if not maybe 4 plastics involved.

HDPE - Tote Bottle

Polypropylene - Valves, Cap

Viton/PTFE/EPDM - for the cap gasket and in the valve seals

For sure, I would imagine the bulk of the nutrients, vitamins, minerals that result from the yeast biomass exist in the liquid portion.

We recycle a portion of the liquid stillage as backset into the next mash.

We separate grain mash post distillation with about a $100-200 investment in hardware.  This, obviously, does not include costs like pumps and hoses, which it is assumed you already have.

For example, 1000 pounds total grain volume in ~530g total volume reduced to roughly ~160-180g total volume of reasonably dry grain (or wet grain, however you want to look at it).

It is a very hands-on process, but we can process ~265g of stillage in about 30 minutes.  

It is not a perfect process and some small solids do not get caught.  Likewise, while the spent grain appears reasonably dry, you can extract liquid if you squeeze it with your hand.  

That said, it reduces the bulk tremendously, and makes it significantly easier to transport.

Looks like a nightmare to clean and keep sanitary, especially if you are trying to separate pre-fermentation.  Cleary, there has to be a way to do it, otherwise it wouldn't at all work in a winery.  I would imagine a belt press that can be CIP'ed is going to cost a pretty penny though.

Yeah, that's the problem with those small pore filters, if you don't pre-filter, they will clog (absolute vs depth filtration).  You can very quickly ruin a filter cartridge this way.

Use an inline filter when you are dumping or pumping from barrels, you don't need to have an extremely fine pore size.  I pre-filter going into the bottling tank.  

Depending on the filter cartridge, you may be able to back flow pure water to help flush some particles and extending the filter cartridge life.  I do this by hooking the filter housing outlet up to my RO water system and just letting it flush (in reverse) for an hour or two.

Very surprised that you would find char in the bottles, either your filters weren't installed properly (probably not likely), or they were damaged by the back-pressure/vacuum - they could be trash at this point.  You can try the back-flush for a longer period of time, if your housing permits it, but you might want to buy a new set and look into pre-filtration (10-20 micron).

Our Pressuretrol bands are 9psi on the cut-in and 11psi on the cut-out.

Typically a globe valve that allows you to adjust steam flow, just like you would with electric.

Your low pressure boiler will have an upper and lower pressure controls that the burner will cycle around.

Consider the total surface area exposed by a typical sanitary gasket as well, you are talking about a minuscule amount of liquid exposed to gasketing surfaces. Considering thread seal on a threaded fitting, likely even less.

Teflon or other very high molecular weight thermoplastics are typically rated excellent.  I prefer Teflon personally.  Teflon tape in a test tube is not a reasonable proxy for a good quality seal.  There are better rated plastics (PFA for example), but they are very expensive and esoteric, and tend to use specialized fittings (this is more common in biopharm).  Question your source, unfortunately I would be very skeptical of cheap gaskets claiming to be something.

You mentioned silicone - the only reasonably acceptable silicones will be platinum cured, I would be very doubtful of any platinum cured silicone that isn't coming from a very reputable manufacturing source.

This all applies to valve seats as well, especially butterfly valves with significant surface areas, and the seals/valves in pumps, tubing inside bottling machines, the support housings for filter cartridges.

Starting and final gravities of fermentation.

It's more likely that the TTB adopted the ASTM standard for high precision SG measurement than actually set the standard themselves - unlike for proof - where the standard was set by the IRS.

Buy extras, calibrate your uncalibrated hydrometers against your officially calibrated references, and keep records of your in-house calibrations.  Otherwise, keep the externally calibrated references locked up safe.

Depending on what you are making, you might only need the first two.

Durac B61891 is the model range I use.

Just to be clear here - the issue is not malting in the DSP - this is irrelevant - and a typical distillery process.

This issue is running another business as part of the DSP, no?

Really though, you've got to make some massively boneheaded move for a column not to work, unless hitting azeo in a small package is your goal (this gets difficult).

2" pipe, fill it with bolts, screws, nuts, rusty nails and keys.

It'll work.

What he said.

And it's not just a pure function of diameter, area, and vapor speed.  The type of column will also have an impact.  For example, dual-flow perforated plates are going to have a very different set of operating conditions than bubble caps, which will be different from a packed column.  Not only that, but each of these subtypes of column are going to have numerous variations that impact operating parameters, for example, the % open area on a dual flow tray, or the type of packing in the packed column.

Not to mention that theory will only get you into the ballpark, from there it's based on practical operating experience, as the real world is kind of stubborn in the fact that it doesn't always adhere to theory.

I always thought this was a pretty approachable read:

http://kolmetz.com/pdf/EDG/ENGINEERING DESIGN GUIDELINES - distillation column - Rev 04 web.pdf

Racked my brain the other day about how I could have possibly overfilled by 17ml, or had such a significant proofing error (on a smaller bottling run).  Checked bottle weights - spot on.  Dumped bottles to check proof, spot on.  Nothing wrong.  Counted the cases over and over, checked the bottles.  Checked the hydrometer.  Nothing wrong.

Turned out a full case ended up stacked on a pallet of empties, and the total count was 6 bottles short.  Racked my brains for a day until my brother comes over and asks why a full case was sitting on top of a pallet of empties.  Hallelujah, all of the sudden the math works, all is right in the world.

Any chance you over counted by 1 case, or a case of empties made it over to the full pallet side?  Just throwing it out there.

Everything PeteB and Meerkat say still applies.  Dump the graduated cylinder - get a small scale with reasonable accuracy to check bottle fill.  I have a small 5kg scale with good sub-gram accuracy.

Someone mentioned this (very inexpensive) unit to me:

http://www.homebrewing.org/Horizontal-Thermocapsular_p_1882.html

Anyone have any experience?  Looks similar to the one @kleclerc77 posted.

My point was more around the fact that 5.1pg a bushel with an 80% product yield seems implausibly high.

I'm not ashamed to say I couldn't even remotely hit these numbers.

Fully loaded, not just grain price - yeast, enzyme, energy, etc.  At least enough loading to compare to buying neutral.

Closer to $6-7 out here in Jersey, but that's milled and bagged.

@Roger - 5.1pg per bushel and an 80% product yield (on a PG basis) on top of that?  You make me want to cry.

That's the equivalent of, what, 450 bottles of vodka from 1000 pounds of grain?  Cost of the alcohol alone would be about 50 cents a bottle using corn, that's 2-4x cheaper than GNS.

Any improvement is likely to be minor.

We are talking 60-65w/sq.in. for a standard watt density element, and 50w/sq.in. for an ultra low watt density element.

Is there any real difference at those levels? Comparatively, a steam jacket is probably running around 10w/sq.in.

Perhaps if you ran ULWD elements at 120v and used 4 undervolt elements for each element being used today.  You would cut watt density by 4x - but at the expense of having to weld a load of fittings.

Other than this being, generally, a very bad idea.

You can attempt to use enzymes like glucanases and hemicellulases to help break down glucans and cellulase - this will make your beer more liquid, less sticky, less viscous.

Ensure you are reaching a final gravity of 1 or below, so that you have absolutely no residual sugar left.

Use an agitator and heat up very, very slow.

In-wash elements are a big problem, because the surface temperatures are very high - you can scorch very easily.  And like you note, once you scorch, you ruin the distillate as it's nearly impossible to remove the burnt/smoke flavors.

Something like a Sussman ES-12 you mean?  

http://sussmanboilers.com/es-packaged-electric-steam-boilers-specifications

Keep in mind that the electrical equivalent of 15 horsepower is somewhere around 150kw.