Silk City Distillers

Has the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission done a survey of members?

A good starting point for bench trials is 5 grams a liter for darker aged spirits, 2.5g/l for lighter aged spirits. This will give you a good idea why the holding capacity of the filtration is important. A 500 liter batch of spirit might require 1.2kg (2.7lb) of PAC. I've decolorized bourbon using this method, just to screw with peoples heads by pouring them a glass of ice-clear bourbon.

You need to use a carbon that’s almost exclusively high mesopore. This is probably going to be a wood based carbon, powdered, and steam activated. Color molecules are large, flavors are small. Use an off-the-shelf carbon and you’ll remove more flavor than color. You are going to need to do bench trials to determine both the grams/liter dosing rate, and the treatment times. You need to balance these two variables. The more you dose, the faster you remove the color, but the more challenging to filter. Dose too little and you may not hit your target color, which will require starting over, and it will have flavor impacts if you need to repeat. You are going to need to be sure you can filter out the powdered carbon from your spirit at scale, because to dose it, you’ll be pouring your powdered carbon directly into your spirit, mixing the slurry, and then filtering. Your total treatment time, including filtering, needs to match your bench trial target times. This is critical. Get it wrong and you’ll ruin the batch. Your filtration needs to be able to carry the full volume of your dosed carbon. You may need a large plate and frame or other large capacity filter. You will require sub-micron final filtration to polish and remove carbon fines. When you are done your filters will be caked with mud. I would decolorize the aged spirit alone in this case, then blend. Do not shoot for pure white in this case, as further dilution will lighten the color. It will be easier to partially reduce the proof before filtering.

No, just the usual stuff - Difficult to fill, drain, clean (assuming a closed top drum). As long as you can control temperature externally, you’d be fine. 200l is still small enough that passive cooling is possible.

Always worth reading the wonderful 1959 USDA Molasses standards guide, which is still the current version. https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Sugarcane_Molasses_Standard[1].pdf This table in particular is great:

I keep trying to nudge the conversation to stainless.

There are plenty of guides to bonding and grounding available, find one applicable to your jurisdiction. The principals are broadly applicable, this isn't something unique to spirits. For example: https://www.justrite.com/media/2019_Justrite-Guide-to-Safe-Grounding-and-Bonding-Practices.pdf Stainless IBC usually have 16-18" manways. 1000l ibc are manageable from the manway, any larger and it becomes difficult without a ladder or steps.

Consider blending sugar sources to dial in your rum flavor profile. There is no rule that rum needs to be made from a single sugar type. Think of it like building a grain mash bill. Keep on mind that as sugar technology has improved, the quality of molasses has declined. Older molasses would have had a far higher fermentable sugar content, less ash. Something to be said for replicating a profile that gets you closer to evaporated cane syrup.

What Pete said - These tanks typically have multiple ports. Drain port at the bottom and often one or two additional for racking or sampling that can be used to recirculate.

If you plan to have multiple tanks, it's going to be far easier to just get a standalone EX pump and use that to recirculate to mix, since you'll probably have one anyway. Something like a Letina closed top forklift tank or similar is probably the easiest to use from a workflow perspective. There are a number of companies that make iso or equivalent 1000l shipping tanks that could be easily repurposed (like a stainless IBC). Many of these are made to fit a standard pallet footprint, meaning they'll easily fit on a pallet scale. Agitators add lots of complexity, especially to thin wall wine-style tanks that are not built to handle the weight and stress of an agitator.

Beautiful rig, a showpiece. This sucker will go QUICK.

You should be able to find chemical compositions of rum stillage in the journal literature. Why not pair up with your local ag school to figure out a use?

Second Viscoferm or similar beta-glucanase, especially if you aren’t step mashing this with a traditional glucan rest. It’s cheap insurance.

It likely will, resting clear flavored spirits does have benefit. Whether a clay container is any better than stainless, concrete, or plastic for spirits, that's another matter. I know there are companies making commercial amphora for wineries, but they are very expensive on a per-gallon basis compared to tanks or oak. Could there be some marketing value? Sure. The best examples of aged white rums are the Puerto Rico rums, though there are tremendous examples all though the Caribbean that use this "PR-Style decolorization approach". Aged in used oak, at least a year, but some far more and then decolorized using very specific types of activated carbon to remove the pale yellow coloration. Result are sippable, refined white rums, with lots of confectionary notes from the oak (vanilla, caramel, toffee, coconut). Real McCoy is doing a 3 year aged Foursquare rum from Barbados, decolorized. Flor De Cana is doing a 4 year aged decolorized "white". Of course, Bacardi and Don Q are the big names from PR, and many of these are aged 12-18 months in used oak. What you'll notice is that some of these longer aged whites are more 'platinum' in color, as it becomes very difficult to fully decolorize as the spirit takes on more oak coloration. It becomes a balancing act between how much flavor you are willing to give up as part of decolorization, and how pure white you want the spirit. These decolorization processes are some of the most guarded secrets in the rum industry, the broad strokes are well known and "easy", but the truth is getting it perfect is a matter of investing sweat and tears.

Nice cooling rig, well done.

Hanna pHep series is cheap and easy. Milwaukee and Oakton also good, so is that Extech above. More important is that you use storage solution and calibrate at least weekly. The best meter is junk if stored dry and never cleaned and calibrated.

That’s a really interesting comment. Makes me wonder about all the times neck condensation has come up here.

694 square inches is about 33 feet of 1/2” tubing per each 6kw element. You can probably get similar watt densities by running huge 480v bundle elements at 120v (dividing the watt densities by 16). The elements alone would cost as much as a steam boiler for a reasonably sized still.

We mounted the cyclone to the top of the mash tun and mill through a grist hydrator. Trying to mill into containers was a complete mess.

Can anyone vouch for those the CME mill rates? They seem so much higher than other mills with similar motor horsepower, nearly 3-4x. We run a Meadows #5 and have been happy with it. Big question is whether or not you want to blow, auger, or both.

Does your parrot have a vent?

Yeah, this is what I don't understand, how is this not as simple as just adding a filter cartridge after one of the pumps that the liquid will inevitably touch? This is possibly even more trivial than the water additions, and something that folks are likely already doing as a standard course of operation.

Also keep in mind you can lower the tank diaphragm pressure to increase tank capacity at the expense of back pressure. For example: https://www.axeonwater.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/SPEC-SHEET_PENTAIR_ROMATE_FRP-1.pdf

We have a similar setup we upgraded. We run a 40 gallon Pentair RO-Mate tank and an Axeon L1 pumped RO system that has a specific outlet and pressure switch for tank-use. We get far more tank capacity with the electric pump compared to the passive system we had before. We went from a 75gpd setup to 300gpd. Looking to get a larger RO tank with the bigger system now. Now that we have more capacity, we're looking to just run 3/8 tubing around the facility to have RO on tap (near dump, blending, bottling). The tank/ro have more pressure compared to the old unit, so it would have no issues with the longer runs.

Seems interesting, why not just send the concentrate for testing and see where things fall? If you have decent input water, it could absolutely work. While sediment is largely irrelevant in mashing (unless its iron or something), being carbon treated is going to provide a little bit of benefit in reducing some of those troubling components (VOC, etc). Really though, won't know until you test. Also, if it's a portion of your total mash, and not entirely, you'll technically be diluting the concentrate with water - which might swing things back into acceptable ranges (the solution to pollution is dilution). We now store our non-contact cooling water for mashing and cleaning, it's saved a ton of waste water. In our case we could easily re-route the RO waste water to the holding tanks. Might just need to give it a test, I like saving water.