Silk City Distillers

1 boiler hp = ~33,500 btu So, 185,000 is about 5.5hp but with efficiency losses, is closer to 6. Your plumber will know exactly how to hook it up, it's pretty straight forward. What I would recommend though, is when you are using steam for process - have some way to automatically turn off the heater. The last thing you need when distilling is a wavering steam main pressure because of the facility heating demand. Frankly, I wouldn't oversize the boiler to account for heating during processing. Instead, I would use the heater before and after operations. No sense oversizing the boiler when there is little process demand for half the day. In addition, when you are running the equipment will all be throwing off excess heat. We only turned on the heat twice this winter because of this, and we're in the cold northeast.

Pneumatic double diaphragm? ARO, Sandpiper, Wilden, etc etc. Keep in mind that the all-plastic pumps are not groundable, so it's critical that both your feed and receiver tanks are adequately grounded (static protection). The stainless shell pumps would be a good option if you want to be able to ground the pump as well.

You should not use a hardware store pump, for two reasons - it's probably not compatible with ethanol, and it may be dangerous to use in the presence of alcohol vapor or spillage. I'm sure you could argue the third reason - it's not sanitary, but with higher proof ethanol, it's unlikely you'd have microbial issues. Small pneumatic double diaphragm pump made out of compatible materials is usually a good way to go, the pump speed is easily controlled by varying the air pressure. I like the Yamada DP-20F - but it's a spendy pump (or the smaller DP-10F). http://www.yamadapump.com/literature/guides/Yamada_PTFE_pumps.pdf

If you are going to lab-quality purity, you can easily add a Deionization cartridge to a RO filter - or if you don't have a unit at all, just pick up a small RO/DI unit for dilution water. You are talking a couple hundred bucks, at most, and the installation is almost effortless - certainly not something that requires bringing in a contractor. I don't think my 6-stage unit cost a whole $300, including the tubing to plumb it up. We have a small 150 gallon per day unit. It's not fast at 6 gallons an hour, but if you pre-plan and fill a few larger containers, it's not a problem. We know when we are diluting, we just prep for it. If your source water is reasonably clean, the RO cartridge will last quite a long time. If you don't really need or want lab grade water, you can eliminate the DI and save additional operating cost. Spending an afternoon distilling water sounds like an enormous waste of time and energy compared to turning a valve and filling a few 5g jerry cans in the background.

Here is a good overview. http://www.spiraxsarco.com/Documents/Food_and_beverage_best_practice_guide_to_managing_steam_quality-Sales_Brochure.pdf Regulatory does come into play. In the US - this would be something an FDA inspector would be accustomed to seeing in a food processing facility in which steam was in contact with a food or beverage product. Could you argue that it's not required for mash? Sure. Do they need to accept it? No, in everything I've read, there doesn't appear to be an exclusion. 3a standards specify specific filtration and criteria for culinary steam (609-3). This would be for the filtration of what's commonly called plant steam. However, there are other requirements regarding boiler additives and steam quality that would apply. Not sure how you would define a sanitary boiler, but FDA and 3A do specify the appropriate approaches for creating steam intended for contact with food and beverage, and those don't require the kinds of systems that might be required for medical or pharmaceutical uses - sometimes called clean steam or pure steam - steam to steam heat exchangers, end-to-end sanitary pipelines, stainless electrically heated boilers with reverse osmosis feed water, etc, etc. On the 140F upper limit - it certainly seems to work better, the colder the water is, but we regularly push to 195-200f. We don't go above 200f much, because we do start to lose some steam out of the liquid. However - we have a shallow wide tank, not a tall narrow tank, and I would very much believe tank geometry would make a big difference here.

We use RO/DI that typically measures 0-1 TDS, probably below the accurate measuring limit of the pen meter. There is too much variability in municipal water - for example, in the Northeast, it's common for salt ion concentrations to increase after a bad winter in which a lot of road salt or brine spray was used. Standard sediment and carbon filtration won't have any real impact on ion concentration. Also, consider that the issues in Flint are probably more common than we know. I'm in the camp that says, why take the chance? Using RO or RO/DI - I know exactly what I'm dealing with.

Since when are you guys doing 53?

Dave - You still have that Race? You wouldn't happen to know what the difference is between that one and the Jr, do you?

Weigh the downsides of DSI - Culinary steam filtration, more frequent boiler blowdowns, possible need for feed water treatment, more aggressive on the boiler life. Steam filtration is a pretty sizable investment if you are moving a good volume of steam. We use a Spirax CSF26 2" on the our DSI feed line - that sucker cost a pretty penny. We're using a jacket on the still, and DSI on the mash tun - sized at 600 gallons. What we're finding is that speed of temperature increases isn't very linear with DSI. Getting from 55-160 is lightning fast, getting from 160-195 isn't. Also, we're finding that with DSI we top out at about 195F. We can push to 200F, but only if we leave the steam running full out. The problem is, once we hit the mid 190s, we start to get uncondensed steam bubbles breaking the surface, and at 200, the steam educator fails to generate eductive flow and generates large steam bubbles and splashing above the injector. In the jacket, we can easily push to 200 and beyond. Losing a good volume of uncondensed steam out of the tank isn't efficient. Could we get faster gelatinization running at 212F vs 195F? And that's the time penalty we're paying for only being able to efficiently get to 195F? Need to factor that as well. It's not so clear cut.

Yeah good point on the Hanna - I think it is TC to 140f. Although in the real world - it's not very far off at mashing temps (mid 150s).

The act of returning condensate to the boiler is actually the energy saving measure - compared to dumping condensate down the drain, and feeding the boiler with cold water - which was actually commonplace at one point in time. So, the fact that you are returning condensate is a positive. The downside is that if you maintain a very high condensate temperature, you can actually cause cavitation in the condensate return pump, causing damage to the pump impeller. The biggest bang for the bulk is going to be insulating the largest surface areas exposed to the biggest temperature differences. Sometimes it's easy, like the steam and condensate pipes, sometimes it's more difficult, like insulating a jacketed tank.

Hanna pHEP5 - you can find it under $100

It's not standard practice, generally the grain is either separated out at the completion of mashing, or after distillation. While it can be done after fermentation, it's going to require additional steps to do it. Realistically, you'll need some kind of separation tun, like an open top milk tank fitted with a false bottom. You would then pump to the tank, separate as best as possible, and shovel out the grain. That said, most who are going grain-in are doing it because they are using cereal grains which don't easily separate (like wheat, rye, and corn), and because of this, will go straight through the whole process with the grain. If you keep your corn on the coarse side, you can still largely dewater your stillage before sending it off. It won't be dry, mind you, but it will be dry enough to shovel, and will be considerably less weight than whole stillage with liquid and solids. Consider the logistics too, it's not simplification if you now require a forklift to deal with a tote filled with 2 tons of whole stillage. Unless, you already have the forklift I guess. This sounds brutally inefficient. Mashing and stripping 45 gallons at a time? Will the resulting product even cover the labor costs or share of your time? Not to mention that stainless drums aren't cheap, and once you've amassed enough of them to be meaningful, and fabricated/modified them all to be useful, the cost you've sunk into that is going to be substantial. At that point you'll probably look back at the time and money and wonder why you just didn't find yourself a more appropriate vessel. One point here on the agitator for the still - this is an expensive piece of equipment, as it will require vapor tight seals that can stand up to the harsh conditions inside the still. Something like that might run you north of $2k - pretty steep price to pay for something that is doomed to be obsolete once you upgrade equipment.

From a purely theoretical design perspective - at that scale why wouldn't you use jet cooking? Assuming based on your wheat/barley ratios - your wheat is unmalted, which would make it an ideal candidate for jet cooking and feeding into non-jacket or insulated tanks to be combined with malt for saccharification. This would eliminate the need for steam jacketing on the mash tuns, which would likely reduce cost and overall complexity quite significantly. Size your tanks based on the individual batch saccharification timing and the total daily production, and then size your jet cooker to assume continuous operation - filling a tank at a time, and rotating through the bank of saccharification tanks through the day. Your mash cooling could either be integral to the tanks, or a single external unit sized similarly to the jet cooking flow-rate so that your transfer to fermenters is at the same rate as the jet cooking.

NBM, Dave Dunbar is your guy. We used him, and will continue to use him, and have only positive things to say. From initial filing, which he had us through in record time to ongoing consulting, opinion, and Q&A. Dave's a regular contributor here, and as far as I'm concerned, is the go-to-guy for all TTB related matters. I wouldn't use anyone else. His time has been one of our best investments, by far.

What was the manganese theory based on? There were some other similar threads across the web (so this is less unique than you might think) and I'd always thought it was some kind of zinc complex. Copper, Iron, Manganese, and Zinc are typically found in distillery wastewater effluent.

Do you already have a steam boiler? Steam injection is pretty straight forward. You put a steam pipe in the mash tun, and you turn it on. Ok, a bit more than that, but that's the basic premise. You could look at steam injection as being safer than a jacket, as you don't have a jacket to over pressurize and burst (rare). On the other hand, you are dealing with live steam, so if you are standing in front of a steam line and open it, you are getting burned (also rare). In my opinion, either of the steam options are safer than having an open flame in a distillery, but that's just my 2 cents. If given a choice and an unlimited budget - jackets win. If you own a tank you are planning to use, and that tank is not jacketed, or you wish to use the jacket for cooling, steam injection might be a viable option to make good use of an existing tank.

We have a 1.5" on one of our bulk milk tanks, and occasionally it will lose prime/clog with a corn-based mash when we use a 1.5" butterfly and an elbow. If we use a reducer and a 2" butterfly with no elbow, it runs much smoother. When it clogs up, we really only need to reverse the pump, run it for a second or two, and switch it back to continue pumping. The 1.5" is probably fine if you have a good displacement pump, but I wouldn't use a 1.5" valve on it. The opening on a 1.5" butterfly is absolutely tiny. A full port ball valve is probably a better choice if you wanted to stay around 1.5". But 1" for a grain mash? That sounds like regret. If I was having something fabricated, I wouldn't go any less than 2" for grain.

We run 530g in a 600g tank, and active cooling is absolutely essential. Without cooling the ferment will rocket to the mid 90s, even with a mid 70s pitch temperature ... and this is with a relatively cool "summer" temp - maybe 70-80f indoors. The total heat load isn't tremendous, but the mash really wants to hold in that heat, especially when it is close to ambient. I would guess 2000btu/hr on your 15bbl for the first 48hr, dropping from there. On our system, the cooling doesn't run on once you pass the mid-point of the fermentation - but our ambient temperatures are generally lower than the fermentation temperature. The geometry isn't ideal, which is probably giving you some heartburn, but the surface area is probably more than sufficient considering you are roughly 20% of the total surface area. A slight amount of agitation during fermentation (on a timer, sporadic) would minimize any temperature gradient. Assuming you are talking about Custom Metalcraft. Give them a call and ask for references.

Pretty much the entire Caribbean, for the last 400 years.

Keep in mind that the perceived color can be impacted by the lighting, so it wouldn't be a bad bet to assume anything in the bluish/greenish family is going to trace back to the copper. I wouldn't make too much of the color difference. What are you using to clean the still?

We are using an oil-fired Weil McLain commercial boiler (Similar to the current Series 80 - It's a bit older), works great. We burn #2. It's bigger though, 15.6 horsepower, twice the size you are looking for. Our still is 250 gallons as well, you might want to think about going bigger otherwise you might be looking at 2+ hours just to heat up. Our plumber insists we should be blending a portion of our heads into our heating oil. He says alcohol is frequently used by local oil providers in the area to prevent the oil from thickening into gel when people are using outdoor/above ground heating oil tanks in winter. I hear Audi is working on an ethanol diesel blend car, and I've found papers that point to fuel oil being stable to 5% ethanol with no special additives, techniques, or changes to equipment.

After thinking about this, it's a pipe dream I think, I don't see how they can make a smaller unit that will cost considerably less. A unit half the size won't likely cost half as much, and even if it did, lets face it, a $20k entry point is still high. If you have a way to deal with wet waste today, the ROI is probably going to be low. A possible cost reduction strategy is to use a non-sanitary design for separation of stillage post-distillation. I've got to imagine a good portion of the Finex cost is due to the fact that it's designed for food contact, not waste handling. With a larger grind (not flour) - the other alternative is a screw press - I've gotten quotes for craft-sized equipment out of Alibaba around $6,500 less freight. I think the Vincent units I mentioned above go for around $10k. Pretty sure they'll put their money where their mouth is when it comes to performance too.

I really hope you are talking about the trolley hoist and not the simple pulley. Otherwise ... Armstrong indeed!

For corn? The answer is almost always going to be "locally", as having to ship corn LTL is going to push the price up quite a bit. Just pick up the phone and start calling around. It might take you a dozen calls to find a good source, but it'll be worth it. In a pinch you can always try the local feed suppliers, generally they'll stock cracked, cleaned, and bagged. You'll pay a bit more than a bulk price, but if you only need a bit, the convenience might be worth it for you. Isn't southern Minnesota in the heart of corn country?