Craft Distillery Resources

I wish I had time to do a class. I work with people on an individual basis. And I do not charge a dime until you are statisfied. Growing yeast is not as hard as is thought by most people.Just need patience. Shoot me a message. I would be glad to help.

Send me a pm. I will supply the drawing, I will have time in teaching the yeast making which would be charged, but I keep everything very reasonable,

Kudos to you for doing it in a craft way. Growing our yeast is a way to make your place more craft if you will. It is not hard to do, expands our possibilities and keeps costs down. I have a design for a yeast prop tank if anybody is interested.

Donald is great. Period. He was working on a model for smaller shops last is poke to him that was way more affordable. Might want to try him back.

Hello, I am looking for somebody who has some spare time and wants to make a little extra money. Beta tec hop products are needed in every micro distillery. Those who have and are using them currently can attest to them. It would be a sales based position, the more you sell, the more you make. And the better you are, the more commission I can pay you. Just that simple. Most work can be done from home, but attending trade shows may be needed. Please pm me or email betatechop@gmail.com this is the only product of it kind available to the micros. This is a great opportunity for the right person. Must be a self starter.

I am pleased to announce that I know have hop extract for keeping lactobacillus out of fermentations. Hops have been used in yeast mashes in Ky for generations. Now the same stuff they use is now available to you. Used in small doses, there is no noticeable flavor or aroma carryover into the product. Yeilds of a gallon or better to the bushel are common. No matter the lengths you go to to clean, you have lacto in your plant. And if using malt, you are introducing it directly. This is an all natural product. I also have a yeast nutrient available that beats everything on the market. Vita hop. Due to costs I am unable to do free samples. I am offering 16 oz samples of the hop extract for 65 bucks for plus shipping. This will allow you to evaluate it and see the benefits depending on your size for quite some time. it is worth the money. A few on the board here have tried it and they can speak for it themselves. It works. Pm me and we can discuss further. Thanks!

On a pot still, the colder the liquor is, the better. Those with a deplegmator. Be sure to run a water line straight to it to bypass the condenser. You can send cold water directly to it, this can make a huge difference in controlling the column. On a beer still, it is normal to run above 70 degrees on the whiskey temp. Let's low boilers come out at it goes through the tail box. Go into a large distillery, you will notice most have vapor condensing on the glass of the tail box. Over 80 is too hot. On a pot, 60 is too hot.

Keep a hoop driver on hand. And get your supplier to supply you with some stuff to stop leaks. Wedges and such made of cedar. And never store barrels dry long. Outside covered up is best water kept on the heads. I do not like soaking the inside of the barrel. It is no longer a new barrel then, and it has lost flavor.

Even if ttb did not require it, it is always a good idea to record for your own use, and bushel yeild should also be record daily if doing whiskey and yeilds per gallon if doing rum, brandy etc. this is just so you know what is going on.

I would not use it. Mold inhibitors will most likely effect your yeast. Be sure you buy from a responsible farmer who picks his corn late enough that it's dry or has a dryer. If stored at 12 percent moisture, no need to inhibit mold. And do not buy grain until you have educated yourself as to what you need. But a bushel weight tester and a moisture meter. And do not buy in more grain than you will use in a certain period of time. Another good rule of thumb is only grind just before you need the meal. Ground grain gets moist fast and stale. Whole kernel is better. I am amazed at the amount of small distillers popping up with no though given to milling equipment. Whiskey still and mills go hand in hand. Always have. Foolish to have one and not the other.

Vinegar. Spray the pot, flood a column. After gin runs and such, boil and distill. It will clean it.

What type of boiler are your running it on? How do just get a constant flow rate of steam to it?

Cutting the barrel size down works if the mash is right, still is right, proof is right. What you are talking about is a felony.

Best bet is an electric stem boiler to direct inject or jacket.

Are you talking about stillage? I hope you are not wasting such a valuable resource. To you and a farmer who will take it and sometimes pay for it. You need to be mashing with the liquid from it.

Thanks man, I am sure you will find them enjoyable. I may have the first one done this week. It will be downloadable on kindle. For a modest price. It will be the first book of real information available to micro distillers ever printed. There have been a lot of books that just have plain wrong info in them. The methods I will present are time tested. I have put a lot of time into the first one in the series and hope they sell well. But mainly I hope to stem the flood of bad products coming from distillers who think they are doing it the right way. Consumers are looking for better products, and micros can produce them, under the right operating conditions.

Here is the deal. Low ph at start and fast fermentation are normal. A high ph of 5 or better and a big drop in ph in the first few hours will without a doubt cause a slow ferment. And this is not normal at all. Rum, a light one should ferment dry from 20 Brix in 48 hours. Starting at a high ph, with molasses, with less than say a pound of dap per 300 gallons at start will allow gram positive, acid producing bacteria to outrun your yeast. If you want a light rum do what I just said. If you want a heavy rum, high ester, that is a whole other process. Another way to keep a rum ferment going and keeping the acid producing bacteria at bay, is to use isostab from betatec, I can provide it. But you drop the ph yourself to start with, to make the yeast happy. I do not mean to speak ill of lallemand, but that way of using their yeast and nutrient will not work. If anybody doubts me that is making rum, get a hold of me, I will tell you what you need to do, and you can see for yourself that it works. Every plant is unique so a general post hear about how to do it other than what I have said, may not work for your plant. Rum is one of the hardest things for micros to get their head around, but once they do, it is money in the bank.

Have you tried this recipe? It will not work. Period.

Stay tuned, hopefully only a couple weeks out.

Rum needs a low ph to start. Say around 4. If not, acid producing bacteria take old and produce acid that stress yeast. And run needs a ton of nutrients. You can also use and ant microbial like isostab from betatec. This will keep bacteria at bay. But this is for light rum. Not heavy high ester rum, you want bacteria then.

I know how the high ester rums of the Jamaican type are produced. Pm me

Very soon I will have some short books covering different aspects of Distilling available first on Ebook through amazon. Depending on how it works, I may go into print. The information in these will be unlike what is out there now. I will take old production methods that make the best products, and teach the reader how to incompatible these techniques into their operation in a micro distillery. There is so much misinformation out there. This will be the first published info that is correct by industry standards for micro distilleries. The first section will be on the sour mash process. A short history of it, why it is used and how to put it to work for you. I am up for ideas, what would the reader here like to know, but have not been able to find a reliable source of information on?

I could not agree more with what has been said above. There is so much misinformation out there, that a person, who does not know Distilling will find themselves with a million dollar mess on there hands. I have seen people dump mash after I got there and saw the shape the place was in, and there processes. And not all consultants are equal, I do this part time, I want to see people succeed. And they can't if I am raking them over the coals to get them straight.

I plan to offer all needed enzymes in sizes small enough for small operators. What the enzyme companies have discovered is, there are a lot of small distilleries popping up, but they only offer five gallon pails of product. Well, it will go bad before being used, not to mention the cost. I will announce as soon as I have product available. As far as the question posed by the original poster, amylase will not add to the flavor. A beta glucan rest will help a lot, if you add malt or have a beta glucanase. I read lots of posts about distillers scorching or having rye stick in the still. This only happens if the mashing procedure was not carried out right. To keep from sticking, you need a beta glucan rest. This is true for wheat and bourbon with more than 20 percent of rye or wheat in the mashbill.

Traditionally, used bourbon barrels are used.