John McKee

Welcome and thanks for stopping by a few months ago. I dig the stickers you guys left. Cheers

http://boingboing.net/2012/11/17/long-now-building-a-new-barco.html

Hagar, Using a still as a mashtun can be done, but you probably need to look at your desired output to meet debt service as your driving decision point. Using a mashtun and fermenter series with a still allows you to mash 2,3,4X the volume of the still and ultimately make more product by the end of the week. If you use your still as the mashtun/fermenter, then you're limited to the overall volume of the mashtun. So, for instance, you select a 250g still (which from a reputable fabricator is about $200-400K), and you ferment a 10% wash, then you might recover 25 gallons of product a week (theoretical). Ok, so assuming that weekly run yields about 100-200 705mL bottles of product and you wholesale those bottles for $20/ea, you're going to make ~$3k a week. Ignoring any other debt service, interest, or monthly bills, at $3K/week it'll take you 100 weeks to pay off the still. Now if you happen to buy a cheaper, but smaller still, then amortize the costs of a mashtun and fermenter out over a longer period of time, you have a lower initial CAPEX outlay and additionally, you are able to lower your overall OPEX by spreading production over multiple tanks and dedicated pieces of equipment. One thing to consider....there are a lot of distillers getting into this game, at a pace that is simply extraordinary. Starting bootstrap may ultimately put you in a position of being behind from the start. Make case studies of small / mid-cap / and large micro distilleries and see if there is additional information that you can take in to assist you with your overall plan. Cheers.

No one is improving GNS (NGS) by redistilling it. They're doing it so their labels can legally say "Distilled by" or "Distilled at" rather than "Packaged by". If you find contrary opinion, have them send a sample of GNS and their re-distilled GNS for lab analysis on a GC or GCMS and their argument will have evidence to the contrary. Cheers.

They also have issues with leaking, if allowed to dry out between runs. Can be resolved by filling with water, allowing to swell and reseal (much like an old barrel), but I'd be cautious in thinking that one could do that repeatedly for very long.

Roughstock Whiskey in Bozeman, MT does, I think they use 500g tanks. You may want to ask them what they think.

My guess is that you're sitting on an acidic wash, so a food grade lye should do you just fine as a base. If you're basic, then I would suggest a food grade phosphoric for an acid. I'm not sure that there are any negative effects of either suggestion aboce to a post fermentation wash, but if anyone has information please go ahead and share. However, I think you should be good to go with either chemical depending on your situation. Cheers

http://gizmodo.com/5952967/how-the-perfect-manmachine-balance-creates-some-of-the-best-booze-in-the-world

Foaming in distillation systems is often (75% or greater) the result of pH. Once Mash / Ferment is complete, add the appropriate food grade chemicals to get yourself to just shy of neutral and you won't have any foam or the need to add anti-foam agents. Anti-foam agents are surfactants which lower the surface tension, which in turn keeps bubbles from forming during boiling or agitation. As an aside, you can do this experiment next time you're tired of waiting for the head on your beer to go down. Stick your finger in your nose then swish that around in the head of the beer. Snot is a good surfactant and it'll knock down the head right away. The reason pH adjustment works so well is that the principles of surface tension can also be affected by the range of acid to base in which your final solution finds itself. Since food grade chemicals are usually cheaper than antifoam, it might make sense to go that route. Don't use snot.

Good morning, As many of you know, I have often championed the cause of making our industry stronger from a certification and self-regulating perspective. My concern, often stated, is that people in the regulatory and insurance agencies were going to start taking notice of the issues in our industry, with respect to fires, explosions, etc. Today, we received notice from our insurance company that as of December of this year they will no longer carry property insurance for micro-distilleries. When questioned, they said it was because of the explosions and fires the industry has had in the last year. FYI, the company is Nautilus Insurance, out of AZ. https://www.nautilusagents.com/. We have provided HAZOPs, Design sign offs from P.E.'s on our equipment, fire suppression, and procedures and that was still not enough to change the decision of the insurance company on this issue. We are now forced to find a new insurance carrier for property insurance because our industry is growing too fast, with too little proper care and concern for the impacts incidents at a few distilleries can have on the industry as a whole. We'lll find a new insurance carrier. However, I do feel that this is the first of many issues that is going to befall our industry in the coming years. Its time to grow up. I'm contacting Bill today and I'm going to push hard for ADI to step up to this issue and own it. I encourage those of you with similar concerns and experiences to join me. We can all do better. Best, John

Pete, Sorry for the confusion. Yes, you are correct, one can run the stills until all alcohol is extracted from the tails. However, this often comes at the cost of driving fusels and congeners over with the alcohol in undesirable quantities or being forced to run the still in a very inefficient manner with regard to both energy and time. The design process I went through allows for a 1000g fermenter to be run to completion every 8 hours through my stills, with little or no alcohol left in the tails and with no congener co-distillation issues as a result. I'll be releasing the details of my stills soon, which may alleviate some of the confusion in discussions like this one. Cheers.

Steve, You are very correct in many of the perspectives shared, it just depends what your design and operational criteria are. However one item on which I would continue to disagree is efficiency, specifically your 1% gain supposition. Due to the design work I had performed, I recover all but less than 1% of alcohol from my tails. To say differently, my tails are virtually alcohol free. So I would suggest the cost involved in proper design has gained me as much as 30-40% greater throughput per run, due to full and proper alcohol extraction. With the surge of micro-distilleries in our marketplace I think a strong argument can be made for operational efficiency trumping old school design or tourism. But as you say, there are many ways to play in this market. Cheers.

With respect Steve, I think your answer might be a little too low tech. Maschmeier, Still internal designs, including proper spacing between Trays (or theoretical trays) can really only be designed via in-depth calculations by a Chemical Engineer or using software packages such as ProII, ChemCAD, or SulCol 3.0 (from Sulzer Chemtech). Please be cautious in designing or constructing distillation equipment. Internal design is not as simple as planning for necessary distances between plates for sight glasses. While we're on it, sight glasses on every tray in distillation equipment is a useless and unnecessary expense. If you want an accurate answer to your question contact an internals design company, which is not necessarily the same thing as a distillation equipment manufacturing company, and get to a place where you have a degree of comfort in the answer. An example of the design for the internals in my skid is shown below. If you’re not getting something like this from your OEM, then you need to consider your needs and vendor choices.

Ralph and others, One last suggested reading and the industry practice for what we're talking about here, is to perform a Hazard and Operability Study (or HAZOP). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_and_operability_study The methods and rigors employed do a great job and when done properly the results are recognized by the regulatory agencies (such as OSHA) and insurance companies. I've been through three separate HAZOPs for our differing size refineries and each time valuable information was gleaned from the process. Basically, this helps with not having to reinvent the wheel. Best, John

Interesting discussion regarding heat. Micro distilled beverage alcohol is the only distillation industry (exception Maker's Mark) I'm aware of that doesn't typically insulate the columns. Massive energy losses and column inefficiencies are introduced because of the desire to show off the copper columns and pots. So take away: There would be no need to go through extraordinary effort to vent heat if one bought (or retrofitted) distillation equipment with insulation. Energy consumption would probably be reduced 20-40% and column efficiencies increased accordingly if insulation was employed.

We've been very happy with Race Labeling. We have a square bottle, so a roll-on technique wasn't going to work. Their machine has a jig that transforms the roll-on to allow for a square bottle. We've labeled over 30,000 bottles in the last 6 months with it and it's holding up just fine, with no issues. I've put Marc's contact info below. Good luck. Marc Moore Race Labeling Concepts www.racelabel.com (800) 653-9357

Ralph, I couldn't agree more. My professional experience is in the design, manufacture, assembly, commissioning, and operation of thousand(s) gph stills. I've distilled millions of gallons (literally) on both Atmospheric and Vacuum distillation units and to this day I still don't call myself a master distiller. Yet, increasingly in this industry, we are seeing people with little or no experience placing that title on their business cards. The program I have been discussing with Bill Owens, the group at MSU, and others is exactly what you allude to....a series of standards, safety & operational procedures and processes that will give our industry a level of certified professionalism. For instance, one is not allowed to operate an Ethanol refinery without training in OSHA, Spill Containment, Fire & Emergency Procedures, Distillation Column operation & troubleshooting, etc, etc, etc. Everyone needs to understand that the insurance and regulating industries are going to start taking notice of incidents in micro-distilling and beverage alcohol manufacturing and they're going to immediately revert to the standards that they force on large scale Ethanol refineries....which is something I think we can all agree is unnecessary in our industry. That being said, we don't need that level of regulation, but if our industry gets in front of this issue and develops a sets of standards, etc...then when the regulatory industries and insurance agencies start attempting to apply standards that don't fit our industry, we can step forward with proactively developed alternative solutions better suited to what we do. When I discussed this with Bill, I suggested that this should be a sub-committee of ADI and that by Denver, we could have a set of recommendations to present to our industry. People on this forum have heard me say these same things in multiple posts. The more we take the lead in making our industry safer, the better solutions we'll have at our disposal. The longer we sit and wait the higher the chance that someone is going to get seriously hurt or killed. We can all do better and I am volunteering my experience, time, labor, blood, sweat, and whatever else is required to help make sure that the worst doesn't come to happen. Best, John

I did get to speak with the fire marshall and she offered the following: The cause is labeled undetermined and still open. However, she did offer that the cause is definitely not the result of a gas leak, faulty gas valve, or any other system associated with the natural gas delivery system. The insurance company took the stills and associated equipment and are investigating the source in their labs. She is asking them for their results and will be forwarding those to me if the insurance company gives them over. Max, three confirmed fires or explosions in the micro-distillery industry in this calendar year to-date means that we're all in a lot of trouble concerning higher insurance rates.

Run the numbers and please take Scott's advice well. If you are planning on moving in 2 years and you can't sell from your curent location due to you local restrictions, then start looking somewhere else.

Ralph, Glad to hear that everyone is ok, whiskey aside......we're all having too much fun to let anyone get hurt. You can count on this MT distiller to be a part of the national effort to ensure operational safety standards for craft distillers. Best, John

The best place to find info like this is to call a Control State and ask for their sales records. Most will give you the data by year, in Excel format, for all sales......often for free.

I've left a message with the Fire Marshall and when I hear back I'll post the results of that conversation.

That is my point entirely. I have said it before in this forum, and had an excellent discussion with Bill Owens, regarding the need for the industry to elevate itself to a level that is commensurate with the process. Distilling ethanol to reactive levels associated with fuel, yet saying its no big deal to deny safe practices....because grandpappy did it this way, is setting up this industry to fail.

Careful with how you think of the NABCA number. This is not a distributor's cut, you will still pay a markup to State Liquor Warehouses and Distributors on top of the fee for the NABCA number. See the map in the hyperlink. http://www.nabca.org/States/States.aspx For instance, Montana charges a 20% markup & 3% excise tax on top of the NABCA fee ....... and without the NABCA registration, you can't sell in MT or the 16 other states in the NABCA system. Costs of doing business in a beverage alcohol environment is varied. Wait until you attempt to sell into markets with locally controlled liquor divisions (those by county) and the NABCA fee will seem small. Good Luck.

We use a mild citric acid & water solution for our bottle cleaning regimen. We bought the sparger rig seen in the hyperlink below then had a 4 custom racks built for our bottle style. So: Set the sparger up over a trough style sink filled with warm water and citric. Sparge the bottles and allow the wash to fall back down into the trough sink Clean 200-400 bottles between wash batches. Basically, our intent is to break the mold oils that carry over from the mold process. Works great. Good Luck.