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We've got the Iberian stills and the worms were truly a puzzle: no easy adapters and so long there's too much friction to get any sort of brush through them. As near as I can figure, the fittings on the stills are BPT (British Pipe Thread) so you won't easily find a fitting to match here. If you've got a spare fitting (or get one from Hoga) you could braze up an adapter to take you from BPT to NPT to tri-clamp pretty easily. We clean the worm on its own using a chugger pump from a home-brew shop hooked up to draw from a reservior (bucket) at the outlet of the worm then feeding in to the top of the worm with a hose with the end trimmed to fit inside the pipe. The chugger moves a lot of liquid so we get good filling of the pipe but doesn't move it at such a rate that it's going to want to walk the feed hose out of the top of the worm. We just loop it like that with Birko's BRU R EZ and then follow that with acid.

sorry I dont recall. I believe we ordered them straight from Minol though so I'd just give them a ring.

It looks like they can handle 150F. We use these, they can handle 180F:http://www.minolusa.com/pdf/Minomess-Meter-Information.pdf Pretty reasonable and you can get it with a digital pulse reader that can be reset for each run. One caveat, we've found them to be pretty sensitive to face up, horizontal orientation. If you deviate you lose accuracy.

Hey Pete, Given that the mash sat for longer than normal it's not surprising that the Acetobacter took hold. The fact that you haven't had an issue in the past may be a matter of luck as much as anything else. Acetobacter is aerobic so as the fermenter settles down and the CO2 stops evolving out of the wash you start to get O2 coming in contact with the surface of the wash and that's when those little guys take hold. If you're using open fermenters, I think you are from previous posts, you may want to put a CO2 blanket on top if you aren't going to be able to strip it right away, you could also fab a floating lid or tank lid for your fermenter that you use when it's going to need to sit for a while. Certainly sour mashing could help, you need to get below pH 4.5 to inhibit Acetobacter, but if that's not part of your current process I wouldn't think you'd want to introduce that and change your flavor profile.

The study doesn't specifically say but i think the USDA recommended upper limit for Cu is 10mg/day for an adult. A European study found that commercially produced spirits contain between 1 and 5 mg Cu/kg of spirit. You'd have more problems than copper ingestion if you were drinking a kg of spirit/day. Add to that the study mentioned that its findings should be considered carefully as Cu is also an important metal in other systems in the body. And lastly, without copper, spirits would taste awful. There was a copper scare in the brewing world back in the 90's and the USDA determined there wasn't enough of a concern to regulate and I'm certain that would extend to distilling. It's an interesting article, and certainly worth watching.

That was great man!

Just saw this and thought I'd chime in. We use one of the systems on Stevea's link, our's is made by Gerard Daniels and we're very happy with it. There are a couple of videos of it in action on our facebook page if folks would like to see it in action with mash. Generally what you've got is a screen (a wide variety of diff mesh to suit diff mash) mounted between two spacers, the whole assembly has an eccentrically weighted motor mounted to the bottom and it all sits on springs. You fire up the motor, the whole rig gets shaking and then you pump your mash on top. The wash strains through the screen and drains out a port on the bottom and the grain migrates to the outside of the screen where it ultimately leaves through a chute and is collected in 50 gal barrels. We use it for both barley and rye mashes, as you'd expect, the barley drains better than the rye but the rye really doesn't do too bad and we're playing with some ways to improve the rye yield. It may not be for everyone but it works very well for us, it has a significantly smaller footprint than a mash tun, costs about the same (we run a 15BBL brew) and is mounted on casters so we roll it away when we're done. Lastly, a 15BBL mash will lauter in about 2hrs with very little supervision.

We use 2 Eternal GU195 and as Lenny described we get around 180F @ 5gpm in the winter and about 8gpm in the summer. As described, you can gang them up and increase your gpm as needed, they have a very small footprint (sit on top of the office). we clean, mash and sparge with them. Soon we'll be looping them in with a condenser water recovery system to allow us to mash in a little more quickly but all in all they're great.

Thanks! I really like direct fire, we've got electronic controls for our burner including a flame sensor that shuts the gas off if it doesn't detect flame, Ward Burner Supply provided our burner and controls. Providing enough combustion air is a little tricky but we've dialed things in pretty well. We keep CO detectors around and have never tripped them (we run Nat gas). I'd check in with you local officials to get their input but ours had no concerns. As for Iberian stills, we use gaskets and o-rings at all joints in place of paste, they provide a better seal and are a hell of a lot easier to clean up.

Steve, it seems that you have as much info to back up the opposite point on this as I do. So perhaps the answer is in the middle. From my experience over aeration results in a heavy yeast load and subsequent downstream effects. As an unscientific experiment, we aerated our last batch for twice as long as normal, our yeast load was 2-3 times what we typically see and our yield off the still was reduced by about 10%. So my recommendation to anyone just starting with aeration/oxygenation is to experiment with different flow rates, and times and figure out what gives you the best results. We've optimized for our process and house yeast and won't be altering our process. On flavor, don't know where I got the DMS but you're absolutely right that it's unrelated to oxygenation.

We use direct fire so I'm not speaking from person experience but I believe the Iberian folks make a bain marie (water bath) still in the size you are talking about. Perhaps you could add a couple of large immersion heaters to the water bath, you'd just want to figure out what heaters you were going to use and have them build your still with enough room in the water bath to add your heaters. I don't have experience with water bath stills but I would think they'd take a dog's age to heat up and get going. Someone else maybe able to weigh in on that.

I hear you Viper, but I guess I'm ok with that (as long as I'm not one of the folks that shake out). There will undoubtedly be a shake out, but look carefully at the brewing world, they're on the third wave. Their first shake out was in the mid 90's! There is always room in the market for the right product, there will always be new folks coming in, folks dropping out and folks losing their shirts. It sucks but it's the reality. In the mean time, I think as long as you're doing what you want to do and are fired up about it, you can't ask for much more than that. Lastly, anyone getting into this business because they think it's going to be a gold mine deserve to lose their shirts, I've heard it said that the the best way to make a small fortune is to start with a big one and then get into the alcohol business...

I guess I feel that people go into business for a lot of different reasons and while you or I may have gotten in to distilling in order to create something from mash to bottle others may get into it because the industry or people in it drew them or because they are business folk that want to create a cool brand and run a creative company that way. I don't think you can judge someone because their motivations differ from yours, just as I wouldn't want to be judged as a poser from someone who planted and grew their raw materials because I didn't farm mine or malt my own grain. We all are driven by our individual interests. I struggle with this at times, like when I see other's FOB prices lower than my COGS but there lies the power of differentiation. Some will differentiate on price, or branding, others on their story, or process and others will focus more on what they put in the bottle, the market decides the right equation. Every small brand out there helps to train the drinking public on the idea of small distillers, bottlers, rectifiers whatever you want to call them and that helps the whole segment. My opinion.

Very nice

There has always been some mystery surrounding exactly what goes on inside our fermenters but we’re learning more and more as the years progress so my info may be outdated. That said the comment I made on yeast growth at the expense of alcohol yield was not something I just made up; it was taught to me at Siebel when I attended in the 1990’s and it can be found on page 479 of Brewing: Science and Practice (Woodhead Publishing in Food Science and Technology) by Dennis E. Briggs, Chris A. Boulton, Peter A. Brookes and Roger Stevens as well as page 141 of Whisky: Technology, Production and Marketing (Handbook of Alcoholic Beverages) by Inge Russell, Graham Stewart and Charles Bamforth. Related to O2 concentrations, I don’t brew high gravity mashes so the 8 ppm (albeit theoretical) is all I need. Some people who do high gravity brewing do in fact give a second shot of O2 as Stevea suggests, but I can’t really comment on that as it’s not my preferred method.

sucks

Hey Mike, Sorry to hear about the print quality on the book. My thoughts are this, for a textbook you're ultimately paying for the info in the book rather than the presentation of the book unlike with others. in my opinion, this book is worth the money (as long as it's legible and nothing is missing). It's a heavy read, but it's my go to reference for all things distilling. Hope that helps, and again, sorry the presentation isn't nicer, I would be pissed too.

Agreed, I can't think of any major advantages with a uni-tank when fermenting on the grain and it may in fact cause draining problems as the grain packs into the cone. If you were lautering prior to fermentation the uni is a great tool, yeast will settle and can be stored under the beer for later pitches etc. Given the additional cost of the uni over a stainless tote or other flat/dished bottom tank it's hard to recommend the uni-tank. I'm using flat bottom tanks because they were less expensive at start up and they don't drain great but they work fine. You may want to consider a man-way near the bottom for clean out or follow Jason's suggestion and go with a dished bottom, it will self drain more efficiently than the flat bottom tank.

Thanks for the site kudos. The burner in the picture is the one we got from Ward, that little guy is 440K BTU. We didn't have anything surrounding the burner in the picture early on while we were shaking out the system; we've got 1 layer of brick loosely stacked around it now which cut nat gas usage by about 30%. The risk is that you really have to make sure you get enough air into the burner so it doesn't carb up, this includes exhausting enough to allow adequate air exchange.

I'll second Lenny's suggestion for Ward. The burner you're looking for is an impinged flame jet burner, he doesn't have them listed on his site but does sell them and he'll set it up with an electronic controller and pilot and main solenoids. I had no problem with the city approving this burner on our still. We use a 440K burner to heat a 250 gallon pot, it takes about 2-2.5 hrs to come to temp for a full charge.

For the batches that are already going you could try an electric blanket just to get it up to temp and when the yeast gets going it'll keep the temp up on it's own. As for the starter, I'm sure there's a proscribed sugar concentration but I don't know what that is. I can say you'd want to go with a fairly low concentration for the sugar to keep the osmotic potential low enough that the yeast can take up the sugar easily (maybe go with a sol'n around 1.030 - 1.040). You can approach this with one of two goals in mind, 1) wake up a suitable pitch volume up, get it active and pitch or 2) wake up and grow a sizeable pitch volume. If the first just rehydrate, with warm sugar sol'n and when you see the yeast is getting active (head forms) then you can pitch away. If the second then you're looking at a few days of advanced planning: aeration, sugar sol'n, nutrient, stir, ferment, settle, then addition of more sugar, ferment, pitch. You can find some resources online to walk you through some different techniques and choose the one that best fits your set up. Healthy happy yeast is really the key to good fermentation.

I've never worked with that yeast before but the specs indicate a rehydration temp of 104F and a ferm temp of 86-95F so that sounds like a part of the equation. Also you said you're fermenting in 45 gallon batches (1.7 hectoliters), the pitch specs are 10 - 50 g/hl so at 1.6 oz (45g) you're in the middle of that range and have some room move. Other thoughts, pH below 4 will shut most yeast right down so you may want to look at that. Also aeration, you really shouldn't aerate for days, the yeast needs the O2 in the first few hours after pitch to generate cell walls as it propagates (respiration phase) and after that you want it to go anaerobic (fermentation phase), if you keep pumping in air you do it at the expense of alcohol production. If you're using straight O2 you really want to watch it, if you're using filtered air you can play with it but I wouldn't think you'd want to go for more that an hour or two. I'm not a big believer in dried yeasts so recognize this comes with a bias but if you like working with this yeast, you may want to consider making a starter and pitching that rather than simply hydrating and pitching. Yeasts are living organisms and you can imagine dehydration beats the hell out of those little guys, so your viability probably isn't great to start, then you rehydrate in hot water, and toss it in a strong sugar solution where a good number of the little buggers explode from the osmotic stress so when all's said and done, you're probably looking at 50% viability of the volume you pitched. If you do a starter, you wake them up, give them some food and air, they get cooking, maybe pitch a little woo and start making new little yeasties and then when you pitch you've got a much stronger, much healthier population of yeast to work with.

Hey J, No problem other than wasted space. Typically when you size a fermenter you're looking for an additional 25-30% head space this allows whatever you're fermenting to foam up but not out of the FV. Anything over 30% isn't necessary but also isn't detrimental. You may want to think what size you'll really need, if you're going to ferment 60 gallons to charge your still rather than go for 110 gal, would you be better served spending a little extra and go for a 160 gallon fermenter so you could get 2 still charges from one FV load plus head space. The idea is: if you're going to have extra space in your fermenter it should make sense; why pay for an extra 50 gallons of head space if you'll only use 20 of it. Either size it for what you need now or a multiple of what you'll grow in to (allowing for head space) in the not too distant future.

Really enjoyed the Irish whiskey cast! I've got the next couple queued up.

The black mold found on the outside of distilleries, wineries and breweries is a sooty mold and it, like us, loves ethanol. Here's a great article on the mold, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/ff_angelsshare/all/1