PeteB

Thanks Stumpy. I assume you mean filtering your production water and removing the bacteria that produce the geosim ie. Actinobacteria or is it an RO filter that pulls out almost everything?

I am trying to help out a friend here. I believe that potato vodka should have a slight hint of potato earthiness but there is too much. Anyone had experience with where this might be able to be reduced? Cooking, enzymes, ferment temperature, pH, spirit cuts??? Thanks Pete

Is the vent pipe connected directly to the steel combustion chamber? If so, that is where most of your heat is going. The air opening is way too big allowing too much cold air in. I am not an expert on propane but I use waste oil and diesel burners and they are meant to run at very slight negative air pressure at the flame for maximum efficiency. At slight negative there is enough oxygen but not surplus draft to carry away your valuable heat.

It turned out to be the hoses I was syphoning with. I had been using them for whisky spirit and it appears as if oils from the new-make has deposited on the inside of the hose. High proof neutral stripped it off into the 4 bottles I was cutting. Probably would not have caused an issue if I had done a much larger batch as the oil would have been diluted. When I used the hose with the cheaper neutral there was no oil left in the hose so no issue.

I get a very similar oil with rye. Does anyone else see that with rye??? Unlike most others I get very little foaming with my rye and I have often suspected it is because of the natural oil in my rye variety.

An observation, where do you get 99% alcohol from? 95.6% is as high as can be distilled at atmospheric pressure. I would have thought at 99% there would be no free water and no rusting. Many big industrial continuous stills are built from steel and I assume they don't rust. You should be able to carbon filter the rust from your "ruined product", but I am no expert on carbon filtering.

There are always exceptions to the rule. I have had some short term employees with University degrees in subjects I thought would have been useful but they were useless, almost a hazard. They lacked life skills and could not think outside the box. But on average there is no doubt a well educated person doing a reasonably technical job will be better than a person with little education.

Even though I have never met you I say your answer "NO" to your own question is incorrect. Your masters degrees may not have given you any direct knowledge of running a distillery but I would be certain that your brain was taught to think and problem solve, that is obvious from your contributions to this forum.

I have just tried out Meerkat's liqueur blending calculator. Typical me, I tried to use it without reading Help. Quickly gave up. There are so many options. About 10 minutes reading and I had most of it figured out. Making up a pineapple liqueur from distilled pineapple ferment + fresh pineapple juice + sugar Ran the calculator to make a test amount of 150 mL of 20%ABV for tasting. Sat a beaker on scales and tared off. Added the calculated amount of juice, tared off and added the spirit, tared off and added the sugar. Taste panel said slightly too sweet and too higher abv. Another couple of test samples then calculated another 150 mL taster at 18%ABV and less sugar. Taste panel approved Re-calculated using amount of available pineapple spirit. All blending done on scales, don't have to worry about temperatures, so easy . Also ran a few dummy calculations to see how much juice - sugar -water - spirit I would need to add to a batch if I wanted to re-adjust the ABV or sugar load, easy Tomorrow I will run some through the lab still to determine exact ABV. Whatever it is I will write that on the labels, (or I could calculate how much spirit or water to add to bring it to 18%) I suspect it won't be exactly 18% because the weak link in the calculation is the sugar load in the juice. I used a refractometer which could be slightly obscured by other "stuff" in the juice. You deserve a medal Meerkat

I can't see how money can be made from 50 mL bottles. Price needs to be too high. I occasionally do a few just for promotion. I am sure I make a loss on them.

I have a mini filling head for my Enolmatic, works very well. For manual filling of only a few bottles use a small diameter syphon hose (eg, ethanol safe type silicon). As the bottle gets almost full lift the bottle and the flow will slow to make final level easy to stop at. Either close the flow off by squeezing hose with pliers or keep lifting bottle until flow stops. With the lifting technique you can reverse syphon an overfill back into your holding tank. Have a long enough hose so there is a loop well down past your bottle then air cannot get into the hose and lose the syphon.

I don't think I explained myself properly. I don't like the straight through Liebig condensers especially if they are short. Some uncondensed vapor can get through without being condensed especially if heat turned up too much at start of boil. Whereas the Graham condenser with the spiral vapor path is much longer and also if it is at about an angle of 45 deg. some liquid forms at the bottom of the curves and prevents any loss of vapor.

The difficulty is measuring an exact volume. The measuring container needs to be calibrated at a specific temperature eg 60f or 20c then you need to have the liquid at that exact temperature. When mixing water and alcohol and possibly sugar, there is an exothermic reaction, the mixture heats up. For the accuracy that TTB requires, a parallel sided, calibrated glass measuring cylinder at standard temperature is no where near accurate enough. Cheap calibrated electronic scales in the correct range are much more accurate, and now meerkat has come up with an easy to use calculator.

Be careful of cheaper condensers on the glass lab stills. I originally had a graham condenser, it has spiral path that when on an angle has liquid at the bottom of the spirals that prevents vapor escaping without condensing. It got broken and was replaced with a straight through Liebig condenser. I don't think this is condensing all the vapor as I am getting lower than expected readings.

Is the vent pipe mounted to the back of the new combustion chamber? If so Ned is quite right. 1)Your heating surface has been reduced 2) Much of the heat is rushing up the vent pipe 3) All of the surface of the still that is not inside the burner chamber is radiating heat, cooling it down, without the bricks you have more heat loss surface. 5) remove the burner chamber and put back with bricks as original but without the copper plate. The air gap between the plate and the still was a good (bad) insulator 4) Heat up as fast as you can without scorching, less time heating equals less time for heat loss from rest of still surface. 6) Check the burner specs, I think it should be much closer to the base of the still. 6) does that regulator have the correct flow rate for that burner? it may be undersized.

I have some very similar marerial i scrounged from a local paper mill. I think it is used to de-water pulp in a belt press. Try searching "belt press" parts

I recently borrowed my Son's Hydropress (he juices water mellons for beer) to try to separate more liquid from my rye mash. A lot of work for nil gain. In the centre of the press there is a water filled bladder. Hook a hose on and fill to 3 bar(approx. 45 psi) It started pressing well but slowed to a stop. When I opened it up there was a nice solid 3/4 inch layer against the outside filter cloth but the rest of the mash was as wet as when I put it in. The mash had been compressed into an impervious layer. (sorry about the sideways orientation)

A couple of questions. What grain are you going to mash? If corn then you don't need sparge or perforated base. Is that the perforated screen in the bottom? if so then it should go full width otherwise you will get a dead area to the sides that won't get sparged efficiently. Sparge arm looks a bit over-engineered but not a problem.

A couple of points about this quote. Traditionally Irish whiskey is triple distilled, but also the traditional product was not "single malt" (I assume you mean 100% malted barley) Traditional Irish Whiskey contains a large % of un-malted grain. Also your reference to the green label, be careful that is not exactly the same green as a prominent Irish brand. A Tasmanian winemaker near me was threatened to be sued because his label colour was too similar to a big European wine label

I would think it is the added flavour components are NOT completly completely soluble in your mix. For interest carefully pour some of the clear liquid off the top of a bottle with sediment. Replace with some neutral and see if the sediment dissolves. Also try leaving out one flavour ingredient at a time to see if one is causing the problem. If you are happy with the taste of your product then leave to settle out the sediment for a few weeks before filtering and bottling.

I am in Australia but i think I might have a similar IBC. The thread looks like 2 inch BSP but not. I eventually noticed mine had a camlock groove just behind the thread. Try a 2 inch female camlock instead of the thread

Thank you bcoutts

TTB says to call it rye whisky the mash has to be at least 51% rye What official rules are there for Canada? I think I recall reading that there was no requirement as long as it tasted like rye!!

Hi Will, you have returned, I have missed your gems of wisdom. Would you mind writing out an example of the math for hitting the right proof when batching a liqueur? Thanks Pete