mcsology

According to this: http://www.frontrangeliving.com/cooking/Corn.htm Kroger supermarkets basically bought futures of the entire crop, so you might have to infiltrate their organization to find it in quantity. On a semi related note: Anyone know of active DSPs that are making whiskey out of fresh corn? Wonder if a cane crusher would be suitable for extraction.

If you post those on reddit /r/firewater you probably can piecemeal them out at a higher price almost immediately... albeit with more hassle.

Thanks for helping clarify peteb. It's not a necessity, but it would be nice to know what my dissolved solids reading is to get an idea as to whether I have unfermented sugars by comparing the dissolved solids count of the pre-pitch wort to the TDS count of the wash at terminal gravity. I've had bourbon washes where all fermenters finish at 1.009, and where all finish at .998. My OCD would like to be able to quantify the reason for the difference if possible.

I haven't used the hose you linked, but I bought a 1" kanaflex hose from them for use as a barrel hose. I emailed them my desired specs and they did a great job. Their customer service is top notch.

Has anyone used this?: https://www.misco.com/beer-refractometer/beer-refractometer/beer-refractometer-wort-dissolved-solids-specific-gravity#detailed_description-tab I would love to have a reliable, quick way to determine dissolved solids in my wort so I can have a better handle on fermentation performance, if only approximate. If anyone has an opinion on this little guy, I'd love to hear it before I fork over 450 bucks for the luxury of knowing TDS in my wort. Getting away from hydrometry for tracking fermentation progress would be nice, as would being able to use sterile disposable pipettes to take a sample instead of less sanitary methods. I guess my biggest worry has to do with how long this thing will last... 1 year warranty for an item like this makes me want to see a review or two.... Thanks!

I'd love to taste some of the result. My flavor calculator in my brain tells me that it would probably impart a taste like immature whiskey into the gin. Possibly would result in something not unlike a cross between dry gin and genever?

In my experience, the volatile oils that cause louching concentrate in the 'heads' of the run, and the proof of 'end-heads' varies from batch to batch. The best way I've found for my process is to a 'demisting' test on the beginning of the run by pulling 25 or so ml every few minutes and adding 25 ml of water to every sample. When it stops clouding up at 50/50 spirit to water, I can be pretty confident that I can start collecting hearts and have no problems with louching for that batch. As for your end-hearts cut, that's up to you, but I pot distill my gin (direct macerated, fired off botanicals) and usually stop at about 135-140 proof, but sometimes it's lower than that because my I make the call based on sensory... the parrot proof is just a helpful hint that I may be getting closer to cutting time.

Hi Chizeck, This isn't a stupid question at all. If I understand you correctly, you are asking why it's better when redistilling that you proof down instead of running at previous proof of distillation. Is this correct? Like much in this business, things are conjectural, but I'll tell you why I would proof down: 1) Cuts are easier: When you have a lower proof of charge (the stuff you load into the still), the additional water acts like a cushion, giving you more time during your run between 'acceptable' distillate and 'unacceptable' distillate (in terms of heads-hearts-tails, or post-heads and pre-hearts; post hearts and pre-tails, intermediate tails, or whatever you like to call the transitional stages between the good stuff and the bad stuff). 2) a lower proof of charge helps prevent so-called 'blank runs'. When your proof of charge is below say... 75 proof, it's a lot harder for volatile oils and alcohol to be in solution at the liquid-vapor interface (the surface of the liquid in the still where the liquids volatilize into vapors that pass through the system) at still-temperatures. When the proof is high enough, and there are enough volatile oils dissolved into your charge, you can encounter a situation where the volatile oils want to stay connected to the alcohol (or other solvents) so badly that you can't prevent your distillate from going cloudy when water is added... because those volatile oils came with the alcohol during distillation to the extent that when water was added, they fell out of solution causing the 'loosh/luche' effect. 3) depending on your heating source, if you were running a high-proof charge, your still could potentially run dry... creating a nasty shit-layer on the inside of your expensive, fancy copper pot interior at the heat interface. If your still doesn't have a man-door where you can climb in and scrub that shit off manually, you'd have a serious problem. Ironically, this is exactly the thing that the TTB asks you to do when determining obscuration through distillation... except in this case you would be doing this on your production equipment and not on a lab still. There are other reasons, but in my experience these are the main ones.

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I use granular for this very reason. Anyone care to share what the advantages of PAC is over GAC? Is the (potentially) greater adsorptive surface area really worth the increased hassle to remove from the spirit?

We make gin through direct maceration on a hybrid dual tower kothe that we also use for everything else we make. When I go back and forth from making gin to whiskey, and back etc... I'll do a steam run prior, and periodically I'll run heads + water to solvent clean it. This is in addition to the normal CIP that I run after every use of the still. When you do a lot of different products through the same copper I think your still gets 'seasoned' but if you follow some basic cleaning procedures it's not a problem (at least to me). I get more worried about buildup of waxes during stripping in the unfortunate situation where your mash pukes into your lyne arm a little bit. That's where the heads run comes in handy.

This has a lot of good 101 level information: http://homedistiller.org/sugar/wash-sugar make sure to explore the sidebar for details on different sugar sources, notes on gravity, nutrients, etc....

One thing I'd caution you about Flexible impeller pumps, is if you are filtering spirits with one you'll likely have higher than anticipated costs replacing your impellers. The inoxpa ones I've used are about 350 a pop to replace, and we were going through 2-3 a year. Apparently pumping 80 proof spirits for hours degrades the fins of the impeller and they snap off after a while. I've also used gear displacement pumps, and the internals seem to be pretty durable, and I believe are pretty cheap. The pump head on ours was around 600 bucks, the electric motor can be found cheap, and the controllers can be 300 bucks and up.

Depending on the kind of molasses you are using, you may have to add your molasses in stages to get to 10% You usually will want to not go higher than 24 ish brix to start. Since molasses can be 40-50% fermentable sugar (or even lower!) you will get a mash of 6-7% abv if you let a 24ish brix wash go terminal, so when the gravity drops to about 8-10 brix, you can add the remaining thinned molasses to the fermenter and get to your target. Homedistiller.org has some pretty decent info about sugar washes, molasses and some very useful calculators. You could use a %age molasses and a %age other sugars to get to 10% in one go. Knowing the sugar content of your molasses will be necessary to calculate specifics. Hope this helps! Edit------------ P.S.: If you are trying to turn around your rum in less than a year, avoid feedstock molasses. There's so much sulfur in that shit, it'll take at least 6 months in barrel and likely longer for the sulfur to migrate out of the spirit (at least in my experience).

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would you mind sharing why you settled on powdered carbon? I've only really seen granular used in vodka production, as it seems to be much easier to use in bag/canister filters. I would think it would be a huge pain to filter powdered carbon out of spirit if dumped in and removed by a plate or cartridge filter. I'm assuming that powdered won't work in a bag/cartridge filter can because the particle size is so small that it would compress into a densely packed mass of carbon and not permit liquid to pass through it efficiently. I'd think logistics Would trump any increase in adsorptive surface area per unit. Would love to hear the alternative viewpoint.

@Tom, Good solid advice. That's a great place for me to start. Thanks! Mike

Hello folks, I've been trying to nail down my whiskey ferment performance and was wondering if anyone had any good resources for calculating nitrogen needs for grain washes. I haven't looked terribly hard, but I haven't seen any kind of information for determining YAN from total percentage Nitrogen in a particular grain. I realize there's probably not a simple answer, but any help getting me pointed in the right direction would be appreciated. I just read an abstract that stated that a particular variety of corn contained 1.5 ish % nitrogen, so if 100% of that nitrogen was extracted into the wort and was yeast-available, that would come to 2270 ppm (if I plug in my mashing numbers... this is just for the 51% rolled corn and doesn't count the other 49% of malted barley), which is WAY above what is recommended from most guides online for nitrogen additions (granted, they are mostly concerning wine fermentation). I'm guessing that only a very small fraction of the total nitrogen in the grain can be extracted into the wort as YAN. We also separate the grain solids with rice hulls, so I imagine that some of the nitrogen in the grains doesn't have time to become extracted into the wort (compared to a non-filtered mash). Since I'm almost certain that my last fermentation was nitrogen deficient (slight H2S smell, sluggish), I'd like to have another nitrogen dosage plan separate from the ones that are floating around for wine. I plan on using Fermaid K and Dap for now, but any other N sources that anyone could recommend for grain would be appreciated. I'll be happy to share any sheets I make when I can nail down a halfway decent formula. Thanks!

Filtra systems makes great bag filters for outfits of all sizes. I think they do 416 or 404 stainless on all models.

Also, check out www.reddit.com/r/firewater it's a great community, with lots of hobbyists from around the world that will answer every question you have from a hobbyist's perspective.

Absolutely. I'll msg you when we are moving some out. Probably 4-6 weeks. We just got rid of some not too long ago. Feel free to stop by sometime though. I'm at batch 206.

My understanding of 'corn germ' is that is not the same as wheat germ, in that it's nutrient/oil rich goodness, but rather the cellulosic crap that gets stuck in your gums when you eat popcorn. I don't know why it would hurt yield, but it might be your guy trying to give you a good reason to not get all that crap in his mill, auger, mash tun, etc.... We use steamed rolled corn because our contract mashers are brewers and don't want to dirty their mills, etc... with goopy corn grist.

@Iliasm Try hitting up another distillery close by that has medium high volume... they probably are buying gns in totes and have more than they need. We offload our extras every couple months for cheap. We are in Seattle.

Still kind of developing my method, but recently I've been leaning toward putting them in my stripping run. If there's anything in my feints that doesn't come through by the time I've called the run at 10% ABV at the parrot, I don't want it going into the spirit run charge. We run a dual tower hybrid still, so I strip using just the pot, and do the spirit run using a single tower and don't begin hearts collection until the dephlegmator output temperature reaches at least 80 deg C (but using sensory as the primary determinant of when to begin hearts collection). I then compress the tails by dropping dephlegmator temperature at the end, so we don't end up with too much feints volume anyways.

I macerate and pull botanicals before charging, but... if using english cukes that are shrink wrapped and not waxed, don't bother peeling. If using any kind of cucumber that is wax coated, definitely peel before using. Not sure if any waxes from the skins will get picked up by the vapor when in a basket, but they will most likely melt off onto the bottom of your basket at the very least... so again, don't use anything that has been waxed (although the cheaper 'standard variety' do have natural plant wax in their skins). The cheaper cukes also have a fair degree of bitterness in their skins, so peeling is probably a good way to go when using them period. Basically, using english cukes will avoid most problems, and they have the most flavor.