mcsology

They work great for fruit juice and sugar ferments, less so for grain (although I currently have 6 going with whiskey mash... but we have a brewery do the mashing for us, and we use rice hulls to remove most of the solids before transferring into totes). Either it's our facility or the totes, but I suspect that there is some lacto that we never quite get to killing that hang out in the porous plastic. Cleaning isn't as bad as some folks are letting on. What I do, Is make sure that there's always an extra one on hand filled to the absolute top with your KOH/NaOH cleaning solution (making sure that you maintain the pH every time you transfer it to another tote). 24 hours of soaking is usually more than enough time for the basic cleaner to destroy any organic scale that developed during fermentation. When It's time to clean post ferment, you can simply pump the cleaning solution from the waiting tote to the one that is to be cleaned. You can then pressure wash/spray rinse the one you pumped out of, then use whatever sanitizing solution you like to get rid of whatever microorganisms you can. I usually throw in about 5 gallons of Iodine sanitizer solution and roll the thing around on all sides and let sit for 20 or so minutes. Pump to the next tote, Rinse, Repeat. Works really well in a series if you are wrangling lots of totes per batch. This way, the chemicals and time are doing the heavy lifting and all you need is a spray hose to blast off any remaining scale on the inside of the tote. Sure beats reaching in with a nylon brush and trying to reach all those corners!

We send our botanicals off to a local cidery that makes a kickass gin botanical cider with them. I reprocess my tails by distilling it to 190 and reintroduce into subsequent batches. The tails from the reprocessing gets diluted and down the drain.

I would start by extracting tinctures of each of the herbs/spices/botanicals that you are interested in using and building a 'library' of single flavors. Once you have that completed, you can just run blending tests of whatever combinations that you want, in order to see if you can formulate something that pleases you. Once you have your blend ratios down, you can start experimenting with co-macerating all the ingredients together. A good place to start, is start evaluating tinctures of possible main bittering agents to determine if you want to use Gentain, quassia, etc... and then layer other flavors on top of your bittering ingredient. Caramel color and sugar are your friend when making amaro as well. Good luck!

The way I've always done it is to blend a sample of your finished product using weighted averages to get as close to your target as possible, while taking extremely detailed notes on details of your blending process. Then, send that sample to a lab that does .001% accuracy ABV testing. Note the variance from your weighted average blend, and then back add water/spirit/syrup to hit your target on the nose with the weighted average method. Then you could use the info on how much you had to add to the batch to adjust to target as an 'adjustment percentage' for future blending without sending to lab. If you want to be extra neurotic about it, you could then lab your adjusted batch to see if you were dead on. Making sure that your blending stocks (spirit, water, sugar syrups, etc...) are all the same temperature will increase accuracy with weighted average blending of complex liquids. Unless you have a pretty legit lab setup, i'd be worried about incorrect data from non-laboratory-environment ebulliometry. If you're small scale this method should get you as close as possible without spending dough on unnecessary testing. If you are making big batches of the stuff, it might be best to send every batch to lab and adjust as necessary if you want to be within acceptable % ABV variance. Also, if you're worried about cloudiness it might be worth considering that citrus oils are pretty volatile and that by doing a 'demisting test' on your 'heads' coming out of the run you can pretty much exclude most of the oil that ends up clouding the batch. I do this on my gin and after about 1% of the run is collected the oils drop below the threshold that causes cloudiness at bottle proof. I just throw the oil-bearing 'heads' back into subsequent batches of macerate. I imagine that it would work about as well with your method for limoncello.

Hi! That's a crazy tax rate! at 79.22/ L Abs ETOH, that means that just the excise tax on 1- 750 ml bottle of 40% spirits is $31.69. What does the average bottle of domestic vodka sell for at retail?

Mmmm... Zubrowka. The original 'Marshmallow' Flavored Vodka. Anyone else think it tastes like marshmallows?

My guess is that it varies with how much oil is not in solution. If you have a pretty serious oil ring in the bottle, that oil will oxidize over time... it's just a matter of how long you expect it to be on the shelf. Colas is still taking forever and a day from what I am hearing, so you might want to set up tests of varying amounts of residual oil in your finished product to see if anything changes against a control during the time that it takes colas to come in. I'm guessing you'd prefer that your product won't be on the shelf much longer than 6 months after bottling. You should probably be more worried about protein haze, precipitate, and other visual defects if you're putting out a macerated product, IMHO. These can mainfest in days or weeks after bottling and are a big put off to potential buyers. From my experience running infusion programs at bars, you'll definitely want to make sure that you're filtering out solids from the ingredients that you macerate with. Macerations left on the solids for too long develop oxidized, sherry-like notes that aren't super desirable in a fruit liqueur by most folks' reckoning. Not so bad in a fortified wine though .

A winemaker tried to sell us some wine that was infected with brett... it definitely carries over into the distillate, but at least in the stuff I've worked with it wasn't barnyardy or really desireable from any reasonable perspective. It was very band-aidy, burning plastic-y and generally gross stuff. We were given some to test out and we ended up not buying it.

Filtra systems can get you massive scale filters... Might be too big for a small distillery though.

To remove sediment pre bottling I just use a 10" home water line filter with removable cartridges. You can choose different pass filters from 35 micron down to .5 I believe. You can get triclamp fittings that screw into the npt fittings. This is the cheapest way to do it. A plate filter is obviously better but exponentially more money. The sediment filter cans are cheap enough to have one for each product you make to minimize any flavor contamination from other products. They are hdpe I believe, so I wouldn't use until you've proofed to bottling strength if you're worried about leeching.