Tom Lenerz

18 hours ago, indyspirits said:

Don't I wish I could.  I do so love the worlds where production and marketing collide. 

Well keep in mind, you can always present the cost difference to the decision makers. Let them know that in addition to the cost differences in packaging materials, that there is also the cost of the new machine(s) and the estimated labor rate per case vs. what you are doing now. 

Like I said, we considered it, but basically the option was 300 boxes an hour on our existing equipment for round bottles or 75 boxes an hour (or less) with a manual solution. That's about 4 times the labor cost, with everything else remaining the same. That won't mean much to marketing, but it should mean something to your decision makers. Our situation is an extreme example, but you might be surprised.

Never used this model, but Inline Fillers has a "head on a stick" labeler for all shapes. https://www.fillers.com/automatic-labeler/

We went with the "don't do it" option.

Also worth considering printing the bottles...

The above two answers are good answers. Pitch early and generously to outcompete, and don’t plan on harvesting and repitching yeast.

You could call one of them. 

Or if you have physical access to a bottle, many manufacturers print their logo on the bottom. Attached are pictures of O-I and Saver logos on the bottom of bottles I had sitting around my office.

Might be a little difficult to do right now.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/felipeschrieberg/2019/02/26/yamazaki-and-nikka-discontinue-more-releases-as-japanese-whisky-crisis-deepens/#3e4d8868404a

How are you rinsing your pads before filtration? We use soft water then purge with RO before use. If you use hard water, you can put calcium and magnesium into your pads, which then can migrate into your bottled spirit.

Also I would recommend checking out Beco pads, we use the select A on our brandies, with chill filtering and have noticed minimal flavor and color impact. We worked with David Strauch, at Strauch Chemical Supply.

https://www.eaton.com/us/en-us/catalog/filtration/beco-select-a.html

For our whiskeys we use a 5 micron, and go non-chill filtered. We haven't had any haze issues with them.

10 hours ago, et1883 said:

good evening all - we have approved construction plans for 3 added zones for transstore tank storage, each at 240 gal maq.   "I think" those zones need to be studwall/sheetrock with individual fire suppression (sprinkler).  However, Is that NFPA or other requirement?  Or can the zones be chain link fence, so we can use the existing F-1 sprinklers?    That would make construction a lot        simpler.   Fire services contractor is recommending chain link, as sprinklers will active at 150 degrees. 

Also for Thatch, is there an updated link?  Keep receiving 404 error on above, and searching at the site does not produce a link.

With thanks,

 

 

Are you trying to build some walls to separate tanks so you can triple your MAQ? If so a chain link fence doesn't slow down fire very well...

Yes this is true (in part) as Glenlyon mentioned, not a fermentor but a spirit tank. Using a drill not an appropriate agitator for mixing.

There have been several incidents (over 5 I can think of off the top of my head) at various small distilleries with various causes in the last 5 years that resulted in either a person being hurt, property damage, and even death. 

Discussions on many can be found on these forums.

I'm definitely not an expert, but my understanding is ergot is dangerous and should be avoided.

The USDA defines "ergoty rye" as having over .3% ergot (https://www.gipsa.usda.gov/fgis/standards/810rye.pdf). I imagine most, if not all food processing plants would reject ergoty rye, and I would bet this includes large distilleries. We look for it, screen for it, and would not purchase grain with significant amounts of it. We work with farmers that clean their grain. Cleaning the grain should remove most, if not all ergot, which is why we rarely even see it.

Halfway down there is a section on distillation concentrating ergot: http://www.beefresearch.ca/blog/ergot/

A couple thoughts, after a brief skimming...

a) After 45 days they saw 500 ppb worth of DO, which is low, but also not 0. 45 days is a very short period of time, and in the paper they stated 9 months was half the O2 as a year, so these numbers seem to increase greater than linearly (I won't say exponentially).

b) French oak and American oak are cut differently for barrel manufacturing, I am guessing as a result, American oak is slightly more porous. (Just a guess)

c) The oak itself may not be very porous, but barrels are, I conducted a scientific experiment yesterday by walking into a barrel room and I smelled whiskey.

Papers like this are interesting, but I always struggle with what I am supposed to take away from it. I'm not going to stop aging brandy and whiskey in oak barrels any time soon. Nor am I going to start doing micro-ox on finished spirits.

8 hours ago, Winnie the Pooh said:

Thank your valuable comment. May I ask you the same question? What other big serious (high productive) equipment would you suggest to have instead of their small / manual versions? And what do you think about having two big stills (for different stages of distilling process) vs. having one huge (two 500 + 500 gallons stills vs. one 800/900 gallons still)? Thanks

I think the reasonable thing is what does your production need to be minimum to make this thing work and where do you want to be in production and sales. Figure out the cases, the $/case in rev and the $/case in SGP. Figure out your operating costs on a barebone operation and figure out how many cases that is. Ideally, if you are trying to work another job while doing this you'd want this to be one day a week or less on your still. That gives you one other weekend day, and all the weeknights to do the rest of the stuff running a distillery requires. Also when you are ready to take the jump to doing this full time, now you can go to 2 or 3 days a week and double or triple capacity while keeping a few days to do the other stuff. Still going good? Hire a production person and now you can have them do production 5 days a week and you are making 5 times what you were when you started.

For us, we scaled our cooker to be twice the size of our still, and have ferementors 3 times the size of our cooker. This was for the future, our boiler, chiller and processing equipment are all set to add in a much larger still, and over night we can over quadruple capacity. Just add some more fermentors. Having the cooker twice the size of the still is nice as well if you are the only production employee or only have one production employee. This allows you to alternate days between cooking and doing barreling or bottling type work. 

Don't forget everything costs twice as much as you expect and takes twice as long, and at the end of the day you'll make half as much as you were hoping!

6 hours ago, Winnie the Pooh said:

I am thinking about opening distillery in nearest future and while I am thinking about it, I am choosing an equipment for my home runs. Currently, I have a small still based on 5 gallons boiler. The next step up for home runs would be 26 gallons, or 26 gallons or better 53 gallons boiler, from the business standpoint. 26 gallons is cheaper, but 53 gallons is better from potential usage in commercial distillery as well as use it at home. Just to give you some numbers, for example, every autumn I have an access to thousands of the pounds of pressed grape skins, that I usually ferment/flavoring wash until March (6 months) and slowly distill them until next autumn using my 5 gallons still. And it takes a lot of time / afford to do it. So heaving, 50 gallons still, allows me to distill barrel (my wash gets fermenting in cheap food graded blue plastic barrels - usually have 2 - 6 barrels of grape skin wash fermenting) one in a time instead of split it to 10 times.

From the future commercial standpoint, I use numbers from the following post (bluefish_dist Posted May 2, 2018) at the following topic, http://adiforums.com/topic/9631-how-to-determine-outputs-still-size/ . From a single run (50 gallons of wash), I can get about 5 gallons of spirit per day, or about 1000 gallons per year (200 days x 5 gallons) having just ONE still. Just adding another one (extra under $3000), will increase output twice. With an assumption of sale, $10/bottle or 50 dollars per gallon (I made a worse estimate and lowered an assumptions from above post in two times), I can potentially get 50K/100K per year in sale. For reasonably cheap price of still and reasonably cheap option of increasing the output. I guess, I might run up to four - six 53 gallons stills until their amount will be unmanageable for me and I would need to move to one bigger still (275 - 400 gallons till) or higher "another me".

I read an article about guys opened a distillery in NY - that is their web site. And based on one of the pictures from the front, they are/were running cheap 26 gallons still sitting on cement blocks (that is what they started), http://kingscountydistillery.com/about/ . So, having 53 gallons still in commercial usage might be even better, compare to 26 gallons

The whole still set can be purchased for under 3000 dollars, for example, on the link below, even it is a different discussion if I need everything from this set or less features:

https://www.olympicdistillers.com/distilling-kettles-boilers-heaters-controllers/53-gallon-200-l-boiler-with-agitator-220v-electric-heaters-controller

Or I can build it separately for about similar price with more copper and options (onion head, potential gin basket, etc)

boiler ($965): https://www.hiproofproducts.com/store/p185/53_Gallon_Stainless_Steel_Distillation_Boiler.html
the onion head ($500): copper, build from one of the supplier in China
4" alembic style column with condenser ($500): build from 4" copper pipe, 4"-2" adapter, "U" parts, 2" pipe, ferrules, tri clamps, some copper fittings
240V controller with two 5500 watts heating elements ($550): https://www.olympicdistillers.com/distilling-kettles-boilers-heaters-controllers/240v-dual-element-heater-controller  

Any suggestion / ideas/ critics/ etc?

Thanks

 

Its 2019, not 2009. Starting with a small still, or an army of small stills is destined to fail in the current market. Heating stills with electricity is riddled with limitations, not to mention the cost of electricity vs. natural gas. I always tell anyone who comes to my place to look around and talk about starting a distillery that they should plan on 500 gallons or more for a still. Its all about the operational efficiency, unless you plan on being in business for a short period of time, you should be investing more in your equipment to lower the amount of labor and utilities needed to make your products to improve your margin. 

Silly question, is that valve on the condensate return line, midway up the tank open?

3 hours ago, Georgeous said:

Tom, 

disregard previous i see you said start with 528 gallons of water. i am not steam injecting, we have steam jackets heating from outside in. i am just curious how you came with the 528 gallons as 2lbs per gallon should be 548? 

 

It was scaled based off of what we are doing here in-house for our 30 gallon beer, but we run direct steam so I added in the volume of water added by steam. It's pretty close to the 2 lbs per gallon, so you can use that number if you want, but that thickness won't scale up.

I'm at Wollersheim just north of Madison, WI 30 minutes or so. We have been making wine for over 45 years and distilling since 2010.

https://www.wollersheim.com/distillery/

To test if there is any starches you can do an iodine test, but it won't tell you quantity.

There should be a way to figure out quantities with a UV Spec, maybe other methods. ASBC appears to have a method for testing dextrins, but I'm not a member so I don't know what it all entails.

On 12/28/2018 at 9:25 AM, Georgeous said:

my goal is a 600 gallon mash of 75/21/4 Corn/rye/barley and an OG of 1.076 which when fermented out all the way will yield me a 10% ABV wash

my problem is i don't have a calculator for corn

There is no value for field corn in these calculators because it varies, and it can vary by a lot. 

Again, I stand by my recommendations above. You may want a 10% abv mash, but start thinner and see if your equipment handles it OK before committing to a thick mash that could plug your pumps, valves, HEX and not stir well with your agitators. And if it doesn't ferment out all the way so you are throwing money away anyway.

If you want higher yields, but are limited by thickness, look for higher bulk density/test weight/bushel weight grain. We use a corn that averages 61 or 62 pounds per bushel versus the average 56, that's a full 10% more weight (and therefore starch and alcohol) than we had with the 56 pound bushels. Yet the thickness of the mash is the same, and therefore my equipment is unaffected.

We use 1.5 inch for spirit and 2 inch for mash/wine. This is partially because the mash is thicker, but also so we don't get sticky grain or wine in hoses used for finished product. Yes we clean them, but it's nice peace of mind knowing they are separate uses.

We move anywhere from 250 gallons to 500 gallons of mash at a time, and right now we are moving 4800 gallons of wine, through 700 feet of 2 inch hose. We only use three inch hose for grape must at the crusher and press or for tanker trucks when we are doing 5400 gallons at a time.

19 hours ago, Georgeous said:

Tom, 

so most mash calculators are designed for making beer not spirits and do not support or give yields for corn. 1st question does a calculator exist for distillers?

I am not familiar with one, but the math isn't that hard.

19 hours ago, Georgeous said:

Also what you wrote here for my 600 gallon system should that yield me a 1.065 starting gravity? if so that only has an alcohol potential of 8.58%ABV. i want to have a 10%ABV potential, so how to scale that? 

I'd recommend starting with the thickness I suggested and see how well your equipment handles the thickness. If it handles it fine, then you can try thicker, just lower the number of your beer gallons, maybe by increments of 2. So try a 28 gallon beer (600/28 ~ 21.5 bushels) and if that is OK up the thickness. Keeping in mind, what you "want" and what you "can do" might be different things. For us, especially with rye, 30 gallon beer is plenty thick.

In addition to being more difficult to move, a lot of thick beers might have a hard time converting or fermenting out, leaving you to loss of yield. We see this with high gravity rum washes on the forum all the time. People have really high starting gravities and struggle to finish, have long fermentations or stress their yeast. 

The cararye is malted to have sugar that is non-fermentable, so your fermentation is probably complete. Most beers with caramel malts finish higher than 1.007. If this is about making alcohol and increasing yield, swap the cararye for something cheaper that converts. If you are happy with the flavor you are getting, note that it probably will have an impact on that.

The supplier should have pressure tested it for you before it was sent to you. It should have pressure ratings listed on the jacket and on the pot, if it is rated.

If you are talking about testing your vacuum breakers and pressure relief valves, I have heard of people getting a second set to swap out and sending them out. At the brewery I used to work at, the owner would tear apart, clean and inspect the stainless PRVs we had. He would then hook just the valve up to a manifold with a calibrated pressure gauge and compressed air, and slowly ramp up the pressure to see at what PSI it popped at. He then recorded it and kept a log of all the different tests. 

Check out Fustis on Amazon. 

https://www.amazon.com/Eagle-WE722-Stainless-Fusti-Silver/dp/B01HRCP0VM/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1542655633&sr=8-6&keywords=fusti

Or you can pull stems out of half barrels, tougher to clean, but they are a handy size to have.

I'd recommend checking with a local farmer to see who they buy there bins, augers, elevators, etc.. from instead of direct from manufacturer. I contacted an ag millwright near me and and I had quotes for bins, elevators, pneumatic system and augers within a few days. Plus they might have a used one that will work for a fraction of the price.

Could be way off base, but did you check the flow of your 3 way valves and make sure they are set right? It is tough to see but it looks like it could be possible to have the first 3 way valve bypassing the column, but the top of the column open, forcing hot vapor into the top of the column, instead of the bottom.

I heard from a beer guy, that for "neutral oak" they steam the barrels, then bung them up. As the barrel cools down it pulls a vacuum in the barrel, sucking the wine out of the wood. Pull the bung and dump, and repeat until the liquid coming out is mostly water.