Wastes - liquid discharges

[stilldownunder]

G'day

Am in final stage of business plan here in the land down under (Australia), have location identified, local development application ready to go, license app ready to go and have a small sticking point causing us to go round in circles.

Our liquid waste (stillage) will need to be either pumped out and dumped at our local waste management service OR used as irrigation water for the vineyard we're co-locating with. Hiccup here is we need an analysis of what's in the stillage for our local department to allow us to do either (note we don't have access to the sewer otherwise that would be our course of action. We're looking at discharging 3-5000 litres per week max(approx 1000ish gallons).

Any suggestions to get past this (anyone willing to share some stillage analysis would be greatly appreciated?) as we can't even generate some stillage for analysis ourselves as that would be illegal to run a still....

Many thanks!

Nathan

[Denver Distiller]

What are you distilling?

[delaware_phoenix]

What you put into the still dictates what comes out. If you put grapes in, you get very cooked grapes out. If you put grains in, you get very cooked grains out. Also some percentage of dead yeast (quite small, but larger than you put in). If you don't distill on the grape/grain, you get very cooked grape juice/grain juice out.

One change will be in pH, tends downward. So if the municipal system can't handle the quantity of liquid at that pH you may need to bump it up towards neutral. You may want to do that a bit anyway as your pipes will be happier.

From the still your stillage will be HOT. So you'll need to cool it, and have a big enough basin to put it.