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Waste water from RO system for whiskey mash?


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Are you in NA? If so have you ever gotten extensive reporting back on the profile of your ground water? I’m assuming you don’t know your ground waters true contents because most people don’t. How’s your aquifer? Does it have any iron colonizing bacteria in it? How’s your Biofilm activity? Did you know this is not regulated by government and is a growing problem through the country? Fermentables in the water? Run off from AG? If you’d like answers to these questions I have a resource for you to use PM me

 

i know the answers to these questions in my aquifer. That’s why I absolutely don’t use my RO effluent for mash water. Plumb it to your toilets and a hose station. Voila. 

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  • 10 months later...
On 1/29/2021 at 3:58 PM, whiskeytango said:

Does anyone use the mineral concentrate waste water from their RO system to make mash with? One would think that having the extra mineral content in it would help with the yeast nutrients.  

What you could/should use the concentrate for will vary, because the quality of the concentrate will vary depending upon the quality of your feedwater.  We have customers whose concentrate is better quality that other customer's feedwater, but that is definitely not a given.

Russ

 

 

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Seems interesting, why not just send the concentrate for testing and see where things fall?

If you have decent input water, it could absolutely work.  While sediment is largely irrelevant in mashing (unless its iron or something), being carbon treated is going to provide a little bit of benefit in reducing some of those troubling components (VOC, etc).   Really though, won't know until you test.

Also, if it's a portion of your total mash, and not entirely, you'll technically be diluting the concentrate with water - which might swing things back into acceptable ranges (the solution to pollution is dilution). 

We now store our non-contact cooling water for mashing and cleaning, it's saved a ton of waste water.  In our case we could easily re-route the RO waste water to the holding tanks.  Might just need to give it a test, I like saving water.

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If the primary concern is reduced water use by your RO system...

How hard/soft is your feedwater?  If your feedwater is soft/softened, and you're using a typically configured residential RO system (something like a 20% recovery - or a 4:1 concentrate to permeate ratio) you can reduce your waste water flow considerably.

If you have a commercial RO system, hopefully a water analysis was done when the system was first installed.  Typically part of that process was limiting concentrate flow to the extent possible, including recirculation.

Russ

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