Gin Basket Sizing

[Handlebend]

Fellas, 

We are new to the site and distilling. We are currently planning our distillery and have a 250 gallon pot still in the works. We want to add a gin basket just before the condenser and are struggling on how big it needs to be. After digging through the internet it appears most people are using 20-40 grams of botanicals per liter of neutral spirit. I have some juniper berries on hand and measured the volume 20 grams fills, then scaled this up to our 250 gallons. According to my math we would need an outrageous sized gin basket, something around 7,000 cubic inches. This would be close to a 5' tall 12" diameter gin basket. Is this outrageously large? We are not planning on running a deflag, so we will have to have the full charge of botanicals in the basket from start to finish of the run. Any help is appreciated!

[Brewstilla]

All depends what you plan to vapor infuse. Most will have the bulk of their botanicals in their boiler with base alcohol. For reference, for a gin run on our 300 gallon still, we use about 80 pounds of bontanicals, and of that 3 pounds goes in the gin basket. Our gin basket is basically the size of two 5 gallon buckets stacked vertically, and we come no where near using it all. Now if we were doing an all vapor infused gin, it would be quite undersized. There's a million ways to skin a cat when it comes to gin, play around and plan accordingly. Hope this helps

[Kindred Spirits]

Welcome to the forum and to distilling.

Like brewstilla said, most people put the larger quantity botanicals in the boiler, things like juniper/coriander. I highly recommend putting your botanicals in brew bags in the boiler though. They make cleanup much easier, and work like giant gin tea bags. If you are doing all vapor infusion for your trials now, you will note a change in the final flavor of your gin if you switch to some in boiler infusion.

Smaller more delicate botanicals that you don't want "stewed" in the boiler like florals and other light flavors benefit from vapor infusion. I guarentee if you pull the big components like juniper and coriander from your batch and scale up, you'll see you shouldn't need an enourmous gin basket.

 

[Silk City Distillers]

Your math is in-line for vapor-infused gin with no macerated botanicals (that can be excluded from the basket).  It's quite a large volume.  At that scale, dynamics of vapor flow through the basket is going to be a concern.  A tall, columnar basket might not be ideal at that scale, without a mechanism to ensure vapor distribution).  A shorter, squat basket might be more ideal to ensure you don't get vapor channeling and dead spots in tall column, or having your botanicals get packed down under their own saturated weight.

There's a good photo from Hendricks that shows a great example of a an extremely large squat-style basket for a similar sized still (in this case, 1000 liters).

[Handlebend]

Thank you guys! This was super helpful! I was looking right over the fact that most people add the main botanicals in the boiler. Duh. I should have realized that!

[Cosmic.Distiller]

On 11/8/2022 at 3:01 PM, Handlebend said:

Thank you guys! This was super helpful! I was looking right over the fact that most people add the main botanicals in the boiler. Duh. I should have realized that!

Yup, basically think anything dried and hard, like various spices, generally go in the boiler, while more fragile botanicals (lavender definitely, and fresh herbs) should go in the gin basket to avoid an "over steeped" bitter quality or a gnarly cooked flavor (anyone have oversteeped lavender tea? yeah not good, don't do that to your gin).