Spent Grain Separation and Removal

[Stumpy's]

Hi All,

We've run into a bit of an issue in our process; spent grain removal. We are currently stripping all of our products through a continuous column still with perforated plates. Needless to say, it doesn't like grain (I've taken a couple corn and beer baths already!) We are currently milling our grain with a 3.175mm screen in a hammer mill and have plans to move to a screen that is sub 1mm.

The question. For those of you that are separating you wash and grain, what methods are you using? Do you find it effective? Pros and cons? Out of necessity, we built a gravity sieve but I know there must be a more efficient way (oil press, centrifugal sifter, trommel, etc.) I find that our little contraption removes quite a bit of wash but still requires some pressing (by hand) to get the grain close to dry.

Also, we are removing the grain after fermentation. Thoughts? I've considered removing right after cooling the mash.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Adam

[OldSpye]

I haven't built it yet, but here's an idea I had, if you want to try. I call it the "False Top" (as opposed to "false bottom") and the idea is specifically to deal with corn, which doesn't like traditional grain-in techniques.

Basically, You take a properly constructed / modified false bottom and, once you're done with the mash, lower it into the mash tun from the top and apply sufficient pressure such that it squeezes all the liquid up through the holes. Once you "hit bottom", i.e. can't get any more downward motion due to the mass of spent grain on the bottom, you pump the beer out of the kettle. All that's left is a block of sweet, sticky corn.

If you want, you can "sparge" in this manner as well. Once you've pumped off the beer, remove the plate, add water, mix for a bit and repeat the process.

[Absinthe Pete]

I didn't get a chance to read this entire things carefully, but off the top of my head just be careful when you're dealing with distilling on grain and perf plates you run the risk of plugging up your still and creating pressure which is a super dangerous thing. If your still plugged up and created pressure it would easily blow an entire building apart.

[PeteB]

I haven't built it yet, but here's an idea I had, if you want to try. I call it the "False Top" (as opposed to "false bottom") and the idea is specifically to deal with corn, which doesn't like traditional grain-in techniques.

Basically, You take a properly constructed / modified false bottom and, once you're done with the mash, lower it into the mash tun from the top and apply sufficient pressure such that it squeezes all the liquid up through the holes. Once you "hit bottom", i.e. can't get any more downward motion due to the mass of spent grain on the bottom, you pump the beer out of the kettle. All that's left is a block of sweet, sticky corn.

If you want, you can "sparge" in this manner as well. Once you've pumped off the beer, remove the plate, add water, mix for a bit and repeat the process.

What you have described here is a big coffee plunger or "French press"

Give it a go, hope you have more luck than I did.

I found that the screen still blocks, press very slowly and lift screen when it blocks, maybe it will work with corn but I couldn't get it to work with rye.

Try a sample with a coffee plunger and let me know how you get on

Pete

[JohninWV]

First, if you are running a column, make sure that sucker has at least (1) pressure relief valve. Ours has (3). We run our column with grain that's gone through a 1/8"screen.

Second, if you take your mill screen to such a small size, I have no idea how you will separate it. Maybe it's your intent to leave it in and not filter it will that size. Less than 1mm will be virtually impossible to separate, IMO.

[Stumpy's]

Yeah. I'm hoping that milling finer will take care of all of our issues and we can just go grain-in through the whole process. Working on hunting down a different hammer mill at the moment!!

[Thejollydodger]

I haven't built it yet, but here's an idea I had, if you want to try. I call it the "False Top" (as opposed to "false bottom") and the idea is specifically to deal with corn, which doesn't like traditional grain-in techniques.

Basically, You take a properly constructed / modified false bottom and, once you're done with the mash, lower it into the mash tun from the top and apply sufficient pressure such that it squeezes all the liquid up through the holes. Once you "hit bottom", i.e. can't get any more downward motion due to the mass of spent grain on the bottom, you pump the beer out of the kettle. All that's left is a block of sweet, sticky corn.

If you want, you can "sparge" in this manner as well. Once you've pumped off the beer, remove the plate, add water, mix for a bit and repeat the process.

This is almost exactly what we do but we don't use column stills for grain and corn as we are just too damn old fashioned. With the finer mixtures I find drawing off the top into a multi-filter system the best. Basically we would dump into a few 55s, have a large, 1" copper plate which almost fit the barrel with a few barbell weights on top and syphon off they escaping liquid into a series of sand and coffee filters leaving us clean and grain free. Then we just dry off the nice, compacted grain disk at the bottom and move it to either be sold as pig feed or use it as fertilizer. You could set up a few of these or something like them to feed your column still but that would take a lot of continuous work to keep it fed so in practicality it might not be efficient.

Then again I could totally be off and not picturing what you are asking and if this is so I will just use the normal distiller's fallback and say it was the moonshine talking.