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Carbon In Finished Product


Jessica Jewell

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I have recently bottled a couple batches of vodka only to find carbon settling out in the bottom of the bottles. At the time of bottling, and even after letting the bottles rest for a week, everything is crystal clear. The strange part is that when we transport bottles to make a delivery, carbon will settle out sometime during the trip. This doesn't seem to make any sense considering that during transportation there is extra vibration and warmer temperatures, both conditions which should cause most particulate matter to dissolve, not precipitate. Any thoughts on why this might be happening or how I can test for dissolved carbon in the shop?

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I have recently bottled a couple batches of vodka only to find carbon settling out in the bottom of the bottles. At the time of bottling, and even after letting the bottles rest for a week, everything is crystal clear. The strange part is that when we transport bottles to make a delivery, carbon will settle out sometime during the trip. This doesn't seem to make any sense considering that during transportation there is extra vibration and warmer temperatures, both conditions which should cause most particulate matter to dissolve, not precipitate. Any thoughts on why this might be happening or how I can test for dissolved carbon in the shop?

Are you making your vodka from scratch (raw materials?) What carbon filtering process do you employ. If you are simply adding water to spirit produced by someone else,then there is a filtration problem. Bottom line is that my guess is that somewhere, someone is not filtering out all of the activated carbon.

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Hi Don, Jess and I have ultimately solved the problem by adding another filter to the process. In the interest of sleeping well at night we installed a 1-micron sediment filter in series with our activated carbon filter which gets rid of absolutely everything and has resulted in crystal clear final product. We distill our own product, so the u"dissolved carbon" was coming from our carbon filter, but wasn't showing itself until driving it around for a while (aka adding vibration and heat to the mix) which was infinitely frustrating since these two components should be working in the other direction with regard to solubility. We have a clear final product but are still wondering how driving the vodka around would precipitate/settle any rogue carbon dust out of the vodka to the bottom of the bottle.

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Hi Don, Jess and I have ultimately solved the problem by adding another filter to the process. In the interest of sleeping well at night we installed a 1-micron sediment filter in series with our activated carbon filter which gets rid of absolutely everything and has resulted in crystal clear final product. We distill our own product, so the u"dissolved carbon" was coming from our carbon filter, but wasn't showing itself until driving it around for a while (aka adding vibration and heat to the mix) which was infinitely frustrating since these two components should be working in the other direction with regard to solubility. We have a clear final product but are still wondering how driving the vodka around would precipitate/settle any rogue carbon dust out of the vodka to the bottom of the bottle.

Cool. Glad you solved the problem.

We pass spirit prior to bottling through a .25 micron filter to ensure we have no issue or the common "floaties." Part of our current Enolmaster filler.

Don

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