Smells and waste water composition

[Northeast Louis]

Hi everyone,

We're currently moving forward with our project to launch a distillery in a village and they have some questions for us.

First, we plan on working with two 300 liter stills and a 600 liter mash tun with two 600 liter fermenters.  At capacity we'll probably always have the fermenters working and will be running the stills 5 days a week (mostly producing gin).  The place we're looking at is close to a residential area and we want to be good neighbours.

First question is should we be concerned about smells getting to houses roughly 100 feet from our roof exhaust?  If it's the case, are there solutions to the odor problem if it occurs?

Second question is regarding the waste water from the stillage.  We plan on distilling on the grain and give the solids to a local farmer. What about he waste water? Is it hard to process at the water treatment plant or we should not be too concerned with this?  The same question goes for the waste water from the GNS stillage we would use to make the gin.

If anyone has any insight on this it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot,

Louis

 

[RobertS]

Our waste treatment facility used to be okay with processing our load but is having us retrofit a solution for BOD and pH control. You'd probably be best off looking into a cistern and anaerobic digester right off the bat, even if the local waste treatment gives the go-ahead to skip them. Upside to the digester is that you can create bio fuel and fertilizer as valuable byproducts rather than having a cost of disposal, assuming the economics work out. A cistern would allow you to send neutralized waste water into the system on a known schedule, rather than sending large amounts of acid or base randomly as you clean your facility.

For smell, I'd be more concerned with your waste grain. Our farmer picks up once a week and summer winds are...not pleasant. I don't know about complaints from neighbors, but it generally blows right into our bay doors and is not appreciated by staff. Enclosed storage would contain the smell, or more regular pickups would keep it from happening in the first place.