Micro Distillery Calculator

[Fazus]

Hi,

 

We are a group of guys who are planning on opening a Nordic Craft Distillery in Texas. We have looked into equipment and we know more or less which suppliers we would like to use as well as annual initial bottle capacity. I have been in the process to build a capacity calculation on what equipment we need but I wanted to reach out to see if anyone on here has already done something similar and if you would be willing to share?

It would be nice to have something where you can put in your annual volume targets and calculate it all the way back to the mash. Of course yield will vary greatly but to build the business case it would be good to have something where we can do a rough calculation.

 

We are primarily going to focus on single malt whiskey long term but we are also planning on making Akvavit, rum and vodka, hybrid still.

 

I appreciate anything you can support us with.

 

/J

[bluefish_dist]

For planning I would use a 10:1 reduction.  So if you start with 100 gallons in a fermenter, you will have about 10 gallons or 50 bottles finished product for whites/vodka.  Barrel aged whiskey will be less, maybe 15:1.  

Pretty easy to work your way back from there.   Just take your bottles per week, divide by 5 for gallons, then decide how many still runs you want to do.  Divide your gallons by still runs, then multiply by 10 or 15 to get your still size.   Figure 2 week turn on a fermenter.   So take still runs per week X still size X 2 and that gives you the fermenter capacity needed.  Then match the mash tun to the fermenter size. Might not be perfect, but it will get you close.  

 

The hard part is getting sales volume.   Equipment is all about capital expenditure and easy to calculate.