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In this Discussion
- CothermanDistilling September 2015
- crozdog September 2015
- DonMateo September 2015
- fadge September 2015
- FloridaCracker September 2015
- FullySilenced September 2015
- grim September 2015
- Harry September 2015
- jacksonbrown September 2015
- Kapea September 2015
- Moonshine September 2015
- Nardy November 2015
- punkin September 2015
- Smaug September 2015
- Sunshine September 2015
- Unsensibel September 2015
Comments
Buying a still is the single easiest part of opening a commercial distillery. The gents here have made that a nearly trivial process. No, really, it's that easy. Just open the wallet and it shows up.
Once you've spent all your money, you'll realize how easy and minor the still purchase was in comparison to all the other headaches.
Methinks there's gonna be plenty who fall by the wayside in the near future. Second-hand stillin' gear will be a dime a dozen. Stands to reason, if everyone is trying to go 'commercial', the sector gets flooded. When there's a glut of any commodity, the price crashes and producers go broke. Simple econonics. People making their own booze in the kitchen will win out. Just like making tea or coffee.
I wonder if I can put a boka head on my coffee machine?
Sure you guys are right. I am planning on doing this right although where I live there isnt a craft distiller making whiskey for about 900kms and lots of tourists.
In the US, approximately 51% of manufacturing startups fail by year 4. So you've got a little worse chance than a coin flip to make it by 5. If you are heavily focused on the retail aspect, that is even worse, about 53% of those will fail. Granted, this isn't talking about making a profit, only not shutting the doors, so the numbers are optimistic.
I don't see any reason craft spirits would be immune to these general trends, in most industries the 4/5 year success mark hovers near 50%. You don't attempt this unless you are comfortable with the fact that failure is likely. Only about 1/3rd of new businesses make it to the 10 year mark. Hell, 10 years is a good run though.
On the flip side, a 50% success rate is a good starting point if you can stack the deck in your favor and you are going in eyes wide open. The risk is though, that you think you should be on the right side of the bell curve, when in really you are on the left (but too dumb to know it).
By the way though, anyone who has actually sat down and run the numbers on a bottle, the profit is a pittance unless you can move serious volume.
I think I've said this before, I don't know how anyone can afford to startup with less than 1000 liters.
I need a client to pay my invoice too. Just think of the shit I could have if someone else was picking up the tab. Hope things work out for you, Don.
I would have disagreed with you a few years ago... completely agree now....
Favorable legislation and winning your backyard will help.
Keep the day job.
Pizza parlors and auto dealerships are every where here in the states. There is a lot of ceiling left in the industry.
StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America
true, if I could self-distribute and did not have a $4000/yr license..
there is room here for 10x the distilleries we have... but the big boys and distributors saw what craft beer did, so it won;t be easy... and physical locations is 100x more restrictive than a brewery.. but humans will overcome that...
Rent/mortgage and taxes, and insurance..., state and federal bonds.... will all be fixed costs not really dependent upon production size... it takes a LOT of runs on a 380L to generate actual profit to pay $30k/yr in simple fixed costs..
The market is astronomical, it is true. The competition is not your neighboring craft distiller, it's the big brands. If you could slice off a fraction of a percent of any given sprits type market, you are talking about real business. Increased number of entrants serves to increase awareness of options, so it's not counter productive. I don't even think there is a huge first mover benefit, in fact, probably the opposite as the first mover needs to pave the road.
If you are able to move volume through the tasting room, you can squeeze by with smaller scale, that's for sure. The distributor and retailer margins really take a big bite out of potential profits.
Realistically though, you are going to hit a point where unless you are in a year-round cruise ship port (captive tourists) you'll probably hit a wall.
@CothermanDistilling - are you guys working through a distributor yet?
My friends dad sent both of his children to college (University of Florida) by throwing pies and making a nice egg plant rollatini at his little neighborhood pizza joint.
It is possible.
StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America
we are not through a distributor yet, not enough product made, literally only 22 cases taken out of bond at this point, just trying to make sure we don't put out crap, batch 4 had a little too much what I think is ethyl acetate, so workign on getting up to 16-20 plates to get more volume out of a day's run. gotta get back to work, there is a $4000/yr state fee and a $6000 building tax payment to come up with in the next month... this is a millionaire's game that we try to sneak into ... Oh, and if my product goes to distribution, I might be lucky to make a buck or two a bottle, so 5-10,000 bottles JUST to pay the property tax and state license..
It really seems like the deck is stacked against the little guy. That $4k a year fee in Florida is horseshit. The margin on a bottle is so small and the overhead cost will keep a LOT of people from jumping in. I pretty much have a green light to move ahead on doing all of this (going legal) but the downside is killing my buzz. A friend with deep pockets is all about doing this and I am the one poo-pooing it. He throws money at different ventures every year and would love to have his name associated with a distillery but my life is fairly calm now and I don't think I could handle the 24/7 of another business. God Speed to all who jump in. I might get to that place one day but right now is not the time.
As an afterthought, I am still honing in on making my stuff the best that it can be. I can't imagine doing recipe development while trying to do the other 893,811 things associated with running a distillery.
Margin on a pizza pie is better than on a bottle sold through distributors. I slung dough for 4 years through college at a small neighborhood joint. But that's a tough racket for a whole other reason.
And now I'm hungry.
Wise guys
I'm more like I am now than I was before.
I really appreciate these comments. In my case I am only considering it because there is a huge market where I live, or at least lots of tourists. Most of the nationally made whiskey is just NGS with flavouring and its horse piss, and the labour costs are low and rent is very small. There are 4 small distilleries where I live but none are making whiskey. I am going to buy the gear and set it up work on some recipe development and get after the marketing. A professional person here in Argentina costs about US$500 per month. I know your competing against the big boys who are here as well. I am going to be making some beer as well as that stuff sells more quickly and with better margins than whiskey.
I wont be giving up my day job for a while.
Crop production in Argentina is aligned for whiskey as well. Only consideration is production of malt, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't source it. They brew beer, so it's coming from somewhere.
Let me know when I can stop by for a steak. I love a good chimichurri skirt steak.
Actually there is a guy who trained in the US at an agricultural university and he has set up a custom malting plant in BA to supply craft breweries as well as the big guys. He makes all different sorts of malt but I can get malted barley for 50 cents a kilo. He also has malted wheat, sorghum, smoked barley and many different sorts of toasted malt barley. And he will do make a malted rye as well.
I have sourced all the stuff I need I just have to start buying gear and get my clients to pay my invoices and I can start accumulating the equipment and get set up.
I live in Mendoza grim. You welcome to come by for an asado anytime. This place has the best meat in the world and some of the best wines as well. But no-one making decent whiskey. Which is a good thing.
Don it sounds like you are in the perfect place to capitalize on the market. I wouldn't worry too much about the big guys if their product sucks. Put out something really good and word will spread.
Thanks FC. Next month I start buying gear. I want to be set up and trying recipes and local tastes by January. This board is great. Thanks guys. Matt
Well I ran the new rig again yesterday, a rye whisky. I really love the separation you get from this thing, so easy to pick the cuts. Really happy with the product it's producing, but this boka head is quite slow. So @punkin you'll have another order from me this week to go down the dephleg and PC route. Hopefully that will speed things up because 1.2L/hr out of the boka is slooooooow.
If you run with the same RR on the delph it should be exactly the same speed. Clearing I'm missing something.
I thought the same thing, but apparently not. If I open the take off valve wide enough on the boka to get any sort of reasonable flow, vapor temps sky rocket, telling me that the RR isn't right. So in order to keep temps stable and as low as possible, I can't go over about 1-1.2L/hr.
Just thinking out loud here, but my thoughts on this go - If you only open the take off slightly with the boka head, you get enough reflux because you're allowing the distillate to overflow on the slanted plate, falling back down through the column (and plates). Open the valve wide to get a faster take off and not enough, if any, distillate overflows, hence why temps sky rocket.
With a dephleg, you can choose what you want to reflux right? As in, drop the cooling water enough after equilibration to only allow heads for example, and then those heads vapours that come through come as fast as your boiler is producing them. Then when heads runs out, drop the cooling flow enough to allow hearts to come through, at the rate the boiler is producing them. And so on. So the dephleg and PC route would run faster.
Or am I missing something?
Your getting it just fine.
The CM on the otherhand can easily run as slow as the LM.
I reckon most running an open flame with ham and egg flame control could easily overwhelm the coil on most LMs. And with out a PC most certainly loose product at the business end.
StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America
The temp goes up because the ABV falls, not be cause the the reflux cools it.
The CM will do exactly the same thing. Saturated vapour can only be one temp. It's BP. To get it higher you need to super heat it. Any lower and it condenses.
A deph doesn't knock out components of the vapour. Just a percentage of the total vapour.
Exactly the same way your LM diverts a certain percentage of the total reflux. One splits the vapour and the other splits the liquid but they are both just method of controlling the RR.
You're going to get a bit of a surprise if you move to CM with those assumptions but there's only one way to find out.
I think what you're actually after is another plate.
Ah well there you go, that's definitely something I had wrong then. I thought that when you backed off your dephleg cooling and started getting your first lot of vapour through, that this vapour would eventually run out and you would need to then back off your cooling more to start collecting the next fraction. I understand the BP only changes as you take off more but thought that the plates acted to 'stack' the different fractions - with the lower BP at the top of the column.
The rising temp I am talking about happens within seconds of increasing the output - not gradually as the ABV drops. So really, the issue is most likely that my 2" boka head is too small. When I increase the take off I am emptying that slanted plate and not allowing enough reflux. Does that sound right?
Not necessarily true. On my rig, once I get into hearts I let it finish out at the same rate. You could speed up the tails but I really try to separate each component of the tails and you can't do that while running flat out. At least I can't.
The LM is open to the atmosphere at two places and has no product condenser. It was only ever intended to run with RR.
The CM can run balls to the wall and the LM can not. We are not talking purity or quality of separation. We are talking about the ability to cope with more input than was ever intended to be placed upon the LM.
We seem to be talking about different things here.
StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America
We might be talking about different things?!?
RR equals reflux ratio. CM has a reflux ratio too, just like VM and what ever else. Even a pot will have a bit of reflux.
CM, VM, LM are all just different types of fractionating column and they wouldn't work with some sort of reflux.
My CM actually has a meter to measure it (rather than looking at water temps).
It's the reflux that charges the plates and the plates that fraction out the components in order of BP, exactly the same as random packing or structured packing does. The exact same processes are driving it.
If you want higher separation with a lower reflux ratio (i.e. more product for the same power in) you want a bigger column (more plates).
If you're getting vapour past your coil in an LM then you didn't design it right from the start. A bit more length or packing around it will let you knock down what ever you want.
I wasn't intending to have a pissing comp so sorry if that's how it's come across.
If you want to go with the big upgrade Nardy please do, and make sure you post up your results for all of us.
I actually think you made the right choice with the LM given you're circumstances and the solution you're after is a more efficient column.