Welcome!
Be part of our community & join our international next generation forum now!
Categories
In this Discussion
- CothermanDistilling November 2019
- crozdog November 2019
- DonMateo July 2023
- Fiji_Spirits August 2023
- FloridaCracker September 2019
- GD50 August 2019
- gixxerpilot750 April 2019
- grim August 2023
- JayTee November 2018
- lowball November 2018
- punkin September 2019
- Raoul_Duke February 2018
- richard July 2023
- Sam October 2019
- Smaug August 2023
- Unsensibel September 2019
- zymurgybob October 2019
Comments
Or plumbing
That's it? Car rim diameters?
Rest of the world is metric with distance, weight, temperature, energy, force etc but imperial is here to stay because of car rim diameters? ;)
Just pulling your chain, i'm a changeover child and still use feet and inches for some things.
The barrel is a universal measure in breweries. No need to be vexed, if you do a 100l conversion in your head you'll be close.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
Jeez. When I first started taking chemistry in the 1950's, I figured we'd be a metric nation in just a few months. And then...
Anyway, corns, roods, chains, acre feet and pecks are just so intuitive.
Zymurgy Bob, a simple potstiller
my book, Making Fine Spirits
I love the Chain, totally impractical, created in the 15th century, and still used to measure distance on railways in the UK to this day.
1 chain is 22 yards or the distance between wickets in cricket, no one could ever tell me which came first.
Never knew that, but suddenly I feel a lot smarter.
Zymurgy Bob, a simple potstiller
my book, Making Fine Spirits
Latest iteration of the steam heating of molasses setup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_GqzbPs52o
great work mate!
@CothermanDistilling the level of ingenuity you guys show always amazes me, you guys developing your own process control systems like you do is really impressive. I hope one day I can get to Florida and see it for myself!
You're going to get spoiled quick when the little skid mount shows up next week @CothermanDistilling
BTW, temp read out on the HMI is clearly not from boiling liquid lol. Tested the probes with a lighter is all.
StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America
@CothermanDistilling I gotta tell you. Weighing the boiler to see how much water to add was a stroke of genius. I woulda not thought of that for a long time.
Thank you again for sharing your processes with us. I get so many great ideas from you.
Lots of guys won’t share their processes with the public for fear of folks copying them. In my experience even if I copied everything you did I still couldn’t make it work where I’m at with the resources I have. It really is up to the distiller to identify both the resources and the limitations of his locality and make something that’s profitable out of those circumstances.
You have that brewery down the street to help with mashing and stuff and I get top grade raw sugar and molasses for next to nothing.
looking good @Smaug
No problem, I learned that I actually don't have to add water, I can stay an inch above the elements... that was a huge time saver... I also use air conditioning unit condensate water, it does not leave the deposits my carbon filtered water does, and I have a good supply in FL 10 months a year...
Oh, yes, I have 3 1000L batches all ready!!!!
We want videos and stuff!!! Lol
Just been re-reading the mollasses posts and have to give both Michael @CothermanDistilling and @grim serious Kudos.
On a side note, I was watching one of the London Gin guild videos where they asked the floor to blind taste a variety of Neutral Spirit bases as to which one they thought the best.
The winning two were;
Grain based neutral spirits they thought were comparably harsh to mouthfeel. Found this very interesting.
I can't imagine molasses-based neutral could ever be neutral.
I did once aspire to try to make a tiki-gin. Something maybe reminiscent of falernum. That, for sure, would need a molasses-based spirit.
I know right?
Here is some data from Steric Systems Inc.
BDAS GC Complete Analysis - Steric Systems Report (PDF)
Evidently, they are able to treat spirits by exposing to some kind of steric reaction that accelerates a transformation or break down of constituents that would otherwise be undesirable. They are not at all using words like rapid aging so this is not the same thing as what Brian from Lost Spirits has done.
The system seems to be gaining traction.
I haven't yet done any side by side comparisons.
StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America
I was once in Lima Peru where I met a friend for a couple of drinks at a swank hotel and I pulled out a couple of my gins and a couple of whiskeys. I had the waiter come over and bring some glasses and ice. I had a spare glass that I filled full of whiskey and sent it to the bar tender. About 5 minutes later the waiter brought out 3 gins and one pisco that were artesenal spirits made in Peru. Anyway I know that my gin was made from NGS made from wheat as that is how most NGS is made in Argentina and I buy a famous label that is super neutral and make great gins. Anyway I tried the three local gins and on the bottles it said they were made with Nuetral made from cane sugar. Which was obvious because of the location. Two of them were from Manaus which is in the amazon basin and there is no wheat growing there. The gins were OK but many of them were fruity gins which really dont inspire me.
Anyway all of these gins distinctly had a very very slight rum flavor and the were also just a touch to sweet. My gins on the other hand were neutral and clean like gin should be. So yes your right Grim.
I am sure you could probably make a super neutral, neutral from cane or white rum but you would have to run it through a 16 plate column a few times.
I call bullshit on the process.
Those results feel completely manufactured to me. There is no way they could have achieved such a perfect separation of "good and bad" constituents like that. No no no, no way to reduce only the bad things, and simultaneously increase only the good things.
Why are there two entirely different constituent lists? Congeners are very similar between the two, differing only really in concentration (and obviously barrel contribution).
The smoking gun there is Phenethyl Alcohol, how could this process reduce it by 79% in neutral, but enhance it by 66% in bourbon?
Why? Because it's considered a positive in bourbon (floral, rose, honey), but a negative in neutral?
I mean, come on, this is bordering on alchemy pseudoscience.
It can process 1000 gallons an hour? Proprietary electromagnetic process? Patent pending? Secrecy?
How, exactly, can you remove a chemical from the mixture, if there is absolutely no separation happening? There is no waste stream. You can't. Ok, so we have to be only facilitating reactions by introducing some kind of energy (they already state they aren't using UV, Ultrasonic, etc). Ok, so back to the proprietary electromagnetic process (which reeks of BS).
Even from the perspective of facilitating chemical reactions - show me where in the data you see the reaction pre-cursors being reduced in this mixture? Ok, so this reaction is synthesizing enough vanillin to double the concentration? Where's it coming from? In aging, it's coming from reactions that start with eugenol and guaiacol. I see in the data eugenol going UP?!?! Ok. Maybe it's condensing ethyl vanillin back into vanillin? Nope. That's going up too. Guiacol not listed. Maybe Syringol? Nope, that's up too. Based on where Eugenol and Syringol are falling on that list, why would guaiacol not increase. So we're magically producing vanillin from nothing?
Steaming pile of...
Can play this game all day.
Whiskey Lactone is not a reaction product creating during aging, it's a naturally occurring chemical that exists within the oak, and it's existence in whiskey is simply due to it being dissolved during the aging period. It's an extraction product, plain and simple. The levels of whiskey lactone are directly related to aging time and the starting concentration in the oak barrel.
How is this process synthesizing new whiskey lactone? It's existence in whiskey is not a result of a chemical reaction.
I guess it's possible to synthesize it, here's the formula:
A process for producing cis-whiskey-lactone represented by formula (A), which is one of the flavoring components of whiskey or wine, selectively and readily, which comprises hydrolyzing the lactone part of trans-whiskey-lactone with potassium hydroxide, adding an alkyl group to the product by the reaction with isopropyl bromide to form isopropyl (3S, 4S)-4-hydroxy-3-methyloctanoate, reacting the formed ester with diethyl azodicarboxylate in the presence of both triphenylphosphine and an azodicarboxylate in the presence of both triphenylphosphine and an azodicarboxylic ester to form isopropyl (3S, 4S)-4-(3', 5'-dinitrobenzoyloxy)-3-methyloctanoate, and hydrolying the formed ester with a 2 % aqueous sodium hydroxide solution.
...Pretty sure that's not happening in the machine.
You know, that points to two different samples being submitted for testing.
The dude has been at a few of the conference trade show floor.
I'd love to be a spectator and see how they address all of your observations @grim.
Will you be in Vegas for ADI?
StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America
Last wash I did with mollasses in a sugar based wash seemed to indicate that anything more than about 3L of mollasses in a 2000l wash would start to affect flavor. At 5L/2000L it was markedly apparent and difficult to cut, distill or filter out. YMMV depending on sugar type used.