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White powder on bottom of bottle after proofing.
Had this happen twice now with white powder on the bottle bottom after proofing down. Two different still's and two different washes. This time i proofed with Evian water and Fiji water the time before that. One rum the other neutral. One was a copper column and now a dash 1 perf plate with a little copper mesh above the condenser. Going to take a guess and say it's from the water (chlorine?) or is it suspended salts / and or safe to drink?
Best Answers
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Evian and Fiji water both have high mineral content, some minerals do not dissolve in alcohol and will settle out of suspension. Calcium is usually the culprit. It is safe to drink. There is a whiskey from a craft Brewer/Distiller from TX that has the same issue using natural creek water but it hasn't effected their scorings in competitions.
Distilled water will impart no flavour or cloudiness to your proofing stage, and the beauty of it is your already own a still to make your own. Some Crafters choose mineral content water or natural sources to impart flavour to there alcohol but if you ask me its usually unnoticeable to the palate of most drinkers. Hope this helped.
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Yep water ain't water, l had to swap the brand of water l used to dilute and ended up with poor results. Just a hint of cloudyness and perhaps almost sediment, with a couple of bottles showing a wisperr of wispy trails when held up to the light. A shake and it disappeared. Tastes OK. It's definitely the different water. Was using a brand called moores chemical and bacteria free 5lt, no longer available so tried supermarket 10lt spring water with the above mentioned results. Instead of testing l have diluted about 150lt of product ! Fark en hell, now what.
I do have a double filter system for our town water that is used for the fidge ice and drinking water, going to try that next.
Fadge
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Buy an RO unit and be done. You work too god damn hard mashing, fermenting, distilling to get to the stage of proofing, using the best quality equipment money can buy to fuck up with the water. imho ;)
Distilling your own water would be ideal but it will cost you if youre paying 26c per kW like I am.
RO water is kinda slow, wastes water, will cost you a fraction of store bought water and shit all over your filtered water... but sure is better than cloudy spirit with floaties <3
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Your choice of water isn't going to help with chill haze, although less water certainly might (higher proof, less propensity for chill haze). If it really bothers you, you can always chill filter, but that's always a trade off.
You need to understand, it's very cold in the freezer, the tasty esters are simply huddling together to try to stay warm. Can you blame them?
Answers
thanks @MikeAggie good to know and i like the distilled water idea.
Yep, RO water always did me good.
Then I moved to China with all the pollution and, guess what?, the water is great. Never a bit of anything in the booze... fancy that.
In USA I had calcium rich well water and bought "spring water" from WalMart to cut my booze with.
My RO water filter did the same good job without lugging bottles from WallyWorld.
I figure it was the carbon filter on the RO machine that did the trick. The rest of the machine was probably just hype.
Yeah I agree - There is a lot to be said about diluting with highly purified water. While I know many expound on the glorious flavors associated with their local waters, or even go out of their way to use imported waters, I find that in many cases there are just as many negatives as there are positives, especially for our uses. Usually problems don't present themselves until well after the fact, and troubleshooting is beyond the ability of most typical users (we can't analyze the precipitate in any way really). Even worse, commercial waters can (and usually do) still contain chlorine, chloramine, or bromines as antibacterial agents.
You can go one step further and add deionization as well, and make your own highly purified water, nearing the kind of lab-grade water that might be used for pharmaceutical or other sensitive processes.
This isn't usually a big investment, and if you do get one of these units, don't ever bother buying water at the store again, the stuff you are making yourself is superior in every way.
Water for mashing is a different story all together, since the yeast require a number of trace minerals, you don't want to have to start with purified water and add back. Although you could, if you really wanted to engineer your source water to very specific parameters. I've heard of some folks in the craft beer market doing this to simulate specific spring waters.
A vitamin pill?
I've been plagued on and off with precipitate (cloudy in brown spirits) since i started. It seems to show at certain times of the year, not always in the cold months either.
I use dodgy town water that's delivered from out dam and treated and now use demineralised water from the supermarket to cut. The bottles still look like they are full of sea weed after a night in the freezer.
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I had the same trouble with bottled water but the water from my well it always comes out clear and we have alot of limestone in it but its good to drink and works well for proofing never clouds.
I'm with the RO lobby. We had issues with our water. A spring off the Cotswold Hills running through limestone and Fullers Earth. Tasted great but left a bit of limescale inside the bottle where it dried - not good. Fitted an RO fillter and the problem has gone.
I still think RO is overhyped til proven wrong. An RO always has a carbon filter that I Think does all the real work.
The RO membrane is always after the carbon and spun fiber filers.
I used a Reverse Osmosis machine with great success in cutting my booze but can't help but to feel that the filters were all that were necessary. The RO (membrane) part of the equipment certainly did meter and slow the water going through the system, I'm quite sure of that. And that metering could be the key to keeping the water quality so high. Slowly percolating through the replaceable filters. (I changed mine every time change in the US - twice a year).
Production was painfully slow, waste water very high but amazing water quality was produced.
Without the membrane to slowly meter the water through the filters, you'd need to devise another way to meter the water slowly through but the filters are just so very cheap and easy to get.
I don't think true RO and its expense is necessary. I think the filters are the real horsepower to good water.
No one size fits all, your filtration solution will address problems with your source water. Some places might need more sediment filtration, but not so much carbon, others will have little use for sediment, but require significant carbon.
A decent all-around system would have a sediment followed by two carbon filters, progressively tighter, followed by a RO membrane. If you are on a well system, you might consider adding two sediment filters. City water high in chlorine or chloramines, might want to err on the side of more carbon.
Most RO membranes are rated based on production rates, it's pretty common for lower cost systems to have abysmally low flow rate membranes, something like 25 gallons a day, which is plenty, given you let it run all day long, but for point of use, it's a trickle. It used to be that the higher flow rates were had poorer rejection, but they've improved quite a bit. You can find excellent Dow membranes that can do 100gpd and other third parties that can push even higher yet.
One thing to keep in mind with these is that you can adjust the flow passed the membrane to yield a lower rejection rate if necessary. If you don't want to take your water down to lab grade, you can run the filter less efficiently, with less waste.
If you are seeing precipitates, you'll want at least RO, it'll begin to remove mineral contaminants, metals, salts etc.
If you still see precipitates after RO, you'll want to go with deionization as well, this will remove sodium and calcium ions, chlorides, sulfates, magnesium, etc. These ions are the smallest impurities, and can pass through an RO, but they can't pass through a DI. After this stage, you are left with pretty much nothing but pure h2o.
The other thing to remember, is you don't need to cut with 100% purified water, you can back blend in some of your local water if you feel it carries benefits. If a 50/50 mix keeps from precipitating, nothing wrong with that.
Excellent post @grim as always. Its easy to forget that water is so different for everyone.
And blending the proofing water is an amazing idea. I'd have never thought of that.
Sorry to disagree @lloyd. We had issues with limescale. At the time we were just using a large activated carbon filter but we were still getting limescale deposits on the inside of the bottles. Installed a fairly small RO filter and 'bingo' Goodbye limescale!
me... I removed the pressure tank, RO membrane, and flow limiter from an RO system that started putting out very chlorophenolic water, and has worked like a charm, have bought 3 triple filers just like it since, use one sediment and 2 carbon filters...
My well water comes in at 50 ppm hardness, PH of 7.0 and a hint of Iron. I use a filter system that starts with a 5 micron particle filter, then goes to 1 micron particle filter, the thru a KD-85 carbon filter. Best thing would be to have your supply water analyzed, then come up with a suitable filtering/treatment method that gets you where you need to be. The Carbon filters will not help with hardness but will with other things such as Iron.
Have you tried your well water without filtering it @captainshooch? Would like to know if 50ppm would make any difference to taste and appearance. Maybe you don't even need to touch it. I was under the impression carbon would help with hardness/salts. Don't quote me:)
Yes @cunnyfunt . Taste is fine, I just try to remove the iron more than anything else. 50 ppm is good but bourbon recipes call for the addition of gypsum to adjust hardness to between 150-200 ppm. guess that's what makes Kentuky's spring waters ideal for Bourbon, no iron and the hardness. The carbon filter I use is for the iron and I am pretty sure it does not help with hardness.