Removing Sulphur Byproducts
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to remove sulphur byproducts in a mainly stainless still. The discussions on the silver deposits, yeast byproducts, etc in the other thread are very interesting, but I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to pre-treat or go through a double distill process.
My understanding is the compounds react with the copper to form copper sulphate, and break down any h2s etc which remains on the copper.
Concept one would be to add copper sulphate at 5mg/L similar to commercial wine during the ferment to clean up the low wines, which will not be picked up by the distillation.
Concept two would be to run 100% reflux through a copper packed column until it’s deposited on the copper, then change over to the bubble plate or pot configuration.
Concept three is more basic - just fit a short copper-packed section below the plates to clean up, aiming for the same effect as copper construction.
Anyone have experience with something like this?
Comments
I played around with copper sulphate a bit.
What I found was best performance was found when you could rack off the precipitate. Meaning - using it on the strip, and not the base wash, and racking before doing the spirit run.
It’s easy to run dosage trials on small samples of strip, then just scale up once you figure out how many mg/l you need.
This should be considered a rescue operation, and not standard practice.
My thinking too, but if you are dealing with someone else's wine with a fault it's different to making wine with a fault. When distillation is the goal, better fermentation practices are your first steps.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
By the way, copper sulfate is poison and looks like energy drink when mixed up to solution. Don’t keep it around, and certainly not in anything that looks like a bottle.
Very interesting - thank you. I imagine the commercial guys have tricks like this which make sense if you’re playing with a lot of product and you don’t want to throw out a bad batch, but for my scale I’ll prob just rinse & retry.
My brewing background means the ferment isn’t too bad, but I’m always looking to learn the intricacies of this.
If you think about it in some kinda way, the juice is the cheapest bit compared to all of the capital expenses combined with actual operating costs of running at the pro level.
I'd bet it pays better to just move on to the next properly prepared batch more often than not unless you have a proper rectifier and a user friendly CIP protocol.
And enough experience to know where the line is lol.
StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America
I’m going low tech and chucking two copper scrubbies from a spare packed column into a 200mm extension below the plates. Why? Because I have it and then I won’t keep thinking about it