Just fitting and preparing a RC for welding. Scary amount of welds and just how heavy it is.

Most silicone have a shelf life of 10 years although in use life can be reduced. Chances are though they will not last as long if you routinely take the joints apart. If you fit and forget, use clean in place and otherwise leave them alone, they may last a LONG time.

There's a large dairy company in the west of Ireland that produce something in the order of 10 million L of pure ethanol per annum. I believe they were 1st in the field when it came to whey fermentation. They give away very little, here's all I could I find

fermentation is preceded by ultrafiltration to remove the whey proteins (a useful product in its own right) and reverse osmosis to eliminate much of the water. By this means, the concentration of lactose is increased. After fermentation, a wash of about 3.5% ethanol is obtained which is then distilled to 96% ABV, the maximum achievable in a column still.

McMenamin's Cornelius Pass Roadhouse Distillery, Hillsborough, Oregon

Looking out of distiller's barn

Natural gas, direct-fired French brandy alembic used to make whiskey, rum, and pear brandy.

The middle vessel is a heat exchanger, not a thumper. You put the next batch of beer/wine in the heat exchanger and a tube containing vapor from the alembic preheats the beer/wine while vapor is cooled prior to entering the worm condenser. For scale, the top of the heat exchanger is about 12 feet high.

In this photo you can see that the vapor can be valved to bypass the heat exchanger (upper ball valve and pipe going behind heat exchanger) on its way to the worm.

You can also see the well-worn "alarm can".

Ginormous worm condenser

Parrot

Makers mark

Raw materials (unhopped beer is mashed in onsite beer brewery. Wort is transferred to fermentors in the distillery barn)

Pretty barrel heads

Rickhouse (ssshhhhh... sleeping spirits)

They were meant to last forever. On the whole, bureaucratic regulations never die, they just go on and on and on...

Prohibition (the 18th amendment) was the first (and only) amendment to the US Constitution to take away rights from the citizens. All the rest define the rights of citizens over the government.

She said when i was ordering Chinese the other day she had a hankering for prawn cutlets.

Found these at the supermarket today. Weighing in at nearly $1.80 each they are a treat, and double crumbed with a 50/50 panko and fresh crumb they look more like Lamb cutlets with a tail.

HungryAlreadyPunkin

This one is at Town Branch Distillery in Kentuky

This is in a frame on a wall in the Bull Run Distilling Co. tasting room.
Alcohol was not completely illegal in the US during prohibition:

Here is a good cheap housing.

Pall Advanta ALT11G23ABH4 Stainless Steel Liquid Filter Housing w/ Clamps @ eBay

Ask him to check his shipping price, because it's outrageous, but if you could get this for $150, its a screaming deal.

You can get cartridges cheap from St. Pats, as long as you flush and keep them in good condition, they'll last a while.

Letina 40x40 Plate-and-Frame Filters @ St. Patrick's of Texas

Big volumes, plate and frame filters are most cost effective, but running small batches, you'd lose gallons just to wet the media.

We use 10" Code 7 Polypropylene filters in Pall housings.

We always do a final polish with sub-micron, 0.22 or 0.10. We've done side-by-side tests of only 20 micron char filtration next to .1 final polish - the spirit is noticeably clearer with more sparkle, especially in a nice quality bottle. The 20 micron char-only-filter looks muddy/hazy in comparison.

Not meaning to be contrary @zymurgybob, but the McMenamin's you, Bushman and I went to up in rural Seattle when we toured Bothell and Woodinville before the 2014 ADI conference seemed more like a refurbished TGI Fridays in a strip mall. I remember you commenting at the time that it was not at all typical of what McMeniman's usually does. I also remember the beers there were quite good.

I wholeheartedly agree with your enthusiasm though; the McMenamins' in Troutdale and Hillsborough are national treasures.

The McMenamin brothers are my heroes. Their business model is to take every place in Portland that I loved as a kid, but that was kinda sinking into the trash heap of history , and put it back on the tax rolls as some combination of hotel, brewery, brewpub, conference site, and/or distillery.

I'm guessing they cut some kinda deals with whatever municipality controls whatever site they're looking at acquiring, and offer to bring the (usually old) facility up to good safety and health standards, without trashing all the gorgeous old architecture and fixtures that make the (did I say old?) place special, while adding a taxpaying profit center to the community.

I don't know how many facilities they have now, but maybe 15 years ago it was 51, ad they're adding new ones all the time. Last night I was at a "Distillery Festival" at one (a rescued elementary school) in Bothell, Washington. They've converted hotels, county poor farms, Masonic lodges, roadhouses, taverns, dance halls, schools, movie theaters, and god-knows-what-all to very successful businesses.

Sorry if I'm going overboard about McMenamin's, but they're rescuing history, and their best tool is beer. How could you not like that?

@Kapea said: I took about 10GB of photos. I'll put some more up if you guys want.

Sounds like a great trip.

Post some more pics!

Packing still and cleaning out the cupboard where i keep the spirit library i found this dusty old bottle. Batch 1.

Last Tuesday we went on a distillery crawl. We visited one brewing/distilling fab shop, Bridgetown Brew Systems, and seven distilleries:

• McMenamin's CBR
• Aria Gin Distillery (my favorite aria used to be Nessun Dorma, now it's Aria Gin)
• Bull Run Distilling Co.
• Clear Creek Distillery
• House Spirits (their American Single Malt Whiskey - Westward - ROCKS!)
• Rolling River Spirits and
• New Deal Distillery - New deal had numerous open fermenters with pear brandy wash at high krausen - the aroma was exquisite!

Our classes took place in the McMeninman's Edgefield brewery, distillery and hotel.

I took about 10GB of photos. I'll put some more up if you guys want.

Big storm on Nullarbor

The StillDragon Australia store will close Sunday afternoon for the week while the final transition to the new warehouse on the coast happens.
Reopen Friday 24th November.

Sorry for any inconvenience, onwards and upwards. To infinity and beyond.

Thanks @grim a lot of good information there, which is useful to know. With what you have said, presumably I could use the malted barley without the husk, which i include at the moment, not only would my calculation be correct, or does this not really matter, but i should add 10% for the husk allowance?

If making a bourbon with rye, corn and malted barley, would you say that using corn meal would be ok, or for it to be a better spirit using flaked corn would be more ideal?

Thanks

Starch is starch, so the closer you get to a refined white flour, the further you'll go from the characteristic flavors and aromas of the grain. Taking it to the absolute extreme, converting white corn starch to glucose using enzymes, and you'll make something much closer to rum than whiskey.

The reason moonshine recipes that include non-gelatinized corn taste like whiskey is due to the fact that the corn germ/bran influence the congeners produced during fermentation. For example, UJSSM being corn-flavored rum, and not whiskey, even though it pains me every time I hear someone call it whiskey, it kind of does taste like whiskey, and that's because of some of that germ. (Lacto too, but that's another thread.)

Also keep in mind that you can't compare these pound for pound. Unfermentable Pericarp/husk accounts for 10% of the weight in something like barley, and closer to 1% for corn, and for most other grain, at least 10% of the weight is non-fermentable bran and germ. So, if you are trying to faithfully reproduce a specific mash bill, you'll need to do some math if you are working with dehusked or degermed (or both) grain products, since most mash bills assume whole grain weights. Degermed barley flour would probably represent the most extreme difference. A whole grain rye flour probably the least.

Corn meal is typically degermed to increase shelf life, and because of that it will have ~10% more fermentables on a pound by pound basis than flaked or ground whole corn. Process, compared to flaked maize, it requires a full on cereal mash to gelatinize all the starches, although if it's fine ground so it converts pretty quickly.

Flaked would be closer to whole corn, as it typically does contain germ as well, and it's partially/mostly gelatinized by the flaking process already. So, not only does it have all the parts of the corn seed you would want, half the work is already done. I mentioned degerming and shelf life above, another reason flaked is more expensive is that it's shelf-life is more finite than corn meal. Corn meal can probably sit 3 or 4 years, flaked won't make it a year.

@grim, looking into the IR filter sheets and I believe, If I am correct, what I would need would be the K 250 IR " Chill filtration of tannin containing spirits or white spirits high in fatty acids". with the digging I have done I have only found them sold by the case of 100. Any idea where one could get single sheets for experimentation?