Step 1. Planning. Use 6kg of sugar per 25L of water. Even though turbos can theoretically do 8kg (or more), it takes them twice as long to complete, the temperature must be more controlled, and you risk incomplete/stuck fermentations. Running less sugar per wash only ups the cost per liter of finished product by 30¢ per liter at most. Don’t try to double batch; 25L is the maximum size that can self dissipate the heat created by the yeast during fermentation.
Step 2: Preparation. Start the night before you pitch your yeast by placing three gallons of water in the fridge… you’ll need these later to quickly cool down your wash to pitching temp.
Step 3: Sterilization. Fill up your fermenter all the way to the top and add in 150ml of bleach and let sit for at least 30 minutes to sanitize. Rinse. You’re not dealing with beer so sanitation doesn’t need to be quite as rigorous (but more can’t ever hurt). Turbo yeast ferments so fast and makes so much alcohol that it out competes most other pathogens and mitigates any potential damage they can cause.
Step 4: Dissolve sugar and make up wash. The standard is to take 6kg of sugar and dissolve it 2 gallons of hot water. Easiest way to do is to take any size pot (bigger is better), fill it a little under half full with water, bring to a boil, take it off the stove eye and dump the sugar in till its filled nearly to the top. Stir till the sugar is dissolved, then put back on the eye till it turns clear. Once you got all the sugar in the fermenter add three gallons you put in the fridge the night before and top off with cool tap water till you hit the 25L mark.
Step 5: Aeration. Boiling the water to dissolve the sugar removes a lot of the oxygen needed by the yeast to reproduce and to build up healthy cells with thick walls capable of rapid fermentation. The more yeast cells you got working for you, the quicker the wash will finish. Simplest way to aerate is to bubble air thru the wash using a cheap aquarium pump and airstone for 5-10 minutes. The jury is still out on whether or not an inline filter (available from homebrew suppliers) is necessary, but it can’t hurt.
Step 6: Pitching the yeast. Even though the package may say 40C, pitch your yeast when the temp is less than 30C by directly adding them to the wash and giving it a good stir. Do not attempt to rehydrate the turbo yeast before pitching, as the nutrients in the sachet will cause the yeast cells to explode (in very tiny explosions... you have to listen very close to hear them
). The ideal pitching temperature should really be closer to 25-27C as the yeast can cause the temp of the wash to rise up to 5-8C. If the starting temp is too high this can cause all sorts of problems including off tastes and the temperature to go up into the killing range resulting in an incomplete or stuck ferment. Step 7: Fermentation and separation. Give your batch 72 hours to complete fermentation (once again even though the package says 48 hours) then force the yeast to settle out. I use three 4 gallon icing buckets I get a local grocery store’s bakery. The wash is poured into one bucket, then into the second bucket 6-7-8 times or until my arms are tired. The remainder of the wash is poured into the third bucket and the pouring process repeated with the empty. This will degas the wash and assist in the yeast falling out. Then each bucket is placed into a small compact refrigerator for 24 hours. This gets rid of 95% of the suspended yeast and makes the quality of your product go up in quality like the difference between night and day. Use of a fining agent such as sparkolloid will further increase the quality of the finished product.
Step 8: Perform a stripping run on your wash. Stripping runs are great time savers. Ideally you want to shoot to reduce the original volume by anywhere from 4/5ths to 2/3rds. Depends on how greedy you are and how many impurities you want to deal with later. I personally go by taste… whenever the alcohol content of the distillate drops off, you cut the stripping run. Store your unrefined tipple until its time to do a spirit run.
Step 9: Repeat as necessary. By using this method one can ferment and strip 13 gallons of sugar wash per week with minimal amounts of time, equipment, and labor invested.