Home Distiller

Got a little lazy over the holidays. But I need to wrap up this thread.

I reserve the right to over-analyze the data later- but first off, the data in pdf...
the actual spreadsheet (in open doc format)...
And just the averages of the summary in pdf...
Feel free to interpret as you see fit, and I am sure it will differ from my interpretation. But rest assured that there is no scientific validity to my data, since I held few variables constant, I used no calibrated equipment nor valid protocols, and the sample sizes were way too small to even imagine a statistical significance of the results. But on the other hand, that won't stop me from trying to understand the general direction of these results, and I hope that you will indulge my attempts to make sense of these trials when I have had a chance to reflect on them.

Stop all the trials. Build your still, then let the fun begin.

Alright, all joking aside, we all appreciate your trials.

Okay, I will cease and solder. Promise. And thank you.

Wheat germ was the fastest, tomato paste had the best taste, and wheat bran was the cheapest of the organic adjuncts.

Trub and ADY yeast adjuncts were disappointing in larger quantities, but perform well in smaller amounts. And the cost of papain also makes them fairly expensive to hydrolyze. Nutritional yeast and Marmite are also great performers, but are not the most readily available.

I didn't try plant fertilizer, but DAP is a great inorganic source of nitrogen when used at a rate of about 1 gram per liter (4 teaspoons per 5 gallons). Fermaid K (and I assume most of the other 'complex' nutrients) doesn't help much if the sugar wash already contains a yeast derivative.

I will probably use either wheat bran or tomato paste in future sugar washes, 200 ppm DAP, and either ADY or trub yeast in moderate amounts, depending on what I have handy at the time.

Thanks for putting up with me.

Looks good, mogur.

Yeah, I did a little experiment with autolyzing my yeast trub the other day, and the method I used looks rather promising to me.

It's not as good as your controlled method, but it might work for some people in a pinch.

Every rum cycle I do leaves me with about two liters of fresh yeast trub.

And every rum cycle I do also has a distilling cycle that produces about 100 liters of hot water as a free by-product.

I can adjust the water flow coming off my Liebig condenser and get water ranging anywhere from, say, 50 degrees C up to 100 degrees C. It's just a matter of speeding up or slowing down the flow through my condenser to dial up whatever temperature I want.

So, I put the yeast trub in a plastic soda bottle, put the soda bottle in a 20 liter (5 gallon) bucket, and filled the bucket with hot water as it came off the still. As a new batch of hot water came off the still, I used it to replace the previous batch of hot water.

After all was said and done, my plastic soda bottle full of trub ended up soaking in the hot water bath for maybe 8-10 hours, through the course of a stripping run, a spirit run, and the fact that a single bucket of hot water can take a couple hours to cool down.

It's not 24 hours, but since we have to sit there in our stilling rooms through the distillation process anyway, and since we get all this nice hot water for "free", we might as well put the hot water and our time to some use.

I figure my trub isn't 100% autolyzed -- maybe it's 50% autolyzed, let's say -- but any autolyzation at all would be better than none for breaking down our yeast trub proteins into bite-sized pieces for the next batch of yeast.

I am going to experiment a bit more with the method and see how my trub performs as a nutrient in future fermentations, and if the method still seems to have merit, I will try to document it a little better as an alternative means of autolyzation.

Sounds like a great innovation, Bob. Despite initial results of hydrolysing yeast, looking back at the entire experiment, I dont know, it seems that papain is a little expensive. I will continue to autolyze, but to avoid the cost of papaining 'real' batch sizes, I will probably just autolyze whatever I have on hand. And if I get lazy, just use ADY or trub yeast straight up.

Thank you, my friend, for sticking with this thread when no one else cared. I really appreciate that.

mogur wrote:Thank you, my friend, for sticking with this thread when no one else cared. I really appreciate that.

He's not alone! I've been reading every update and trying to wrap my head around it too!

We are reading, just slowly.

Thank you, guys.

One thing I still don't get is that when I upload a pdf, it looks great and can magnify with full clarity, but after a week or two, the pdfs are grainy do a pixelated magnify. Oh well, the zipped OpenOffice spreadsheet is still good, assuming that the downloader has Open Office or compatible. Just wondering what is up with that.

Thank you Mogur for posting all of this work. It has been helpful and stimulating. I plan to post the results of my own trials in a month or so and I will use some of what I learned here.

Your idea of weighing the samples was ingenious although some of the CO2 is being converted....most of the CO2 bubbles off but some of it combines with water to create carbonic acid, hence your lower Ph values. I don't know if this would cause a problem with your measurements.

Your graphs give me a sense of the slope or rate of conversion and are helpful in predicting runs at higher sugar concentrations, which I will aim for. I don't know if I would worry about the taste of the wash as I would be running it through a fractionating still. After stripping, I run my wash twice to 95% and then through activated charcoal and I have never had a off taste or aroma come through.

It would also be interesting to know how much ethanol has been produced by each trial. From a cost perspective the sugar in/ethanol out number is an important one. I suppose I could use the SG drop method but there seems to be quite a bit of controversy over the method. Readings may be off due to dissolved protein or starch. These things will contribute to the gravity, So suspended particles as well as non-fermentable compounds (i.e., maltodextrin, proteins, etc) contribute to SG. So to really "know" how much alcohol is being produced you would need some other method of measurement . Have you given any thought to that ?

I am looking forward to following the next part of your journey......"The Still" .... I know you will come up with something exceptional.

Cheers,
Max

Thanks, MV. I'm going to try to do a Rad kitchen build. 1 1/2" column. On the cheap. Because I am cheap.

As for the absolute alcohol content, no I don't have a clue. Most of my trials were similar in that they were mostly all the same amount of organic material by weight. I know that washes like molasses throw off the SG readings because of unfermentables, but I tried to keep the variations understandable, in the sense that vegetable adjuncts were equivalent to vegetable adjuncts, and yeast adjuncts were comparable to yeast adjuncts. But I didn't have the resources nor knowledge to do a linear regression analysis. My education many decades ago stopped at linear Algebra.

One thing to keep in mind is that it's not about how much "alcohol" is being produced; it's about how much liquor you have that's worth drinking after making proper cuts.

Ethyl acetate, methanol, propanol, isoamyl alcohol, etc., are all natural byproducts of the fermentation process, and a hydrometer sees all that stuff as "alcohol". (So will any calculation methods.)

Of course, most of us home distillers are after a better quality liquor than we can purchase at the liquor store, and we are keen on having as little of that bad stuff in our final product as possible.

Some recipes (with their corresponding nutrients) will produce less of that bad stuff and more of the good stuff, and other recipes (with inferior or negligible nutrients) will produce more of that bad stuff and less of the good stuff.

For me, that's what a lot of this is about: getting the best recipe with the best nutrients to achieve the cleanest fermentation I can get, thereby maximizing the amount of good quality liquor I get from X-amount of ingredients, Y-amount of my time, Z-amount of propane, etc.

Daymn mogur... I've been off the forums for a while now due to 'real life', and I come back to this Excellent work, saying you're not a scientist is pure bs. It's not a degree that counts, its the method and dedication Amazing stuff. I just started up 36gal split among a couple recipes today... I'm back with a vengeance

I gotcha WV shine hanging, grin. How's it, my friend? Parkersberg hotel, WV ... don't eat french fries with your fingers, we were trailer trash, we didn't have any class, but we did have the American spirit. And we happened to win the Revolutionary War. The freaking Revolutionary war.... How cool is that for lame anti-establishmentarian ethics? You Goth boobs are not worthy...

OK, i have no idea what the fuck that meant

Have another drink, there, mogur.

Rofl, says he hasn't started distilling those trials? Mby he's just drinkin em straight...

I've been to Parkersburg a few times, I'm from the south east part of the state though, pretty close to Va. Pretty country

oops, busted. Yes, was out of my mind.

West Virginia was a battle of cultures. My childhood experience in West Virginia was a clash of middle class with upper class, and I was on the short end of that stick. My WV cousins made fun of us Pacific Northwest trash because we ate french fries with our fingers. Sorry, I squirt ketchup directly into my mouth. Less germs that way. And sure, I am a drunk, but come on, West Virginia isn't exactly the height of culture.

On another note, I just bought 5 feet of 1/2" copper, 5 feet of 3/4" copper, and 10 feet of 1/4" refrigeration tube. Got my 4 gallon stainless pot, and trying to proceed. Next month I will get the 1 1/2" parts on the internet. I am poor, but I will do this.

Glad to hear it, mogur. Once you get those first few drops of hooch dripping out of the still, you're gonna be hooked.

WV shine, I owe you an apology. Even sober, I managed to disrespect WV. That is certainly not my intention. I love WV, the winding roads, the beautiful fall foliage, the good people that I met there, it is all that America is about. Your mountain roads, your mountains, and the people are awesome, and I felt at home. I'm a jerk who had a bad experience when I was twelve years old with family. Sorry that I let that corrupt my posts and this thread. Take care, my friend.

It is a gorgeous state, and I'll always love it, but it's true that it's not the height of culture... I guess that's one of the reasons I chose to go to school elsewhere, and I've stayed elsewhere since then I still have family there and I may move back some day, it'll always be home... but there's a lot of other places I'd like to check out before then

Don't worry about it mogur... I've heard much worse, and a good deal of that was true as well

So instead of readin the parts of the forum I could actually use as I'm just starting out I spent the last two nights of free time reading this... And I am impressed and curious and know I still have way too much to learn ahaha. But if you still want to do a mini trial and then cook it, someone mentioned that bacon ferment a while back... XD what's the world without bacon right?

Damn, I wasn't trying to be off this forum this long, but I simply couldn't login for some reason. What. Ever. How's it going? Anyone still here? I bet Rad is, grin.

Hes still around with about a couple hundred new users. So how about giving us an update brother?