Home brew improvements

Made the decision today to ramp up the home brew production a bit.

I'm currently running on two small fermenters capable of producing 8 litres of usable wash each, using the turbo yeast and dextrose Still Spirits kits.

The economics of this has been that I can buy a twin batch kit for $40 that will ultimately produce 4 litres of drinkable spirit.  The spirit is essentially a sugar moonshine, which then requires flavouring etc, but that's beyond the scope of production analysis.

The problem with this method is that I have to clean fermenters and rebatch around every 7-8 days.  Cleaning is not a major issue (10 minutes with a hose) but it does include other fussing like sterilisation, yeast pitching, temperature monitoring, restirring, checking for clarification, monitoring specific gravity, dropping the yeast and carbon out of solution prior to stilling etc.  Add in the current low temperatures, which necessitate a heater pad to keep the yeast at an optimum 28° etc, and running two fermenters is a bit of a pain.

So let's up the size a bit.

                                                   

I now have a 30 litre fermenter, which will enable me to use the 6kg dextrose kits.  These ultimately produce 6 litres of drinkable spirit for $50 (much better!) plus I have food grade containers to hold the fermented wash prior to stilling - so I can have another batch pitched and running while I still off.

Other advantages include only having to wash/sterilise/pitch once a week, plus I only have to temperature and SG monitor one batch, not two.  This is a not inconsiderable improvement, when you consider that heat plates are $65 each, and need timers to cycle them on/off to match the heat output to the thermal load of the fermenter and how much heat it dissipates.

 

I've found that a simple "blanket" (towel) wrapped around and over the fermenter can increase heat retention by a solid 2°, so with 10 litres of wash in a small fermenter an hour on/hour off cycle maintains 26° fine even with house temperatures around 16° during the day.  I will have to experiment with the larger thermal load (25 litres) of the bigger fermenter but I anticipate that once it's at temperature it shouldn't be much different; experience with heated fish tanks has told me that it's surprisingly hard to induce a thermal change in a reasonable body of liquid without quite extended exposure, even with quite basic insulation.

When we move into the new place, I'm planning to go to a full reflux still instead of the simple pot still I am using now.  Yields on these things are now in the low 90° margins as opposed to mid 60°s for pot stills due to the increased catalytic reaction surface area, and the new one on the market will produce 93° output with only 90-100 litres of water flow per hour through the condensor.

                                                               

If you feed the drain into the washing machine you can recover a lot of the runoff, and combined with doing 25 litre batches and high efficiency I'd only need to run the thing for a couple of hours once a month.

I'm donating my organs when I die, but I suspect there's a fair chance my liver isn't going to be reusable.