Distillation - making moonshine
Questions & Answers
Q: Can I ferment more than
25 litres by scaling up the recipe of a Turbo Yeast?
A: Not easily, no. But
if you are willing to experiment a little, ok - it can often be done.
Here's a summary for our turbo's:
ALCOTEC 24 : Forget it.
This turbo produces so much heat when fermenting so scaling up (and
thereby producing even higher temps "inside") just doesn't
work well at all. Some people may still use it for 50 litres or more
and get a "good" result. But what they don't realise is that
they would have got the same result (1-3 days fermentation, final alchol
around 10-11%) with a cheaper turbo.
Also - if you add, say
12 kgs of sugar into 50 litres and then get 10% alcohol in a few days
- there is a lot of residual sugar left and this is unnecessary (will
cost you money and produce a not-so-good distillate). Better then to
use a different turbo (AT48) and aim for lower alcohol to start with,
i.e. add LESS sugar than recipe. This way you get no residual sugar,
less impurities, cheaper.
ALCOTEC 48
: Can be used with larger volumes but you need to cut down a bit on
the sugar level. If you simply scale up the recipe there is a risk the
wash overheats (due to the smaller surface/volume ratio). We don't issue
guidelines here - you will have to experiment a bit - but it can be
done.
ALCOTEC 8 & ALCOTEC 6:
These are both less temperature tolerant than the modern recipes above,
so it is not a very good idea to scale up recipes here. If you have
to do it you MUST cut down on sugar content, plus cut down on the amount
of turbo's below 1 sachet per 25 litres. We don't give any recommendations
here.
LARGE FERMENTATIONS: That
would be, say 100-500 litres. Using AT48, you will need to cut down
on the sugar here, you would also preferably want to cut down on yeast
but not nutrient. Now this is difficult because the turbo is pre-mixed
(yeast+nutrient). So you will have to cut down on both unfortunately
which will give you a non-optimal result. You can use simple cooling
(throw in a number of frozen 5L containers of water some 12 hours from
start) etc. See our website for more info, www.turbo-yeast.biz.
VERY LARGE FERMENTATIONS:
500 litres plus, often in the industry up to 10,000 or 50,000 litres.
Cooling MUST be provided (normally water cooled mantle tanks) and then
you can actually scale up our recipes to 100,000 litres and they work
fine. We provide the alcohol industry with bulk turbo mixes for very
large fermentations. The main reason they use our products is to produce
up to 18% alcohol in one fermentation.
Q: My alcohol turned blue
after distillation. What's going on here then?
A: It is very likely ammonia
reacting with copper somewhere (your still probably). It is not dangerous,
you can usually filter it off with activated carbon. But it shouldn't
normally be there - unless you have changed the recipe in some way (at
least for the "modern" turbo's AT24, AT48 and VodkaStar).
See the Q&A about neutralising wash.
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Q&A - Continued on page 2
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