Day 17: Lab day 6, testing and distillation of Rye Test Batch.  Alright before we get into todays activities, I thought I would share some of the cool stuff I am doing in my spare time.  I took a stained glass class at Delphi Glass in Lansing.  This company has been a major player in the glass world for many years and they have quite a facility.  I took the class as a fun refresher since I haven't done anything like this in years.  On the left is Roy our instructor who was incredibly patient, knowledgable and made the class real fun.  We had to choose one of three patterns and I chose this sunset.  You see the unfinished window with copper foil ready to be soldered together and framed.  We finished the window in one day.  I didn't realize I forgot to take a picture of the finished window.  So I may post that later.  I chose to use different textured glasses instead of color.  It was a real fun time and I suggest you give them a shout if you are in town and want to do something new.  On saturday I used an extra ticket Kris had to a minor league baseball game.  The hometown Lansing Lugnuts beat the Great Lakes Loons 2-1.  One home run for each team and a sweet triple to drive in the game winner.  The seats were right behind home plate as you can see in the action shot.  On the left you can see the scout section which was just across the aisle from me.  These guys were firing up the speed guns every time there was a pitching change.  The guy closest to me was wearing a gigantic cardinals world series ring.  I didn't know who he was but, I guess this is where a lot of players end up when the glory days end.  There was a fireworks show after word which I enjoyed.

Okay, on to the more serious stuff.  We got in at 10 this morning and went to work taking samples of the mash to see how it faired over the weekend.  In the picture on the left you can see the new HPLC test.  If you take the time to compare it to the one in the last post you will see the ethanol level has gone up.  The Ethanol Red was up around 7%.  A bit low but not too far out of the desired range.  The Distilamax LS lagged behind at about half of that.  We decided to go ahead and run a distillation on the ER mash and discard the LS.  ON the left Adam is finishing the still set up with a water bath for heating. On the right you see the boiler section of the the still set into a water bath for a heating source.  We later

decided this method was too slow and not working as desired. We switched to a more direct heating method using a lab heating mantel designed to go with this still.  We took some 25 ml samples of the whole run at the end of the day. We will do the final testing in the lab tomorrow afternoon.  Below is a short video showing the whole still and the distillation in full swing.  If you look close you can see a droplet of condensed distillate running down the condenser until it falls into the graduated cylinder for collection.