Day 21:  Got to make the field trip to the Burgdorf Winery today with Adam and Jake.  They were preparing the back room for a wine making class Adam is teaching in the fall.  He has to teach one class as a requirement for his graduate program and this will be it.  All of the pictures below are of the Winery.  They had some nice stuff, many of them things I hadn't seen in person like the bottler, corker, and the very large filter system they had.  Sadly, the owners had to run some errands so we didn't get to talk with them too much.  We got the last bolts for the beast and the electrician is coming on Monday to hook up the motor.  So we will get the mash going on Tuesday.  I may take a day off from writing on Monday unless something significant happens.  Justin and I got a bottle of Old Grand Dad this past week.  Thought we would look to the bottom shelf for something neither of us had before.  Not bad for a $6.99 375ml.  I'd give it 6.5 out of 10, smooth but not a fully clean whiskey.  

 Day 20:  I have to apologize for the random disordered look to this blog.  I am new to this thing and the pictures just do not line up like I want them to in the template.  I have gotten a few messages asking about why the pictures are so small.  I do it that way so the page doesnt get to big. If you click on any picture you will see a slide show of them full size with thumbnails at the bottoms of the page.

The first picture above is Tim, the plumbing guy, making all the final hook-ups on the beast.  Today he plumbed in the steam, condensate return, water in and out.  I spent most of my day reclaiming valves and other parts for the plumbing from a bizarre contraption this beast was hooked up to in its old home.  Hopefully I saved the guys here some cash.  So tomorrow we need to get a few bolts and tighten everything up.  Monday is go for the Rye test batch.  I sat down with Justin and Ari and talked about doing some big mash tun runs of this whiskey as well.  For those of you considering joining in with the merchant bottling idea, where you buy it from someone like LDI and bottle it yourself, The guys here are very reasonable and will help you make a whiskey that is your own.  You should consider talking with them.  I agreed not to post any particulars about our contract as numbers and prices will change with the market and energy costs etc, but I would doubt you can get any better deal on a custom whiskey from anyone else.  After our discussion I recommend them without reservation as someone you will enjoy working with.  Justin later gave me a lesson on how to calculate your yield of ethanol for grain in your mash.  The idea is to know what you can expect to get theoretically and practically.  The numbers give a base from which to know if your mash is going as expected.  Very informative and useful.

 I posted the next two pictures just for interest.  If  you are following this you know I am a glass artist in my other life and I thought this was a real cool looking thing.  This is a tray which goes into a glass column still to support the column packing.  It may seem like a simple piece of glass but I can assure this is a special thing which requires a lot of skill to make.  It is about 8 inches in diameter.


Tomorrow I am heading to Burgdorf's Winery about 15 minutes outside of Lansing.  I am going with Adam and Jake.  Adam is going to do a few tests for the owners to analyze some of their processes.  I'll post a lot of pictures.  According to Adam she is excited to have us out and is planning to give us a really detailed tour.  So check back.  Oh, and we are going to get the test results from the lab experiment afterwords.

Day 19:  The Beast comes out of the dark.  So the plan for today got scrapped pretty fast and Justin and I went into high gear to get the Beast Mash Tun/Fermenter out, in place and ready for action.  I am going to try and get a before picture so you can see how much work Junior and I put into this to make it shine and look tough.  I only just found out that Junior moved on to a new job while I was spending my week in the Lab away from the distillery.  Junior is just one of those fun crazy people who makes a day more enjoyable.  I'm going to miss him.  So the beast is at the point where it is going to plumbed for steam and draining.  The steam guy is coming in tomorrow.  So the top is on, the pressure relief valves  were installed, and the whole thing is leveled and ready.  The hope is to have this ready by monday to really commence with the Rye.  All the mashing materials are in.  Even Justin is pumped to get back into distilling mode.  We didn't get to the sugar mash to test out the big mash tun, and now with the Beast in and ready for action, I am not sure if that will happen.  Also, the meeting with Kris kind of just got lost in the busy work.  All in all I had a really fun day working on this with Justin.  Tomorrow we will put a bunch of brass parts on, which I brought back to life with a wire wheel.  So hang in there, we are finally getting to the good stuff.  Oh, and I will get back to the lab one of these days and give an update on the all the test results.  One last little thing.  Justin asked to put in a guest post for the blog when the beast is fully completed.  So check back in a couple of days for that if you aren't one of the daily readers.

THE BEAST

Day 18:
Today was a very short day.  There wasn't much going on in the distillery and I went into the lab with Josh to set up our HPLC and GC tests.  We did that this afternoon and will get the full results tomorrow.  All the grain arrived for the project rye so hopefully I will have some reports from that soon.  Still waiting to find out where I'll be and what I'm am going to be doing tomorrow.  May be running a test mash on the big mash tun to make sure it is all put together right, or I might be back in the lab.  I do know Kris is going to go over another one of his lectures.  I'm looking for to it.

 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.

A VERY SPECIAL THANK YOU POST

Day 14*:  I want to send out a special thank you to all the people at Briess Malt, especially Gordon Lane and Annette Schmidt.  (www.briessmalt.com)  As I was preparing my order with Ari for my project Rye Whiskey I contacted Briess Malt, told them about the ADI internship and this new program with Kris at MSU,  and asked if they would consider helping us out a bit.  Thank you to Briess and Gordon for your kind donation of the grains and malts.  When it comes out of the barrel, I will hand deliver a special bottle just for you guys.  If any of you reading this have not checked out what Briess has to offer please take some time and reward their generosity.  You see this above image all over the ADI site.  They are big supporters of this movement and now me.  I started looking at their specialty malts because I think they are elements which can help to create truly unique spirits.  I am honored by their generosity and I hope they will be proud of what comes from it.
Thank you,
Rick Schneider

 Day 14:  I got picked by Adam and we headed to the lab around 10am.  Jake set up the glass distillation system for distilling the experiments on Fusel oils we started at the beginning of the week.  Before we did anything Jake took final samples of the fermentations and ran the Spectrophotometer, Gas Chromatorgraph, and the HPLC tests.  In the first picture on the right Adam is pouring the F1 fermentation into a large 1000ml graduated cylinder to get 400ml to fill the still.  In the next picture Jake is using the Force to start the heating cycle on the still.  The midichlorian count is high with this young scientist.  The next picture is the glass still in full working order under the lab hood.

 While Jake was working on his tests, Adam and I went to work taking some samples from our two fermentations.  They had been running for about 16 hours when we took the samples.  On the left I am loading up the samples into the centrifuge to separate the grains from the wort.  On the right is the top view of the spinning chamber in the centrifuge with my samples in slots 1 and 13.  There go those prime numbers again.  Just below this you can see the results from the HPLC.  Almost dead center you see the peeks of ethanol levels for each strain of yeast.  If you can read it when it is blown up you can see levels of all the important compounds in the sample.  They are given in grams/liter.  We will be taking some more readings over the weekend and doing a final sample on Monday morning before distilling the mash.  Just for fun I added a video of the two fermentations at work bubbling through the air traps.  I'll try and post a few simple videos in future posts now that I realized how to do it.  Have a great weekend.

For this past week I was drinking the Evan Williams single barrel vintage 2002.  So for a 10 year old I found it a bit harsh, but that was in line with things I read by our favorite professional reviewers, one who said this whiskey can have large differences from barrel to barrel.  So I will give this a try again in the future as I found barrel #369 to be about a 7/10.  Definitely good and I would serve it to a friend.  For the upcoming week I am drinking the Bulleit Bourbon.  I have had their rye and liked it so I thought I would give the Bourbon a try.  East Lansing liquor stores don't carry many ryes so I have to spread my tastes.  I would give this 8.5/10  Pretty good, I'll have two tonight.

Day 13:  Lucky day thirteen.  I started today with an introduction to what type of things you need to do to prepare your business plan for getting a distillery off the ground.  What types of things the TTB is going to want from you and where you need to start.   Kris discussed a lot about starting at the local level, before you even think    

 about a building.  He suggested going to your local city planner to find out about zoning and restrictions that may end up in your way.   By respecting your  local authorities you have a better chance  of ending up on there good side.  Kris thought you would find many towns open to finding a way to make this happen for you, if you are willing to play by the rules of your town.  Going back to the TTB, they are going to want to know you have gotten all of this taken care of before you approach them.  Step one is to get your business structure set with the state and EIN from the feds. Obviously this is just a nut shell of what we discussed, but this is the outline.

A lot of cool things got done around the distillery.  The big mash tun got electrified so it is now plumbed and ready.  The beast was getting plumbed so it should be set when my materials are ordered and arrive,
 we can get right to work on the rye whiskey.

In the afternoon it was back to the lab to check on our experiment and to mash the small 1L batch of the Rye.  I have to admit we are mostly doing this one in the lab for fun.  Justin gave us a priceless look when we told him what we were doing, which could only be described as "Why the hell would want to do that?!"  So the first picture at the top is the mash right after the grain was added to the water.  The second picture is of Adam looking at some of the yeast from the earlier experiment.  The two pictures below that are of the healthy yeast cells propagating  and looking happy from batch F1, while the second slide shows the unhealthy cells run at too high a temperature.  Although, this experiment was largely run to teach Jake and I how to use the equipment and prepare the specimens,  I have

learned a ton about what one can learn from paying attention to their mashes.  I can see how valuable knowing how to diagnose problems as they occur, or how to discuss your issues with a lab can be extremely helpful.  I wasn't planning on adding a microscope to my equipment list, but I am now.

The next two photos are of Jake prepping the yeast for pitching after the mash cooled to fermentation temperature, and one of the two yeasts we are comparing.  The other is Distilamax LS.   The next photo is the finished mash, after spinning in a centrifuge so we can get a sample to put into the HPLC.  The next photo on the right are the two 500 ml batches with the yeasts pitched in.  On the left is the glass still we will be using under the hood in the lab.  On the right, a bit out of order is our improvised chiller.  This bucket and ice water did the trick pretty fast.  The bottom photo is of the two batches set into a water bath for temperature control at 35C, where we left them to head home.  We'll return first thing in the morning to see how the fermentation is coming along.

 Day 12:  We started the morning by checking out our fermentation started the previous day in the bioreactor.  The first two pictures here are the agitated fermentation chamber and then a shot of the whole bioreactor.  We ran spectrophotometer readings on the two samples.  If you look at the two different fermentations in the next two pictures you will see F1 on the left run at 30C was running a healthy fermentation.  F2 on the right is visibly thinner suggesting a weaker fermentation.  When we ran the test we got a cell density in F1 that is more than 2xs the density of F2.                                                                                                                                                  

 Adam taught Jake and I a new test method available for our experiments.  It is called a HPLC or a High Performance Liquid Chromatograh which runs a test similar to the Gas Chromatograph but runs the separation as a liquid rather than heating the volatiles to a gas state like the GC (see image on the right).  In the pictures on the left you see adam showing us how to prepare the samples and setting up the tray which goes into the HPLC (seen in the right photo).   Below right I am setting up a small lab fermentation of my project whiskey.  Below left Adam showed us what the yeast from our other experiment looks like under the microscope so we see the difference between good healthy yeast (F1) during fermentation and what yeast (F2) looks like when it is struggling for whatever reason.  In our case the temperature on F2 was a bit high for the optimal range of the Distilamax LS yeast we chose for this.  Tomorrow we are going to attach a computer to the microscope so we can use the mounted camera to show you the images of the yeasts.  The images are visually fascinating for the artist in me and telling of what is going on in the two fermentations for the science side.  The very bottom photo is the grains for my project Rye Whiskey and the bottle we are storing our weighed mash ingredients in until we mash them tomorrow.  So here is the recipe I chose after consulting with Justin Aden.  67%Rye, 20% Rye Malt, 13% Caramel Malt 60L from Briess.  I like Prime numbers.  Sadly with three ingredients you get to use only two of them to make 100%.  Lets hope 13 is a lucky number for this one.  Ari helped out with getting my ingredients for the bigger project batch when I get back into the distillery.  Tomorrow I will start the day talking with Kris about preparing an application for the TTB in the morning and then running the lab fermentation in the afternoon.