Day 41 and 42: We started Saturday with our stripping runs, running them in both the 450L and the 850L Carl Stills. They were run wide open with no plates engaged. Rye is a sticky mash to work with especially when distilling on the grain. I had the unenviable job of pressure washing and scrubbing the Pot Stills between each batch. The rye begins to mess with heat transfer if you don't keep the pots clean. We ended up doing three of them in each still to get our low wines. On Sunday, Justin and I hunkered down for the long day of Spirit runs. We started out by watering/proofing down the low wines to 25% ABV and then loaded the big 850L Carl and engaged only one plate. We ended up with 175 gallons of Whiskey around 62%ABV. This would get put into storage for a while awaiting the arrival of barrels from ISC some time after I left Michigan. We proofed the final spirits down to 59%ABV for barreling, and I wheeled the tote containing them into the storage area.
Picture 1 is me scraping Rye mash off the sides of the 450L still. Not a fun job. Picture 2 is me pushing the low wines around to the put them on the forklift to load them into the 850L Carl for finishing.
Picture 3 is the transfer to the 850L to start the spirit run.
