Back to Basics
Posted: Sat Jun 15, 2013 8:21 amIn the first 5 months of this year I tried all sorts of different recipes promoted by different distillers here and elsewhere. These were tried and trusted recipes that reportedly worked well for those posting them and their results....but they just gave me endless trouble and poor return for my efforts. 
Finally, I decided I needed to go back to basics and forget about all the fancy stuff, like all bran and tomato paste, so I re-wrote my basic sugar wash recipe and now, when I walk into my 'brewery', I can hear the washes trying to get out of the buckets and run around like wild things
My wash ingredients are as follows;
21 litres of warm water at 30oC
6Kg Sugar
1Tsp Youngs Wine Nutrients (this stuff contains DAP and Ammonium Sulphate)
2 Vitamin B tabs crushed and dissolved in a little warm water
* pH Buffer made up of 100g Citric Acid and 100g of Sodium Bicarbonate
Note: the pH buffer had been originally listed incorrectly as 50g of each part and was corrected on Sun 23 June 2013
100g Allinsons Bread Yeast
* In the past I followed recipes that said to use 1 Tsp of Citric Acid or the juice of a lemon and sure enough the wash would take off. After 3-4 days the bubbles would slow down and I believed the wash was almost finished until I checked the hydrometer and found it a long way from finished. My pH meter told me why. The pH of the wash crashed soon after take-off and had dropped to the mid 3's - too acidic for the yeast to do any fermenting I tried various amounts of Sodium Bicarb, Sodium Carbonate, Potassium Carbonate, but, while the pH came back up to 5 at first, it quickly crashed again. Then I came across a post by Dr Who on MD about making an effective pH buffer and that's what I've posted above. The water at my place has a pH of 7 and there's no limescale and very little else remarkable about the water.
Method
I take 500ml of the warm water @ 30oC and place in a clean 2l container. Add 250g of the sugar from the recipe (do not use DME or LME for this purpose) I dissolve the sugar and use a hand whisk to introduce plenty of air to the liquid and also make sure the liquid is still 30oC - if it's cooled I add a little hot water to make it up to 30 again.
Add the yeast to the warm sugar water and I give the container a quick swirl to get the yeast well mixed. This is covered with a lid and left to stand in a basin of warm water for about 30 minutes. The yeast very quickly starts to breed and multiply and a thick frothy head forms. I give the container a good swirl every few minutes and when the yeast has used up all the sugar they stop breeding and the foam stops forming
While the yeast is growing I completely dissolve the sugar in the 21l of warm water, add the Youngs nutrient, dissolved 'B' vitamin tabs and finally the pH buffer. Note: add the buffer slowly as the wash will foam up.
When the wash is ready I get the yeast starter and give it a good whirl to get the yeast mixed up well and pitch into the wash. With the lid and airlock on the wash usually gets going within an hour and three hours after pitching it's like a runaway train and it's a waste of time trying to keep water in the airlocks, it just keeps blowing it out. By the end of day two it will have slowed a little and I put water in the airlocks then.
Here's the lesson I've learned from all this: In the natural process of fermentation a wash will become more and more acidic as the yeast makes ethanol and CO2. This increasing acidity slows the activity of the yeast cells and when the wash gets too acidic for them they go dormant and the fermentation stops.
For this reason it is clearly wrong to introduce acid alone at the beginning of the wash, even if your water has limescale, as it will only hasten the crash of the pH of the liquid and put the yeast to sleep However, by using the pH buffer above the wash pH will stabilise around 5 and stay there for the entire ferment resulting in more complete conversion of the sugars to ethanol 
Enough of this waffle, I've got a stripping run to do
AM
Finally, I decided I needed to go back to basics and forget about all the fancy stuff, like all bran and tomato paste, so I re-wrote my basic sugar wash recipe and now, when I walk into my 'brewery', I can hear the washes trying to get out of the buckets and run around like wild things
My wash ingredients are as follows;
21 litres of warm water at 30oC
6Kg Sugar
1Tsp Youngs Wine Nutrients (this stuff contains DAP and Ammonium Sulphate)
2 Vitamin B tabs crushed and dissolved in a little warm water
* pH Buffer made up of 100g Citric Acid and 100g of Sodium Bicarbonate
Note: the pH buffer had been originally listed incorrectly as 50g of each part and was corrected on Sun 23 June 2013
100g Allinsons Bread Yeast
* In the past I followed recipes that said to use 1 Tsp of Citric Acid or the juice of a lemon and sure enough the wash would take off. After 3-4 days the bubbles would slow down and I believed the wash was almost finished until I checked the hydrometer and found it a long way from finished. My pH meter told me why. The pH of the wash crashed soon after take-off and had dropped to the mid 3's - too acidic for the yeast to do any fermenting
I tried various amounts of Sodium Bicarb, Sodium Carbonate, Potassium Carbonate, but, while the pH came back up to 5 at first, it quickly crashed again. Then I came across a post by Dr Who on MD about making an effective pH buffer and that's what I've posted above. The water at my place has a pH of 7 and there's no limescale and very little else remarkable about the water. Method
I take 500ml of the warm water @ 30oC and place in a clean 2l container. Add 250g of the sugar from the recipe (do not use DME or LME for this purpose) I dissolve the sugar and use a hand whisk to introduce plenty of air to the liquid and also make sure the liquid is still 30oC - if it's cooled I add a little hot water to make it up to 30 again.
Add the yeast to the warm sugar water and I give the container a quick swirl to get the yeast well mixed. This is covered with a lid and left to stand in a basin of warm water for about 30 minutes. The yeast very quickly starts to breed and multiply and a thick frothy head forms. I give the container a good swirl every few minutes and when the yeast has used up all the sugar they stop breeding and the foam stops forming
While the yeast is growing I completely dissolve the sugar in the 21l of warm water, add the Youngs nutrient, dissolved 'B' vitamin tabs and finally the pH buffer. Note: add the buffer slowly as the wash will foam up.
When the wash is ready I get the yeast starter and give it a good whirl to get the yeast mixed up well and pitch into the wash. With the lid and airlock on the wash usually gets going within an hour and three hours after pitching it's like a runaway train and it's a waste of time trying to keep water in the airlocks, it just keeps blowing it out. By the end of day two it will have slowed a little and I put water in the airlocks then.
Here's the lesson I've learned from all this: In the natural process of fermentation a wash will become more and more acidic as the yeast makes ethanol and CO2. This increasing acidity slows the activity of the yeast cells and when the wash gets too acidic for them they go dormant and the fermentation stops.
For this reason it is clearly wrong to introduce acid alone at the beginning of the wash, even if your water has limescale, as it will only hasten the crash of the pH of the liquid and put the yeast to sleep
However, by using the pH buffer above the wash pH will stabilise around 5 and stay there for the entire ferment resulting in more complete conversion of the sugars to ethanol Enough of this waffle, I've got a stripping run to do
AM