My new 7,000 Gallon Carboy

[BrewChemistinCO]

Cleaning and sanitizing a vessel that big, not nec. designed for fermentation should be fun!!!

If they're fermenting it for biofuel, is rigorous sanitazation necessary? I, personally, don't care if my biodiesel has a bit of lacto sourness or some other off flavor.

As someone who works in a biofuels company cleaning and sanitation is 100% necessary. Competing yeast mess with the production of your strain's ability to produce your biofuel. There's only so much sugar to go around and an infected fermentation produces things other than your desired product. Large scale fermentation means 5% of your sugar source lost to infection is a large amount of money lost.

Anyway Good luck on your venture Mattress. R&D companies are pretty fun to be a part of.

[BrewBum]

Cleaning and sanitizing a vessel that big, not nec. designed for fermentation should be fun!!!

If they're fermenting it for biofuel, is rigorous sanitazation necessary? I, personally, don't care if my biodiesel has a bit of lacto sourness or some other off flavor.

As someone who works in a biofuels company cleaning and sanitation is 100% necessary. Competing yeast mess with the production of your strain's ability to produce your biofuel. There's only so much sugar to go around and an infected fermentation produces things other than your desired product. Large scale fermentation means 5% of your sugar source lost to infection is a large amount of money lost.

Anyway Good luck on your venture Mattress. R&D companies are pretty fun to be a part of.

I thought that would be true, cleaning the tanks shouldn't be to hard though. I am sure you won't be using star san, probably some caustic and some really nasty stuff. I have seen brewers use dairy tanks and they use some strong stuff for that.

[Mattress]

I was wondering if I could get by with a lot of bleach. We will be testing the gravity on whats in the tanker, and will probably be running some samples through the still for proofing. But I don't think that anyone will be running it in their cars when we get done. Damn thing just takes 2 1/2 hours to fill so I don't want to waste a ton of time/water doing lots of cleaning. The tank is stainless, and so far we have only rinsed it. But I know I need to do some kind of sanitation before next friday.

It does make me wonder what we are going to do with 5,000 gallons or so of fermented sorghum juice. But I've already got plans for what goes in the carboy.

[BrewChemistinCO]

I don't mean to sound like a dick or anything but what exactly is the point of this? Besides fermenting sorgum what are you guys trying to do? Or is this one of those because you can type answers? Buying something that big sounds like a production scale but I would think if you are trying to have an actual production scale operation you could just buy equipment that is designed for this type of thing. Again I'm just curious more than anything and not trying to be a dick.

[Mattress]

Well that has to include a better explanation of what I do. I work for the University of MO. This is only one of the experiments that we are doing, our others include corn, rice, milo, soybeans, etc. What we have for this is a research grant that we have been working with since 2007 to determine whether sweet sorghum is a viable alternative to corn for producing ethanol. Up until now we have been taking yields from our tests and just doing the calculations to convert what we harvest into how much ethanol it would produce. My project leader has decided that for the publication he wants to take it a step furthur and take our plots down to a semi-finished product and compare what we get from different Nitrogen fertilizer rates, harvest timings, and other factors.

The problem is, however, that these grants weren't originally written to provide a budget for this equipment. The tanker that we are using has been on our research farm for a long time. They had been using it as a water trailer up until the plumbing went bad last year. Since then it has been gathering dust. We looked at it as a way to still do a semi-large scale fermentation for roughly an acre of sweet sorghum (1 ac = 2000 to 6000 gallons of juice) without spending much money.

If we ever decide to continue this research we may get into purchasing new equipment, but for now our budget just wont allow it. Well, I think thats got most of the story covered, although it may not make much sense.

[BrewChemistinCO]

Ahh so sort of a proof of concept experiment to apply for future grants. Good Luck!!

Also more curiousity...I work on the downstream of things. We are modifying yeast to produce isobutanol instead of ethanol with current feed sources. Why besides food cost, logistics, etc are you looking into these other feed sources? Do they have more glucose per pound or something?

[whatsontap]

I wish you all the luck in your endeavors. Back in 2002/03 I was investing heavily in ethanol companies (verasun, pacific ethanol, archer daniels mostly). I ended up making some pretty sweet cash off of it until the government killed them all with some bullshit regulations. Until the oil kings get their filthy corrupt hands in ethanol and we're actually getting close to the end of fossil fuels I don't see this nation adopting it any time soon.


ANYWAYS to keep my post somewhat on topic, don't most infections end up drying a finished product out more than normal? Is that a taste thing or actual attenuation thing? I would imagine you'd want 2 key things to keep it efficient, highest percent attenuation / yield and lowest boil volume / highest OG (cost to heat). I read somewhere there was an ethanol company researching using cargo train inertia to power vacuum pumps to run vacuum stills rather than the old fashioned heat/chill method to yield a more pure end product, like how lab spirits are rendered. They happened to be next to a massive train hub somewhere in the midwest. The vacuum thing makes it easier in a couple ways (as long as the vacuum source is cheap). One being worrying about overheating and causing steam the other being chilling and cooling. Yes the regulators and temp sensors will be a bigger up front cost but in the end I think it'd be safer than working with tens? hundreds? of bbl's of boiling product under pressure and cooling it off. just some thoughts (mostly rambling)

[whatsontap]

Ahh so sort of a proof of concept experiment to apply for future grants. Good Luck!!

Also more curiousity...I work on the downstream of things. We are modifying yeast to produce isobutanol instead of ethanol with current feed sources. Why besides food cost, logistics, etc are you looking into these other feed sources? Do they have more glucose per pound or something?

Warning: Most of this post is speculation I don't work in the agricultural industry or fuel production business.

I would like to see more research in the amount of rendered fuel to amount of nutrients consumed type of thing. For example one corn plant has a lot of stalk and leaves (useless in the production of fuels) whereas something like sugarcane plant has less % waste to amount of nutrients supplied. To actually replace gasoline for america the amount of sq acreage is ridiculous and crop cycling would be near impossible @ the current farm capacity with corn or most other crops. I suppose this wouldn't be difficult to do with a hydroponic setup?