Page 65 - Craft of Whiskey Distilling

54 | CrAFt WHIskEy DIstIllInG
Most distilleries use a plate filter with coarse filter media to take out the particles. It’s important to filter after diluting, and not before, to make sure any turbidity in the diluting water is removed as well. Also, the receiving tank for the filtered whiskey and all its tubing must be completely lint free, or particles could be re-introduced to the whiskey.
Bottling: The bottling of whiskey doesn’t require the same level of sterilization as for bottling wine or beer. At 40 or more percent alcohol, whiskey is itself a disinfectant. How- ever, it’s very important that all the equipment and the bottles used are very clean.
A good type of bottling machine for spirits is an inline overflow filler. This type of filler is suited to filling containers where a specific visible fill level is required. The overflow mechanism enables the device to fill the bottles much faster since there’s a provision to return overflowing liquid to the reservoir, thereby eliminating the need for a slow fill to achieve a specific level. Small inline overflow fillers are available at a very reasonable price that can fill several thousand bottles per day. Most craft distillers use a four head gravity filling machine or an enolmaster vacuum filling machine. These filling machines are read- ily available from winer equipment companies such as G.W. Kent (gwkents.com) or St. Pats (stpats.com).
Once the whiskey is diluted and filtered, it can be placed in the product tank of the bot- tling equipment, and bottled. It’s interesting to note that once a spirit is diluted to bottling strength, it will actually improve with age for a few weeks. The reason for this is not fully understood, but recent research indicates that it takes a few weeks for all the different types of molecules to completely mix and diffuse themselves evenly throughout the substrate. And, this has a beneficial effect on mellowing and bringing out the complexity of the flavor.
bOTTLINg pROCEDuRE FOR THE bARREL OF wHISkEy FROM CHApTER 4
This section describes how to bottle the fully-aged malt whiskey from Chapter 4. There should be about 30 gallons of cask-strength whiskey at about 60% abv.
Equipment
n 53-gallon barrel of malt whiskey from Chapter 4
n Distilled or RO water
n 50-gallon tote
n Measuring equipment (thermometer, alcoholmeter graduated cylinders)
n Plate filter with coarse-grade media
n Bottling machine and ancillary equipment