In this episode various aspects of using wheat as a fermentation base are discussed including selecting the grain, milling and mashing. Chad Butters from 8 Oaks Distilling talks about farming wheat and using it in his distillery.
Colleen Moore:
You’re listening to Distilling Craft Episode 14 Amber Waves. Today we’re going to be talking with Chad Butters of Eight Oaks Distilling out of New Tripoli, Pennsylvania.
Promo:
The Distilling Craft is brought to you by Dalkita, a group of architects and engineers who specialize in designing craft distilleries across the U. S more information is available at our website. Dalkita.com.
Colleen Moore:
Hello everyone. Welcome to Distilling Craft. I’m Colleen Moore. Hey, just a quick thing before we start today’s show. While we are hard at work, lining up new interviews and producing new shows and you are so kindly waiting on us, we are going to reissue a couple of our episodes from Season one with some previously unreleased material mixed in.
Colleen Moore:
Eight Oaks Distilling is a farm to glass distillery that forms their own wheat for use in their product. Chad is going to talk with us about that later in the show. Our radiogenic part-time distiller, DJ, is going to talk with us about using wheat as a fermentation base, including selecting the grain milling it and mashing it. Welcome to the show, Chad.
Chad Butters:
Hey, how you doing? It is good to be here.
DJ:
I really like how you guys named your distillery. Would you let everybody know how that kind of came to be?
Chad Butters:
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I certainly appreciate you taking the time and getting me on the show, so I appreciate that. The name Eight Oaks, actually has its roots with my grandfather. So he lived at a time where people, when they traveled away for work or whatever, they would keep in touch with their family by writing letters. Prior to cell phones for sure and even land lines were very expensive during that time, if you could get one. So he would write letters to his wife, my grandmother and his son, my father. At the end of those letters he would sign off with a number eight, and that number eight to him was representative of the eight letters. And I love you. So that’s how he communicated that emotion to his family. My Dad did the same thing as I was growing up.
Chad Butters:
He would travel away for work, working construction quite frequently. So birthday cards, letters, things like that for special events. There would always be you know, the number eight in the card or on the letter and still had that same meaning and representation to our family. So as my wife and I started our business, we knew that we would incorporate that number into the name somehow. My dad and my grandfather since passed on, but we just wanted to carry on that tradition. So the number eight comes from that. The oaks, to me is symbolic of nature and strength and longevity; all traits that we hope that this distillery finds itself having over time. Of course the oak tree plays a special part in the aging of Bourbons and other whiskeys, things like that. So that’s what the name is all about for us.
DJ:
Yeah, I think that’s just a fantastic story. So you guys are a farm distillery and it looks like most of the winter rye, you guys grow goes into your products. Tell me a little bit about the farm and how that kind of started off and turned into a distillery.
Chad Butters:
Absolutely. And if I get long winded on it, just don’t hesitate to just tell me to be quiet. I’ll even kind of back up just a little bit cause I think it’s important for context. The whole reason we got into this, I was an army guy for my whole career of 25 years. I was ready to retire, move on and do the next chapter in our life and what really got us there was my wife was diagnosed with colon cancer, unfortunately in 2012. We’re relatively young when you consider the average age of people. You know, certainly in our late forties, early fifties at this point. But it was one of those kind of rude awakening moments for us that wow, life really is short.
Chad Butters:
This stuff can happen to people. All those dreams and visions that we had of ourselves, at some point you gotta kind of put that into action. And so as she completed her first round of treatments and things like that, we sat down and we had a conversation about what it is that we truly want to do to make ourselves exceptionally happy. The first thing that came to the list of course was just simply spend more time together with friends and family, traveling away. For long periods of time, career had gotten worn a little thin. And so we just simply wanted to be together more often. So that was number one. Number two, we wanted to start a family business where we could work together with friends and family every day and spend more time together every evening.
Chad Butters:
Number three was that we wanted to have some sort of agricultural business. We’ve always been interested in that. It’s always been something that I’ve wanted to explore some more. And lastly, we just wanted to have fun and enjoy ourselves. So as we kind of wrap all those things together, as we look for an agriculturally related business to be a part of you start exploring things like pick your own berry farms, community support agriculture. Vegetable garden type things and corn mazes and pumpkin patches and all of that. So we did our research, and we stumbled into wineries as part of that research and just didn’t find ourselves really infatuated with that idea. It’s certainly been done before but it led us to distilleries and that was something brand new for us, really didn’t know what all that included.
Chad Butters:
And so we started doing some research on distilleries and, and to make that long story just a tad longer and that’s kind of where we got into this. So to your point the agricultural part of this is exceptionally important to us. And not that I’m a farmer, I’ve found out through that research that farming is kind of hard. So you know that I have very soft hands and you know that you have to, have to, have to be real willing to put your back into it when it comes to farming and you have to have some experience. And so we, luckily, have a neighbor of ours that is a third generation farmer and knows what he’s doing and he is the one who’s planting, physically driving the tractor and planning the grains that we select to plant. So we grow a soft red winter wheat, we grow a rye, we grow a conventional variety of corn and parsley as well. So those are the things that are on our kind of farm bill for right now.
DJ:
Well, hopefully your wife’s diagnosis’s improved and things are going well as far as she’s concerned.
Chad Butters:
It has. And I don’t mean to mention that as a damper. She’s doing well today. I just mean to mention that as, you know, for us. I wanted to share an experience in our life that nobody ever thinks that kind of stuff’s going to happen to them. Again, not at all trying to be a damper on that, it’s just a catalyst for action.
DJ:
Oh, certainly. I just wanted to get an update.
Chad Butters:
Yeah. She’s doing well.
DJ:
So you’re not actually doing the farming, how do you qualify as a farm distillery? You guys owning the land or the distillery is located and next to the fields? How does that work?
Chad Butters:
No, I would say it absolutely it’s just like, I don’t physically do much of the distilling my distiller does. I don’t physically get out and do much of the farming, but we absolutely own or lease the land. We select the varieties of grains to grow. I just happened to pay this friend of mine that actually does the act of farming. So we truly do have every aspect of the farming covered. We are intimately involved in every single process that goes on in that farming component and all of the grain, every single kernel and the grain that we use is grown on our farm.
DJ:
That’s awesome. So how did you select the different varietals of grain then that you’re choosing to grow?
Chad Butters:
While we’re still very much in the exploratory phase of things. I think we will be for a number of years just because of the seasonal kind of qualities of farming. So what we did initially was we went to Michigan State University much like a lot of our cohorts do when we’re looking at starting a craft distillery. Michigan State has Dr Carl Berglund up there that I think has probably educated a great majority of craft distilleries, in innovation anyway. Four day course up there that gets into the weeds a bit on how this is all done. And Dr Berglund certainly has done some scientific research on different varieties of grain and what works, quote unquote, best for different things. So what we started with soft red winter wheat. It happens to grow really well in our region and it happens to do really well as far as starch conversion and starch content in the first place. That allows you to do something like what we create out of that as our vodka and our Gin.
Chad Butters:
So that’s where we started. We started with a specific variety of that soft red winter wheat. It seems to be working really well as far as quality and yields are concerned. So that’s what we’re sticking with and at this point that wheat is something that I would hesitate to go away from just because now it’s a known entity. So that’s an example of the wheat. The corn is a conventional variety type of a corn. It’s a non GMO corn. And again, it seems to be producing good results as far as quality and quantity is concerned as well. Barley is something that we’re really exploring right now because as you probably know, two row varieties of barley are what’s typically found in, some of the Scotch and Irish whiskey type of whiskeys. Here in Pennsylvania, two row is just not been grown to any real extent.
Chad Butters:
It’s all been six row barley and it’s mostly for feed. We started with a six row variety called a thoroughbred and we’ve since kind of moved on to trying a couple of different varieties of two row, even just this past year. Trying that out and we actually had some real success with it. So we’ve been working with the Penn state extension, as far as, getting some advice on different farming methods, with two row barley specifically. We’re trying some different varieties and different approaches to that now. And I think really what we’re most excited about on the farming front, beyond experimenting with different barleys is obviously what that’s going to produce as far as an end product, which is going to take some time, especially in the barley phase. Trying to do kind of an American style Scotch, out of a two row barley is going to take years to really figure out how well we did.
Chad Butters:
Yeah. So, it’s going to take a little time. I think right now, strategically my main thing that I’m excited about on the agricultural aspect of this is working with folks from Rodale Industry. Trying to transition this whole operation to an organic operation. That’s where we’re going, I think all things point to that. There’s several different reasons for that. And everybody I think has their own opinions about organic farming. I just have started formulating mine based on some research lately.
DJ:
You know, I had so many questions about your farming. I’m not even sure where to start. I guess with the transition from the six row to the two row, you said you kind of getting some tips from the local ag extension. Can you kind of talk about some of the techniques that you’ve had to do differently to get two row to work for you, and then what you’ve seen in terms of gain from the grain itself. Are you getting a higher yield on the two row or at least getting the equivalent to what you were getting with the six row?
Chad Butters:
So I think what’s nice about Penn state extension is they obviously approached this from an academic point of view. And they do the small plot research that allows us to take advantage of their findings. Right? So they’ve, got a pretty good head start on this whole barley seen as far as it relates to brewing and distilling. They saw that coming, I think that wave coming and they’ve kind of done what they can to support that and do the research that is helpful. So that’s where we’ve kind of gleaned some of their lessons learned is we don’t plant varieties that they’ve already tried. And for one reason or another, typically it’s a moisture thing or it’s a seasonal thing. Either it’s too wet, it’s too dry, it’s not cold enough, for the growing season.
Chad Butters:
So it just depends on the environment. You know, a lot of that barley is grown out west and in Canada. Totally different agricultural environment out there. So we’ve just been able to take advantage of trials that they’ve already run and have had success with. And then we’ve kind of piggybacked on that and recently just this July harvested our first two row and did have a better than expected yields on that two row. So we’ll certainly keep going down that path. But like I said, it’s to be determined as to how well it works for us in the finished product.
DJ:
Yeah. And that actually kind of led me into my next question. I know in particularly in doing grapes, the amount of moisture really matters as well as when it kind of shows up. So you can get sweeter grapes by kind of shorting the water a little bit, but they’re not as big and you get a lower yield with higher sugar. Do you see any of that kind of thing with grain where you’re able to impact the flavor profile created with your farming techniques? Or I guess have you gotten any advice from the ag extension since you got the time to experiment yourself?
Chad Butters:
Yeah, the trials are still on and the data’s still out and we don’t have enough data under our belt yet just from not producing so much age product yet to really be able to pin those variables down. You know, I think of it as everything that we’re doing right now, we try to do consistently and not mess with too much of the variables that we as as much as we can control. Wait, let’s go back to the wheat. We use a very particular variety of wheat and we’re going to stick with that and we’re going to see what happens over time. So now we’ve got a couple of seasons under our belt and actually a couple pretty good variations in those seasons. We had a dry season, we had a very moist season.
Chad Butters:
So we’ve seen just this season what that did to our yields. In corn, for instance, this season was exceptionally wet here in this region of Pennsylvania and what we would typically see as somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred to 125 bushels per acre of corn. We’re seeing this year 175 bushels per acre of corn. So that’s just a yield issue. You know, that’s good news. But it’s gonna take some time to see and decipher, you know, kind of that terroir element that you hear about. I’m really excited to figure that out because we do have consistency in the soil. We know exactly what the soil is like here and we have consistency in this seed variety and we have essentially a consistency as far as the regional environment is concerned. So really the differences that we should see would be related to moisture related to temperature.
Chad Butters:
Specific temperature and moisture in our area on our land that we’re getting year over year. So it’s going to be really interesting I think over time to be able to answer those questions with some fidelity. And I think it’s what’s going to take a decade probably to really kind of nail that down, right. Which is awesome. I mean, it’s great to think about` a business that’s takes some real time to get to solutions and I’m okay with that. It’s going to keep us on our toes for a good long time.
DJ:
I think we’re going to have to move on from the farming stuff. It’s something that interests me a bunch. It’s an essential element, that’s my opinion. All right, so with the transition and doing barley, are you guys doing your own malting in house or are you sending your grain out to be malted elsewhere?
Chad Butters:
It’s a great question and it’s one we still struggle with. So currently I malt, no barley. Right now inside or outside, I don’t send any out to be malted. I use very little barley in our process right this minute. So we are struggling with as you probably know, barley malting or any malting for that matter is relatively expensive. I mean, when we look at it compared to our input costs on the grain, the malting processes is multiples over our grain input. So we are certainly looking at starting our own malting operations in the relatively near term. In the next 12 months or so. So, right now the answer is neither.
DJ:
Oh, when you look at that cost of malting, how does it compare to the enzymes that you’re using? I mean, like say on a one year basis.
Chad Butters:
Yeah, that’s a really great point and it goes back to my initial kind of thing about being very new to this business. We’re 19 months in or so and I think, again, I want to try to keep a consistency initially without introducing these wild variables. If I change my enzymes right now and either change varieties of enzymes or whatever, too wildly, then I’m not really going to be able to pin down what variable caused the effect that we might be seeing. So I certainly don’t want to replace technical enzymes with malted barley for conversion right now. It would certainly, it would just simply be for a flavor profile, I think at this point. Now as we get better and better at this and as we understand more and more about what each inputs doing to our final flavor and character of our spirit, then we can tweak those variables. One variable at a time. I think in order to see the result. That’s my approach and you know, being a publicly educated guy from South Carolina that may not be the best approach. It’s just happens to be what makes it simple for me to kind of keep track of.
DJ:
That’s about the best approach there is.
Chad Butters:
It’s the only one I can think of.
DJ:
I saw something a little interesting on your website and we’ll want to get into it a bit. It says, you hand mill your grain. Now what is hand milling mean to you?
Chad Butters:
Yeah. And what is handcrafting, right? I mean some of that painting a picture that the grain is literally grown here, literally, harvested, cleaned, dried and milled. Everything is done on site. Yeah, I think when you talk about hand milled, we certainly are intimately involved with the Labor of billing. But the mill itself is a 10 horsepower electric mill that I will tell you, we hand mill some of the smaller adjuncts that we might add and I don’t want to hand mill more than about one bushels worth of anything and I don’t as far as like literally hand cranking something, I’m sorry.
DJ:
I wouldn’t want to use a hand drill for more than a Bushel.
Chad Butters:
No, we’ve tried that too. And that we’re not crazy about that method at all. So yeah, there’s things that we have used and we’ll continue to use that are in relatively small quantities that we don’t run through the hammer mill. And just having done those, I’m good with that. I’d much rather stick with the hammer mill at this point.
DJ:
Yeah. I don’t blame you even a little bit. So in using your mill, what do you guys see a different in terms of setup or how it runs when you’re processing your wheat versus your rye and then the six row versus the two row barley?
Chad Butters:
That’s a really good question. That’s a question that see, I would not have had the insight to even ask a year and a half ago. It leads to some of the kind of comical things that go on around the distillery on any given day as the clown show tries to turn into a real professional distillery. So, yeah there’s a significant difference. What we have is we’ve got some great equipment from Hershey equipment which is here in Pennsylvania and, and they are the ones that came in and I told them kind of what we wanted to do and they sized up the equipment and said, okay. These are the augers that we recommend and this is the hammer mill and what have you. So we have a hopper that we have on load cells that weighs out the grain.
Chad Butters:
I’m sure that’s not anything totally unique to anyone else’s distillery, but it weighs out the grain based on the recipe that we’re making that day. And to your point, what we have is in between the hopper and the very first augur, there’s a small shoot that has a gate that allows us to decrease or increase the flow of grain going into the Auger. Which of course decreases or increased the flow grain coil and the hammer mill. So that shoot, I expected, look in kind of being new to this, that you just open it and let grain go in and that’s fine. That works really well for corn, but when you just open it for Rye, for instance, you’re going to pop all kinds of circuit breakers and cause all kinds of issues to your entire milling system.
Chad Butters:
So yeah, rye mills very, very hard. It takes a lot of time. We have to meter that in very slowly, relatively to other grain. Corn is a dream. And I will almost want to make everything out of corn just because it mills so nicely. Wheat is pretty reasonably easy as well. Barley, we haven’t run a whole lot of barley through, the mill individually. We sometimes add barley in with other grain. So I’ve not run a whole lot of barley through the mill by itself. So I can’t speak on the load that gives the hammer mill. But I can definitely tell you that we mill rise is certainly like, what I would imagine it would be like if we just threw a bunch of gravel in there.
DJ:
That is a great analogy. So once you’re getting done with your mill, do you have any ideas on screen size or what grist you’re getting put out of the mill?
Chad Butters:
Yeah. You’re kind of reaching back into my memory for a minute here. And I want to say it’s two millimeters, but I would have to, I would have to kind of go back and check on that. We do have two different screens but frankly we put on one screen that was too big and then step that screen down just a little bit. And that’s been the screen that we’ve been using ever since. I want to say that’s two mill, but I can’t remember right off the top of my head.
Promo:
Yeah, fair enough. It tends to be a set it and forget it. So I was just curious if…
Chad Butters:
It is. We throw the screen on there and we let it go. And again though, I think it’s a great point that it’s yet another variable, right? That can add to or distract from what you’re doing as far as quality and quantity and your process, right. So each one of those variables, even down to the screen size on your bill can have an impact and it might be a good one, maybe not. So I’m sure that if you look at our system from planting all the way through finishing and bottling, there are so many things that I know that I don’t know yet. I can’t wait to learn those things because I’m sure I’ll be kicking myself for not having done them sooner. It’s one of those things.
Promo:
The nice reasons that most distilleries are very willing to share is there’s no possible way to replicate every little detail like that all the way through your distillery. So there’s no way that anybody can really steal your flavor.
Chad Butters:
Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I’ve recently heard somebody coin a term collabetition when it comes to distilleries. And I think that’s a perfect, dead on, description on how we operate. Certainly here in the Lehigh valley and down towards Philly we have a dozen or so distilleries now. We’ll be happy to share information back and forth. But we’re also all keeping one eye on the market and making sure that we’ve got our point of difference and that we’ve got our thing that we’re bringing to the market that’s going to be a little bit different than the other guy. So it’s just so much fun. And you know, people like Rob that you discussed before out in Colorado and folks like that. I, I just love working with these folks cause they’re all just good hearted people that are trying to do things, not only to make a living, but they’re trying to do things that traditionally or crafts that they can be proud of. And it’s just, it’s such great fun to be part of that.
DJ:
All right. Certainly is, I enjoy every day. So one last thing here about your, your grain process and that’s your mashing. So what do you guys we talked earlier about enzymes. What other controls do you guys do in your mashing process that kind of give you the flavor you’re looking?
Chad Butters:
Well, q I don’t know that it’s flavor at this point as much as it is efficient conversion and healthy mash for yeast to convert sugar to alcohol. We’ve certainly, I think if, if my lead distiller was sitting right here with me, his name’s Logan and he’s on top of stuff and always experimenting. Katelyn is our assistant distiller and they’re very much mad scientists that are trying to experiment but be very controlled and very methodical about it and not do too much at any one time. So I think right now what our big deal is is Ph and working with Ph. Because before that we weren’t doing any kind of Ph adjustments whatsoever. We were just do it using the natural water that was coming in.
Chad Butters:
We were doing our recipe is per enzymes alpha and Beta amylase and then getting what we got. We were always, frankly, we were always trying to shoot for this high number of bricks. Right? It was all for us, it was all about bricks. It was all about, oh my gosh, I’ve got x amount of bricks out of this. That’s awesome. But then when it came through the fermentation process and we measured the end result of Abv at the end of a fermentation, we were always disappointed. So we’ve kind of started coming up with different theories about what was going on. And again, I’ll be the first to admit that our theory right now, seems to be panning out. But it also is probably very elementary and you know, we’re very much in grade school at this point as far as our ability to experiment and learn.
Chad Butters:
And you know, I’m looking forward to graduating and getting into high school and college level. But right now the Ph has been something that we’ve been playing with for the last several months and we’ve seen some real returns on alcohol conversion. So again, that’s a quantity issue. We haven’t seen any negative impact on quality as far as un-aged products concerned. I can’t imagine that we’re going to see any negative impacts as far as our age product either. But we have definitely seen some returns on the level of the alcohol by volume that we get out of the fermentation,
DJ:
Kind of getting a little higher abv or are you dialing back on your grain to maintain kind of a consistent level?
Chad Butters:
Yeah, I feel terrible. I’m like all of us were busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest right now, but I haven’t had the opportunity to do my research on you and see your background, so forgive me for my ignorance on that, but these are fantastic questions and follow ups. So yeah absolutely, we are seeing the ability to dial back rain? Certainly, no doubt about that and in a fairly significant way. And again you start off with a mash bill that’s created off of R&D, which is rip off and deny, right? Trying to figure out well rob master’s does it this way, so let’s try that and then tweak it a little bit.
Chad Butters:
So just like you pointed out, I think very accurately is, I think it’s a bit silly to be overly carded with your processes and your recipes because, let’s face it, there’s a million things that go on to produce your particular product. So Rob was instrumental and kind of be in our training wheels as we started off and helping us come in and develop recipes and things. And so we’ve taken those and now are starting to tweak it and see that we can indeed get the same or better conversion and quantities. Then with less, far less grain. We’ll see how that goes as far as, you know, what some of these aged spirits come out as far as quality goes, but everything points to similar or better quality.
DJ:
Very cool. Unfortunately we’re running short on time and so I’ve got to take a flying leap to something else that just grabbed my eye off your website. How are you getting locally sourced molasses in the northeast?
Chad Butters:
Yeah, that’s a good one. So yeah there’s no such thing as that. That is our folks at our marketing place that put in some verbiage that says locally sourced, because I said that I get it from Lancaster, Pennsylvania from a place called golden barrel foods, which is all very accurate. So that’s where we get our molasses. But Golden Barrel Foods certainly does not grow sugar cane in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We’ll use that as a great segue to kind of our product line though. And now that we’ve got 18, 19, 20 months under our belt you start to get your own personality under you. As you start out you’re a distillery that’s got a business plan based off of the research that you’ve done and the market research that you’ve done in the past.
Chad Butters:
It’s all very much just kind of an educated guess. And as you start to kind of get your feet under you and get your brand about you and understand who and what you want to be is a distillery. We did rum because I like rum and I own my own distillery, so I want it to have rum. It’s not at all in line with our brand of being a farm distillery that’s growing all our own grains and sourcing our apple cider locally from a local orchard. Rum just doesn’t fit in that. And frankly rum, there’s some really great distilleries that focus on nothing but rum that can make some brilliant rums. I don’t think we’re going to stay in the rum game at all. I think we’re going to start pairing that back to a point that we probably don’t even have that in our product line. And if we do, it won’t be outside the tasting room. It’s just something that doesn’t fit within the brand that we’ve grown to be. It’s not anything that I’m overly passionate about. And there’s some people out there that are very passionate about rum or making it far better than we ever will. So, that’s where we’ll kind of step off on the rum.
DJ:
Well, speaking of your brand in line, so where can we find some of your products? You guys only available in state or do you have a little bit more of a national presence?
Chad Butters:
No, we’re very much an in state presence at this point. We’re very much retail oriented. We have taken advantage of the Pennsylvania regulations that allow us to sell at farmer’s markets. So we do a lot of that. We’re here in the Lehigh Valley, at several different seasonal farmer’s markets. We are down at reading terminal market, which is a very famous market down in Philadelphia. We’re just opening our newest location at the broad street market in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania tomorrow, actually. So those are the ways that we’re kind of getting not only our product out there, but getting people to understand who we are and what we’re about and just getting our story out to people as well. So that’s been really helpful, but that’s been really what we’re focused on. So 90% of our business right now is retail within the southeastern Pennsylvania region and we’re happy with that. We’ll continue to grow at a methodical pace that allows us to continue to hone our craft and be good at what we do.
DJ:
So if you’re going to start your distillery again, what would you do differently?
Chad Butters:
Oh, boy, that is a great question. My Goodness, I tell you what, I think I would do differently. I would, right now we’re in a situation where our age products sell exceptionally well to the point that I can’t keep up with demand. So I would probably go ahead and raise more capital up front. We did take advantage of some advice given to us by some distilleries early on about raising initial capital to the point that you can have a distillery that has a footprint and subsystems that will be easily scalable. So we did that, but what I didn’t do was raise enough capital right up front to really start putting away barrel aged product inventory, from day one. You know, we’ve had to grow that product and that inventory organically. Meaning that we’re taking a cash directly out of the checkbook and we’re having to make a decision about do we pay the electric bill or do we put it in the barrel?Typically we pay the electric bill. So at some point you can put some in a barrel, but we just don’t have nearly as much as we should and could have, if we would’ve raised a little bit more capital to begin with.
DJ:
Yeah, I think that’s a very common answer. So if somebody came to you and they were in a similar situation as yourself and said, hey, I’ve got a limited budget, where should I focus my money? What’s the most important place to focus on? What would you say?
Chad Butters:
Oh, let’s see a limited budget, but they already have a, they already have a distillery or, I mean, they’ve already purchased equipment or?
DJ:
Just starting out. They wanted a distillery, but they’ve got a limited budget. What’s the most important thing to spend your money on or focus? You know, what’s the big ticket item that needs the extra little kick?
Chad Butters:
I will tell you when I have a buddy of mine that’s looking at starting a distillery. It’s not in the state of Pennsylvania, but he’s getting ready to start a distillery. And the thing, my biggest piece of advice to him right now, it’s not necessarily where to invest your money, it’s where to invest your time. And where I would invest my time initially is more on your location. And I think we all get very anxious and we want to pick a location, we want to get a location as quickly as we can because that means we can start production and start getting this business done. But the location, I think when you first look at first blush. What we’re interested in typically is what’s the location, what’s the square footage, what’s the cost per square foot?
Chad Butters:
And maybe we start looking into things like what’s the water source and what’s the source of my disposal water? Where is that going? And those are all good relevant questions. But what I would say is you want to be even more involved than that. You need to know your locality, your municipality and the zoning officer for that particular locality. You need to know what kind of regulations that are going off of it. The international construction code, the international fire code, which year, which version of those are though going from and just generally speaking, what, how receptive is that zoning officer, to what you’re doing? And as far as building a distilled spirits plant and how much do they know, your location impacts so many different things.
Chad Butters:
It may require you to put in fire suppression. It may require some sort of environmental, interaction with the state environmental agencies for disposal of stillage and all of those things add up to money and time. I’d be very, very sensitive and very thorough about choosing a location and that there’s not a whole lot of price per square foot that would influence my decision. It would be all those other things that we talked about or where do you see the industry going in the next five to 10 years? Well, I certainly see it continuing to grow. I think that’s obvious. I think, you know, we have seen the scale of distilleries pop up over the last six, seven, eight years, what would be defined as explosive growth, I guess.
Chad Butters:
Uh, I personally think that’s going to continue to happen. I think with distilling, you know, we’ve seen it, you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it in the craft brewing. If you look over that for the last 15, 20 years, you can kind of see that trajectory. I think with distilling, you have an opportunity to create unique products. Beer to me, and I’m not a beer expert, but you’re relatively limited. I mean, you’ve got so many different paths to follow or go down or create on the distilling industry that I think that’s going to be what’s going to be important to the people that are coming on now is figuring out what products they want to launch and trying to ,we don’t probably need another vodka. You probably ought to look into something that maybe has some historical background to it. Something that maybe is really, really popular in a place like Nicaragua, but we don’t know anything about it. Those types of spirits. I don’t know. I think there’s certainly lots of room for growth and lots of room for people to play in this arena for a good long time. That’s just my opinion.
DJ:
Thank you very much for coming on the show.
Chad Butters:
It’s an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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Colleen Moore:
Special thanks to Chad Butters from Eight Oaks distilling to talking with us on our show today. Up next, our intern DJ and his exhortation on using wheat as a fermentation base, including to select the grain, milling the grain and mashing it.
DJ:
So wheat is probably the oldest grain that we know of. We’ve been farming wheat as far back as we have records and there’s a lot known about wheat, both from a baking perspective, a farming perspective, as well as from a brewing and distilling perspective. I’m not going to be able to get into a lot of the deep genetic stuff and honestly it doesn’t really affect us as with most things distilling is a lot simpler than what other people have to necessarily deal with. There’s a couple of different varieties of wheat out there. Generally speaking though, differences break down to three things. You can either have red or white wheat that you can have soft or hard wheat and you can have spring or winter wheat. The red and white thing really doesn’t matter. It’s purely a color issue.
DJ:
I’ve even heard there’s some other color varieties out there on some of the older types of grain. Aside from, some flavor differences, how they distill and how we need to process that grain really isn’t effected by the color. Where it is affected though is in the soft versus hard. So soft versus hard refers to how easy it is to mill the grain. Hard wheat is hard to mill and soft wheat is easy to mill And the reason for this is that the starch molecules or starch chains are actually bound up in a protein matrix. And so the tighter that protein matrix binds around the starch, the harder it is to mill, the more protein there is, the less starch there is and starches what’s given us our alcohol and the protein also causes all kinds of other fun problems for us. In the case of wheat, protein generally means gluten and gluten means glue and sticky, just junk, so we want to try to stay as far away from the hard wheats as possible.
DJ:
Next is spring versus winter. Generally speaking, the winter wheat have a lower protein content than the spring wheats and that’s about the major difference you can find in either variety grains that will meet your needs in terms of high starch, low protein, they tend to be easier to find in the winter variety. One more thing to consider is if you’re looking at say a bottle and bond product where you need to be distilling in the same year that you’re harvesting, your winter wheats will tend to be harvested earlier in the year than your spring wheats. You’re looking like a May to June harvest date for your winter wheats where you’re going to be pushing closer to September for your spring weeks, so you’ll have a shorter distillation window in order to get those same distilled in the same year they’re harvested. Probably doesn’t matter for the vast majority of you, but it is something to note.
DJ:
So when we’re talking about using wheat, historically wheat wasn’t a major whiskey in and of itself. Wheat and Rye actually have a lot of things in common. I mean while there were straight Rye whiskeys and there certainly were straight wheat whiskeys, most of the time they were used as a component in a bourbon or a scotch in order to help fill out the their major grain bill. And this is mainly because the starch component of wheat and rye are very similar. Generally speaking, we’re looking at about 69% start with wheat, 68% with Rye, we’re looking 13.2% protein with wheat, 12.6 with Rye. I mean these numbers aren’t very far off. Even when we start talking about nitrogen, there’s 1% difference between them. We’re at basically 70% with wheat and 71% with rye, so the makeup of these two grains is very somewhere and so you find their uses are similar.
DJ:
What really is going on is that the conversion of that starch is a little bit more difficult in a weeder or awry. It’s not quite as readily available as it is in a corn and you don’t have as much enzyme as you get in say a barley. Part of that is in the way though the wheat is structured. Wheat doesn’t have a kernel like you get in barley and so it’s a little bit doughier and those proteins are actually what gives the wheat its shape, but the proteins also break down and start forming that gummy, gooey mess that causes all the nightmares. We need to be careful when we’re milling that we don’t over process our wheat grains. What that’ll do is give both the starch availability and the protein availability and the protein old bond to that water and create that gummy gooey mess that we hate. The easiest way to solve that though is temperature.
DJ:
So we can do a solid protein rest and that’ll get rid of our gums and what that’ll do is that’ll allow the starch to be a little bit freer in there and boundless tightly to the proteins. These just way to do this is to do it as you do your strike temperature, so make sure your, when you’re putting your weed in there, give it a nice rest on the way up. Maybe strike a little bit lower in that hundred and 1,013 range and let it sit and really destroy all the proteins. Then build up. The other way you can really help out with your wheat mashes is to not let the wheat get too hot. If your wheat gets over about 155 you start killing all your alpha amylase and that’s what allows you to help break down those gluten chains. Having both a kind of rest at the low end and then staying out of the high end will actually help your viscosity of your wheat mashes considerably.
DJ:
It gives you a little bit of a tighter range to work in. You definitely don’t want your weed in there while you’re cooking your corn up at, you know, one 73 or anything. But if you bring your corn back down, if you’re doing, say a bourbon, make sure you’re down below 155 before you add your wheat and then still underway out. Give it that solid protein rest. Like I said, about 113 and that’ll help break down that viscosity even more. We will see less foaming in the fermenter and a whole lot less foaming in the, in the still. If you don’t do that though, we has a terrible reputation for viscosity problems mainly because you can play with it outside of those bounds. Wheat is going to form that sticky mush that is almost impossible to clean out of. You know, your chillers scrape off the sides of your fermenters.
DJ:
And where it really makes the difference is when you’re trying to separate your grain out from your, a wort prior to distillation or after distillation, the gluten molecules really bond without water. And it becomes very difficult to separate out. So what you’re going to do, instead of getting nice dry grains, it’s always going to be that kind of sticky doughy mush. Or again, if you can break down that gluten, that won’t be as much of a problem. But if you are, say, doing a traditional bourbon with that high mash you’re throwing your wheat in there at the same time, just be aware that you’re going to have a little bit more of an issue with a a weeded bourbon separating out your, your solids than you would say with a, with a high rye bourbon. And it’s just a matter of of how you treat the grain.
DJ:
This goes back to kind of why we’re doing this segment, which is to talk about how different fermentable need to be treated differently in order to get the same result. You can do what you want with it, but just a little bit of difference can really change things. One last fun thing you can do with wheat is something you can steal from the beer world. So there is a way to induce clo flavor due to chemical reaction. So obviously your yeast, particularly for in the beer world, if you’re using a Heffe(wisen) yeast will naturally put out, I forgot the chains called put put out clove flavors. In order to do that chemical reaction, they actually need a precursor molecule that you can create during your mash and that precursor is ferulic acid. And so what you can do is as you’re cooling down your wash, give it a nice rest just below the protein rest 109-113 somewhere in that range. Yeah, you also need a little bit of a higher Ph at this point you want 5.7-5.8 and what you will do by sitting there for about a half hour, is you will create this additional ferulic acid and then that can impart a clove flavor. So if you want a little bit of different funkiness in your wheat whiskey or in your wheated bourbon, giving it that little rest down there at the bottom could be a way to add complexity and kind of fun steal from the beer world.
Colleen Moore:
Are you interested in filing a report with us? Well, we’re actively seeking professionals to give us the low down on the technical aspects of distillery operations for our listeners. Contact us via our website with your pitch. Do you have feedback on this show? Well, send us an email to distillingcraft@dalkita.com. Of course, if you want to find out more about this specific episode, go to our show notes on our webpage that is dalkita.com/shownotes.
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Mentioned in this Episode:
Eight Oaks Craft Distillers: www.eightoaksdistillers.com
Hersey Equipment Co.: www.hequip.com
Check out other episodes of the Distilling Craft Podcast here.
