1868 The complete Practical Distiller

SOME DIRECTIONS TO THE DISTILLER.

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workmen who are continually in the use of the hammer and anvil. Their blows affect the vessels, as well as the fluids they contain ; they also facilitate the disengage- ment of the carbonic acid gas, the first connection of bodies ; the lees combine with the wine, insensible fer- mentation is augmented, and the liquor more promptly decomposed. A cellar cannot be too dry ; humidity undermines the tuns, moulds and rots the hoops till they burst, and the wine is lost. Besides this, humidity penetrates the casks insensibly, and at length communicates a mouldy taste to the liquor. Experience has proved in France that wine preserved in vast tuns, built into the stone walls of good cellars, increases in spirit every year. These tuns are not subject to running, like the common casks; and also contribute very much in point of economy, and in the end are less expensive than wood. For one apparatus, the space appropriated to a distillery, properly speaking, should not be less than from forty to fifty feet by fifteen or twenty; but this is only to be understood of distilleries of wine or spirits. A large yard or court is also necessary to a distillery. SOME DIRECTIONS TO THE DISTILLER. The average gravity of worts brewed from a mixture of malt and barley is, in all, from 100 to 120 pounds of saccharine matter per barrel. But part of this gravity is made up from a mixture called loh, which is a powerful and strong saccharine, made from barley and malt flour,