Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Hi Folks,

Decided it was time to put down a TFFV to make some neutral for oaking and gin production through the stay at home time. Opened up the bran bucket and found that the contents were riddled with weevils. Now I know that some of you will be saying “just toss the lot in. She’ll be right mate.” Nah... I just couldn’t do it. It all went to the worm farm and a couple of packs of bran were picked up from Woolies. This got me thinking. The original bran was purchased from a produce store and obviously contained weevil eggs. If I could stop the weevils hatching there would be no problem. Don’t like chemicals at all but one thing hit me. What about carbon dioxide? Got plenty of that on hand every ferment, so an experiment is now under way. I have attached some tubing to the fermenter airlock, directed that into a small jar to catch moisture and then redirected tubing into the top of my bran bucket.


The lid of the bucket was left unsealed to allow air to escape and the airlock was still bubbling away nicely. This meant that there was very little back pressure to stop gas transfer. I plan to put some water absorbing crystals into the bottom of the jar to make sure that the carbon dioxide is quite dry when it passes into the bucket. Hopefully the CO2 will do the job on the weevils and stop the eggs from hatching. It’ll be an interesting test to see if it works. If the CO2 slowly filters down to the bottom of the bucket, I am guessing that there will be some chance of success. If it all works out, the cracked corn will get the same treatment.

The weavels won’t drink much, just scoop them off .
But, I don’t understand people wanting to oak a neutral ? But then I don’t understand the Oaked Absolute vodka either

TFFV comes up quite well on oak. Normally do it with chips. Not heaps of flavour but it is quite OK as a mixer. Just a drink to have while waiting for the better stuff to age for 12 months or so.

Weavels no problem have been told that fruit in Europe if had grubs was used to make alcohol and if have cheese with maggots and not alive do not eat.
There was a TV program that they recommended to treat insects on old taxidermy to put in the freezer for 5 days.

Maggots :puke-huge:

The little weevils float to the top of water so can be scooped off prior to the heating stage of the bran prep.

Fridge or freezer will also stop the eggs hatching

Fridge and freezer are good ideas, I doubt the little trickle of carbon dioxide will have any effect. There'd be far more oxygen in amongst all the grains. In order to make it work you'd need to get the whole lot under a high vacuum and then fill with CO2. Just freeze em.

But co2 is heavier than air, so feasibly it could work.
Do you have a second bucket that isn’t under co2 as a control?
Obviously freezing it or just scooping them off is easier but nothing wrong with a little experiment

Farmers use a phostoxin to kill weevils in silos, nasty shit and you need to be licensed to buy it.

As long as the weevils haven’t turned everything into powder, then eventually a brick you would probably be alright.

Unless of course it’s barley that you were going to malt then forget about it

We are actually using a powder in our on farm grain storage that cases weevils or the lesser grain borer to dehydrate and die. It's not a chemical as such so has no withholding period. Very safe to use in comparison to some other chemicals out there.

dans.brew wrote:We are actually using a powder in our on farm grain storage that cases weevils or the lesser grain borer to dehydrate and die. It's not a chemical as such so has no withholding period. Very safe to use in comparison to some other chemicals out there.

I would assume that is an aierated silo? Tailored to keeping grain?

Oxygen Absorbers they put in food to keep longer and kill unwanted bugs.

I actually thought of putting some of those absorbers into the jar. Good idea to have a control bucket of grain or bran when performing the test. My other concern is that the CO2 would not penetrate the bran and force air out. It would form a layer over the surface but am not sure if this would be enough. Being heavier than air, it may sink through some of the grain over time. My initial thinking was to have an inverted fine sieve on the bottom of the bucket and run the CO2 into that, slowly rising up through the bucket but decided to be lazy and try a simple approach first. I will put CO2 into the bucket at the beginning of every TFFV wash. (Every time I open the bucket to remove bran, the CO2 layer will be disturbed.) Will run it into the bucket for the first 24 hours of the ferment.

Sam. wrote:

dans.brew wrote:We are actually using a powder in our on farm grain storage that cases weevils or the lesser grain borer to dehydrate and die. It's not a chemical as such so has no withholding period. Very safe to use in comparison to some other chemicals out there.

I would assume that is an aierated silo? Tailored to keeping grain?

They could be aierated but we dont run that type of sytem as yet. Its all heading in that direction as the rules for what chemical applications are used on grain get more strict.
If you can cool the grain below a certain temp all the bugs in it will go dormant... no need to totally freeze it.
One of my mates is a organic farmer and therefore can't apply any chemical to anything he does. Im fairly sure he pumps Co2 into his silos.. some silos run a pipe in the center from top to bottom or across the cone, full of little holes small enough for the grain to not get through but let the gas out.

Thanks Dan. Looks like CO2 has potential but I think the main issue could be that in our brewing situation, we don’t have gas pressure to play with. I reckon there would be a better chance of getting gas penetration through cracked corn or whole grains rather than bran. Will get the experiment working with a control bucket of the same batch of bran next week.