karrotbear wrote:Okay, so today I tried my hand at making a TPW, fermenting away in my 50L keg I would assume I have roughly 43ish L of wash
I used roughly:
11kg Sugar
500g-ish tomato paste
1-2 teaspoons of citric acid
and 140-160g bakers yeast
And I have no idea what I'm doing :D
Keg is kind of warm, not really, sitting at about 30 degrees at the moment. But I'll wait and see :)
If I wanted to check the SG (not sure why I would check it) as it ferments away, would I just siphon off a little bit into a beaker and test it there?
With that much sugar, SG at commencement should be around 1.102 - a little high. Means that if all that sugar were to complete then ABV would be above 15%. Too high for Baker's Yeast. The ferment will most likely stick unless you water it down some. For that size wash 8kgs of sugar to 9kgs max for baker's yeast is probably best.
The simple formula that Croweater was referring to is
(Starting SG - Final SG) x 1.32 or 1.33 = ABV (Alcohol By Volume)
DAP (Diammonium Phosphate) is a great yeast food but is a little hard to get without Urea which needs to be avoided in your wash like the plague. I have been sold DAP with Urea as food grade over the net. Urea is usually seen as small lighter coloured round balls amongst the course granular DAP. IMO easier and safer to use tomato paste as the nutrient.
If you keep your sugar to about the level above you will find that your wash runs quickly and produces a high quality just slightly sweet "neutral". If you intend to use this "neutral" with essence to produce spirits such as rum, whisky, bourbon, ie. those spirits that are normally aged in oak, then soak 2 oak sticks per litre (about 200x15x15 long grain cut, not cross grain, definitely not HBS shavings) in your neutral, prior to mixing your spirit. This will give you that "depth" of flavour that you might have been missing since making your own.
Your yeast level is about right - Your tomato paste could have been halved - Citric acid max a teaspoon - but these are really changes of no consequence.
Hope this helps. BTW once sampled you will never go back to Turbo again. AND before long you will be messing with rum and all grain and gin infusion etc, etc,etc,.:handgestures-thumbupleft: