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Craft Distiller Turns Waste From Whiskey Process Into Revenue

A waste byproduct becomes a useful livestock feed for farmers by using a centrifugal sifter to dewater the stillage, the grain/water mixture stripped out after the fermentation process.

Bendt No. 5 is Bendt Distilling Company’s first blended whiskey release, blending five different whiskeys made in-house.
Bendt No. 5 is Bendt Distilling Company’s first blended whiskey release, blending five different whiskeys made in-house.
Bendt Distilling Co.

As Ryan DeHart and his wife Natasha rode the early wave of the craft boom—first as brewers and then as distillers—they aimed to set themselves apart from the rest of the pack. In their earlier days, rum was their differentiated craft product, but it meant an uphill battle of educating and converting what wasn’t a strong rum market in Texas. But once the whiskey, their true passion, had had time to age properly, they were on a new track.

Now that Bendt Distilling Co., based in Lewisville, Texas, has seven different handcrafted whiskeys in its portfolio, the company is bringing the art of blended whiskey to the U.S. It will require some education of this nascent market again, as more Americans come to understand what is possible in whiskey flavor profiles.

Bendt is also interested in helping its fellow small crafters understand the value of a distilling process that more efficiently turns spent grain byproduct into saleable livestock feed—not only making some profit from waste that had been previously difficult to give away, but also by better recovering the valuable liquid sour mash from the mix.

Dewatering the stillage

To make its whiskeys, Bendt grinds its grains—wheat, rye, barley malt, oats, corn and triticale—to the consistency of coarse flour, which is then mixed with water, cooked, mashed and fermented. After fermentation, the strip run (the first round of distillation) separates out the alcohol from the fermented mash. The remaining grain/water mixture (stillage) is primarily water with 5 to 10% grain solids.

Though still quite watery, the stillage contains enough grain and nutrients to be useful to farmers as livestock feed. Initially, Bendt was giving this stillage away simply to save on disposal costs. They would pump the stillage into 20-cubic-yard disposal containers, which the farmers would then have to forklift onto their trucks to haul away, returning the IBC totes after emptied.

“There was quite a bit of manual labor involved in that. And we were just giving it away to whoever would do it,” DeHart says. Sometimes farmers wouldn’t show up when scheduled—or at all, leaving Bendt with a container of stinking, molding stillage outside.

Reading about another distillery’s use of a centrifugal sifter to dewater stillage, DeHart decided to give that a try, contacting Kason, which ultimately recommended its model MO-3BRG Centri-Sifter for the job. Now the stillage accumulates in a 10,000-gallon holding tank, where it is then pumped into the centrifugal sifter about one a week.

The Centri-Sifter centrifugal sifter at the distillery runs at a higher voltage than normal in order to screen heavy, sludgy stillage.The Centri-Sifter centrifugal sifter at the distillery runs at a higher voltage than normal in order to screen heavy, sludgy stillage.Bendt Distilling Co.

Unlike brewers, which just crack the grains, grinding to a flour consistency allows distillers to extract more sugar from the grain. “So there’s benefit there. But then the challenge that you have on the backside is then how do you separate those solids from the liquid once you’re done with the distillation process,” DeHart explains. “The Kason lets us separate out a majority of the solid material from the liquid, which then allows us to stay with this higher-efficiency milling process.

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