Who Fixes Broken Distillery Equipment?
Most of us have known someone who started on a shoestring budget and “saved” their way into bankruptcy or ended up spending more money and/or man-hours finding workarounds for something that seemed like a piece of affordable distillery equipment. Just because you’ve found an Affordable distillery equipment deal doesn’t mean that it’s the right tool for the job.
Sometimes spending a little extra money can save you a lot of money in the long run but it can take knowing what you want or at least which direction you want to go in to maximize your benefits. Some systems are of Corson need of repair but we can improve performance on many systems out there.
If you’ve already been producing spirits for a while it’s pretty easy to know where your headaches are and what tasks suck up a lot of your time. If you’ve already identified your bottlenecks it will help us know where to get started. Sometimes the solutions and root causes of an issue may not be as obvious as they appear to be on the surface. You may not need a completely new system to get a production boost, identifying your bottlenecks and replacing individual parts can sometimes make a huge difference.
If you’re blowing past your condenser then you either need more coolant or more surface area. However, trying to collect more distillate while maintaining the same quality can be a more complicated question to answer once you eliminate the obvious bottlenecks. Sometimes all you need to increase production is to upgrade your column size to increase vapor throughput but sometimes your bottlenecks are more difficult to diagnose.
This is where StillDragon can add a lot of value and hopefully help a lot. We spend a good amount of time fixing other companies’ older equipment, it’s one of the major benefits of being modular and being in business for almost a decade. Technology improves over time and your production needs will hopefully change as your business grows but there’s no need to throw out perfectly good components.
The trick is to make sure you’re optimizing configurations to make the system work better as a whole and make everything work together so the whole operation is greater than the sum of its parts. If you have a 12-inch column and a 6-inch condenser, or vice versa, you’re not pairing the equipment suitably to maximize efficiency. By looking at the system holistically you’ll be way ahead of the game and have a better idea of where to spend your resources wisely.
Just because parts and pieces don’t perform like you’re looking for doesn’t mean that they can’t be repurposed in your upgrade to do a different job or even the same job in a different way. Lots of our customers use their old systems as a recipe development still or a finishing still and use their larger equipment for stripping. By keeping your old equipment around you’re adding redundancy to your process so that you can be running systems in parallel or have a backup in case something needs to go down for maintenance.
Once you fix one set of bottlenecks you’ll find where your next set of bottlenecks is and you’ll want to make some decisions. Sometimes these will be quick and easy fixes and sometimes it takes a lot of effort, and/or cash, to truly fix the problem. Having clear goals will help a lot in this process so that you’re not wasting time and money on a problem that will be irrelevant later. Sometimes you can make a big impact with a small change, but sometimes you need a complete overhaul to take things to the next level.
Affordable distilling equipment repairs and upgrades don’t have to break the bank but spending your resources wisely will help you get the best bang for your buck. Of Corson repairs and upgrades come in many forms and there’s no one size fits all solution. Give us a call, or email Brad@stilldragon.com so we can discuss the best options to take what you have and augment it to hit your current goals.
