Distillery loads grain ninetimes faster with pneumatic conveying upgrade
Dancing Goat Distillery has come a long way since barreling its first batch of rye whiskey in 2017 . It ’ s now a destination that offers a range of distillery experiences from tours to hands-on distilling classes . The Dancing Goat Gin Academy lets students distill and bottle their own 750 ml bottle of gin to take home . The distillery also boasts a rusticchic tasting room where patrons can watch corn and rye become drinkable spirits , including the company ’ s flagship Limousin Rye and Death ’ s Door gin .
While the company ’ s rye whiskey can spend six years barrel-aging , Dancing Goat needed only about five years to orchestrate three expansions . The most recent , which doubled the facility ’ s footprint to 3,159 m 2 , moves grain nine-times faster using a Flexicon pneumatic conveying system .
Employing modern techniques With each expansion , the company strives to preserve the traditional art and science of distillation as it adopts modern techniques . Thus , an old-school copper pot remains in service beside sleek distillation columns . At the cookers , where grains and malt are turned into a mash for fermentation , the company has twice upgraded its loading methods . Originally , workers hoisted dozens of 23 kg bags of grain to load three 908 L cookers . When those were replaced by two 7,192 L cookers , Dancing Goat began receiving grain in bulk bags , unloading them into the vessels using a bulk bag discharger and flexible screw conveyor from Flexicon .
After its latest expansion added a third 11,356 L cooker , Dancing Goat installed a 26 m long PNEUMATI-
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The distillery combines modern methods with traditional aging in oak barrels .
CON ® pneumatic conveying system , also from Flexicon . The system transports the grains to two 0.2 m 3 hoppers , one feeding the two existing cookers and one feeding the new cooker . “ The pneumatic system can load three times as much grain in one-third the time ,” says Mike Reiber , former director of operations . “ Instead of driving fork trucks to the bulk bag discharger at the cookers and charging the cookers there , we created a grainhandling room and based our pneumatic conveying system there . It improves the process and is less painful for the operators .”
Weigh batching from a distance Located on the opposite side of the facility from the cookers , the grain room houses the intake and terminus of the pneumatic circuit , and a bulk bag discharger mounted on load cells . With a forklift , workers load the bags into the discharger using a lifting frame that nests into receiving cups atop the discharger ’ s frame posts .
Once the bag spout is secured to a SPOUT-LOCK™ clamp ring , the grains — milled to a flour-like consistency — flow into a 155 L floor hopper , from which a 1.5 m long flexible screw conveyor , inclined at 45 degrees , feeds the grain into the pneumatic conveying line via a pickup adapter , which includes an air inlet filter . Load cells supporting the discharger transmit loss-ofweight signals to a PLC that stops the screw conveyor once a pre-set batch weight has been fed into the pneumatic line .