Louisville distillery keeps cool with industrial fans

Personal protection equipment manufacturers have devised all sorts of innovative systems to keep manufacturing workers cool, such as caps and vests that circulate air to wick away heat, but many of these systems aren’t practical for distillers.

Some states are known for three iconic characteristics. Florida is known for endless amounts of sunshine, beautiful beaches, and seas of tourists. Texas is famous for longhorn cattle, oil, and the two-step. Louisiana? Cajun cooking, alligators, and jazz music. Michigan is known for the Motor City three times over—the cradle of U.S. automobile production, Motown Records, and in recent years, the resurgence of U.S. automobile production.

Kentucky, of course, is known for bluegrass, the Kentucky Derby, and bourbon. The last one is so well-established in Kentucky that the Kentucky Bourbon Trail features stops at 16 various distilleries. However, it’s not all bourbon, all the time. Despite the deep cultural connection Kentucky has to bourbon, some of its distillers buck that trend and make other spirits. Joe and Lesley Heron went against tradition in 2014 when they founded Copper and Kings American Brandy Co., Louisville, Ky. A purveyor of brandies, gins, and absinthe, the company relies on old-school distilling and aging to make its products—craft spirits that are not bourbon.

To separate alcohol from a fermented juice or wine, the distiller uses heat to exploit the difference in boiling points. A process that can be traced back 5,000 years, distillation doesn’t use a lot of heat—it takes place around 200 degrees F—but for a craft distiller that aims for quality rather than quantity, one that uses long soak times, the heat output is substantial.

Northern Kentucky is far enough south that the climate is agreeable much of the year, and even the summers don’t seem too warm, at least on paper. Posting an average high temperature of 88 degrees in July, Louisville seems like a little slice of paradise, but running a distillery in a persistently hot, humid environment can lead to more than just a bit of discomfort for the workers on the distillery floor. Fortunately for the workers at Copper and Kings, the company’s owners found a way to displace the heat.

The Brandy

Derived from the Dutch word brandejwein, or burned wine, brandy originates in the form of a fruit juice. Copper and Kings buys fruits from various sources throughout the U.S.

“We purchase grapes from California, apples from Michigan, pears from Oregon, and peaches from Georgia,” said Brandon O’Daniel, master distiller.

After deriving juice from the fruit and introducing yeast, the distillery staff gives the juice time to ferment. The yeast feeds on the sugars in the juice and gives off two byproducts: alcohol and carbon dioxide. As the alcohol content rises, the resulting wine becomes increasingly toxic to the yeast; removing the alcohol slowly over time moderates the alcohol content, prevents killing the yeast, and allows the process to continue.

Removing the alcohol by distillation is a matter of achieving and maintaining a temperature between the boiling point of alcohol and the boiling point of water (172 degrees F and 212 degrees F, respectively). The distillery’s plumbing routes the evaporated alcohol through a series of coils, where it cools and condenses. The system puts the alcohol back into the beverage at a later stage.

Keeping the distillation process around 200 degrees is the distiller’s goal. The three distillation vessels—copper pots—used at Copper and Kings hold 1,800 gallons, so they need a lot of heat to maintain the necessary temperature.

The Environment

Copper and Kings isn’t just a distiller, but a leader in environmental stewardship. The management team sees its efforts as a combination of a few big, bold initiatives fortified with a series of small, and sometimes peripheral, projects. For example, the company made a few small, one-time gains when it used the wood from its shipping containers and lumber from its original facility to make tables and shelves for various uses throughout the building, retail displays in its sales area, and planters on the grounds. In an effort essentially unrelated to the business—unless everything is related in some fashion—the staff created a sanctuary for Monarch butterflies that doubles as a groundwater drainage system, mitigating water runoff after rainstorms. The company also encourages folks in the community to forgo using fossil fuels and electricity when possible: anyone who signs up for a company tour and arrives by bicycle gets a 50 percent discount on the price of a tour ticket.

One of the big projects involves solar power. The company installed 42 solar panels on its rooftop, using essentially every square inch of roof space (which started a trend in the neighborhood, the owners are happy to report). A second includes water recycling. Its distillation process uses two closed-loop recycling circuits, one for the condenser chiller and one for the boiler.

The Heat

The old adage about working in food preparation—“If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen”—is probably a metaphor for difficulty or stress rather than a literal warning about temperature, but it makes a point about temperature nonetheless. Some jobs just don’t lend themselves well to air conditioning. Making steel, annealing metals, and many other activities rely on heat, and lots of it, so the workers in these fields have to endure more severe working conditions than the rest of us do. The same goes for distilling spirits.

The main heat source is the burner that generates the steam that heats the pots. At Copper and Kings, the steam is distributed to three pots: Isis (1,000 gallons), Magdalena (750 gallons), and Sara (50 gallons). To bring all 1,800 gallons from an ambient temperature (say 85 degrees F) to the distilling temperature would require 1.7 million British thermal units. Considering that a typical home furnace generates 100,000 BTUs per hour, Copper and Kings needs a vast amount of heat.

Some of that heat escapes directly into the distilling room. Some of it leaves the pots and works its way through the lengths of pipe that run throughout the distilling room, diffusing a bit of the heat throughout the entire workspace. Diffused or concentrated, the staff deals with a lot of heat.

The Fans

How does an environmentally conscious management team deal with excess heat in its facility? Rather than condition the air, it circulates the air. Dispelling a lot of heat means circulating a lot of air, and in the case of Copper and Kings, this circulation comes from several ceiling-mounted fans from Big Ass Fans. They serve two purposes.

“We need to have a continuous flow of air over the pots,” O’Daniel said. This is part of the distillation cycle. It runs just a few hours—each pot runs three or four batches per day—so the distillers need to keep a reasonably tight control over the heat as it’s added to, and removed from, the pots.

“We keep the windows wide open,” O’Daniel said. “They are as big as airplane hangar doors. To keep the air circulating, we have four fans that run all the time,” he said. “Keeping the air moving over the pots helps to make the distillation process go a little quicker, and it helps to modulate the temperature inside the pots,” he said.

The breeze is invaluable to the workers that staff the distillery floor, too. Big fans that move a lot of air, creating a breeze throughout the entire work environment, do the trick. According to Big Ass Fans, which makes units up to 24 feet in diameter, improving the airflow can make a worker feel up to 10 degrees F cooler.

The Right Way

In any field of human endeavor, the two basic ways to achieve a result can be described as “done fast” (usually synonymous with “done cheap”) and “done right.” Mass producers of brandies often use processes designed to reduce the beverage’s flavor as much as possible. Artificial flavorings are added later, along with colorings and other additives. Whether this is a good way to make a brandy or a living is a matter of debate, but you wouldn’t want to waste any time debating this point with the Herons, or anyone else at Copper and Kings, for that matter.

“Our process is as close as you can find to the way brandies were made in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” O’Daniel said. The company uses no computer programs, no digital equipment, no fancy readouts, nothing of any sort from the modern era, he said. It’s a matter of using traditional methods and taking great care to make craft beverages.

Part of the tradition means aging the brandy. This is done by storing it, for six months to six years, in repurposed bourbon barrels.

“It might be more economical to make brandy in California or some other location near a source of fruit, but this is Bourbon Country, and we need a steady supply of used bourbon barrels,” O’Daniel said. About 50 to 55 percent of the brandy’s taste profile comes from the aging process, and new barrels would impart too much flavor, overpowering the fruit. Copper and Kings needs about 100 barrels each day, barrels that have aged and can impart a smooth, delicate flavor to the brandy.

In making brandy, “done right” means more than a steady supply of old bourbon barrels of course. It also takes time. Time for the brandy to make contact with the copper kettle. Time for double distilling. Time for the brandy to age when distillation is complete. The last step doesn’t generate heat, but the first two sure do, and Copper and Kings takes a “low and slow” approach to the process, keeping the heat a little lower than it needs to be, but protracting the heat output over a longer time.

In the Heron’s view, it makes a superior brandy. It also generates a substantial amount of heat, but in Big Ass Fans products, Copper and Kings found a way to deal with it.