Black Label Turbo Yeast and Drawbacks

Turbo Carbon provides fast, clean fermentations with high alcohol concentration. Specially formulated to ferment 6 kg of sugar across a wide temperature range and produce triple-distilled quality alcohol, Turbo Carbon should only be used where cool air temperatures (18-24C) can be maintained and in combination with Turbo Carbon.

Turbo yeasts may seem daunting to home distillers due to how quickly they work. At its core, turbo yeast is comprised of high-grade Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast mixed with nutrients designed to facilitate alcohol production as well as compounds designed to maintain an ideal mash pH level.

One major drawback of turbo yeast fermentation is that it may produce undesirable flavors during its cycle – this is often due to it going through fermentation too quickly, producing volatile compounds which impart unwanted flavors into your finished spirit.

Avoid this situation by carefully following the instructions in your package and ensuring your mash has reached an ideal temperature before adding Turbo yeast. High levels of alcohol produced by Turbo yeasts may cause excessive heat production during fermentation and result in unpleasant flavors as a side-effect of their use.

Avoiding this problem requires keeping liquid temperatures below 30 degrees C during fermentation or adding ice into the mash for cooling purposes. Both solutions may prove challenging when dealing with larger batch sizes; that is why our Black Label Turbo Yeast and Prestige Turbo Yeast sachets are “fully stackable”, enabling you to use one sachet per 25-liter batch (and two per 50-liter batch, etc).

Alcohol Distillation and the Art of Blending

Whiskey, gin, or vodka distilling starts with fermented alcohol which starts its life as a wash. Although many spirits share similar ingredients and processes, each requires specific alcoholic distillation techniques in order to achieve signature flavors. Distillation requires selecting congeners (aldehydes, acids, esters) carefully in order to extract these signature flavors without eliminating those you don’t want.

After fermentation is complete, wash is taken to a still where it’s heated to turn alcohol in to vapor form. From there it travels upwards through its Swan Neck/Lyne Arm into a condenser where it returns back into liquid form – this ratio determines both product purity and energy requirements. It’s referred to as the Reflux Ratio.

Distillation continues until a desired proof is reached, at which point it’s time for blending, an often artful process that depends on experience, scent and taste, intuition and experience. Each distillery decides when and how much of the distillate should be cut back depending on taste, experience and intuition of their distiller – this decision being called the art of blending – which also determines when cuts should be made on run portions to be kept and which can be let go as part of this art form. Depending on what type of still it uses timing will do this, while for column stills position will do just this job.”