“The faintly lit hatchway lay in the dark…like a grave yawning at judgement day in some old apocalyptic painting.” — Cormac McCarthy One of the appeals of craft distilleries and microbreweries is that they produce small batches, so a lot of care goes into each batch. Small batches, by their very nature, require small additions [...]
“Pressure’s what you make of it.” — Daniel Ricciardo Years ago, a colleague told me, “If the pressure is too high, it’s going to find a way to relieve. If you don’t plan for pressure relief, then you don’t get to pick how and where it relieves. And that can be disastrous.” For every piece [...]
“You know what’s the greatest part of anything ever in the history of everything? Exaggeration. No wait; it’s correcting yourself. No, better yet, it’s making lists.” — Demetri Martin When Google offers an AI response, it includes a statement: “AI responses may include mistakes.” That was never so obvious to me as when I posed [...]
“To be beyond any existing classification has always pleased me.” — Boyd Rice Every distiller understands that they are working with extremely explosive hazards. There is ethanol, a flammable liquid. And there is milled grain, a source of combustible dust. Despite this, when I visit distilleries, I often see areas that should be electrically classified [...]
“A rule without exceptions is an instrument capable of doing mischief to the innocent and bringing grief—as well as injustice—to those who should gain exemptions from the rule’s functioning.” — Derrick Bell I don’t remember when I first realized that there is a difference between process safety management and Process Safety Management. Process safety—the aspect [...]
“I had thought fermentation was controlled death.” — Michelle Zauner I enjoy touring distilleries. I love seeing the process of making whiskey, but I’m usually taken aback when we get to the fermentation step. Occasionally, the fermenters are enclosed and vent to the roof. Most fermenters that I see, however, are open top vats. This [...]
“I have a horror of being in confined spaces.” — Hayley Mills At a craft distillery that is not too far from Bluefield’s offices, the owner spoke about his need to climb into the pot still to clean out the stillage, especially the spent grains. He saw me wince and said, “Yeah, I know. It’s [...]
“Ventilation is the profound secret of existence.” — Peter Sloterdijk Most people, when hearing about the legal limits of ethanol, will think of Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC). Except for Utah, where the BAC limit for driving is 0.05%, the BAC limit in the United States is 0.08%. That applies to drivers that are 21 years [...]
“Ignorance is not too dangerous. If you combine it with power, then this is a toxic mix.” — Yuvai Noah Harari Not surprisingly, eighteen of the thirty incidents in Volume 3 of the Chemical Safety Board’s series on incident reports addressed incidents at refineries and large chemical complexes. One incident in Volume 3, though, was [...]
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina I once worked with a facility that discharged process equipment cleaning water to the city sewer. They had a tough time staying below the discharge limits for copper. In turned out that the city water [...]
