I believe that "bottled in bond" bourbon had to be aged at least four years.
Heaven Hill Distilleries is the largest privately held distiller in the world, and has millions of barrels in aging. There latest project, built by Buzick Construction, are the Cox's Creek warehouses. It's a cluster of eight, 300' L X 100' W X seven stories high. Each one holds 60,000 barrels. With the addition of these rick houses I believe they will have 48 warehouses. That's a ton of bourbon. Bourbon sales have been very good. In fact, I just learned how to make a mean Old Fashioned.
These buildings are huge and the amount of board feet of lumber within is staggering. Considering they hold 3.1 million gallons of liquid that is 50% alcohol in a completely wooden structure, when they catch fire it is frightening. Remember how fearful of fire the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz was. When multiply that by a factor of a million or so. In the 1990s Heaven Hill had a massive fire that destroyed several rick houses and the entire distillery plant. They moved distillation to the old I. W. Bernheim site in West Louisville and built a modern bottling facility where the old plant was in Bardstown, KY. They still have quite a few rick houses there. Meanwhile the Louisville distillery has been totally upgraded, enlarged twice and under full computer control. It's a beautifully run facility.
Alcohol vapors are constantly evaporating from the stored kegs. The building has a lot of air flow so vapors can't concentrate. All electrics are explosion proof or intrinsically safe to prevent ignition sources. But there's still lightening. The story height is eight feet.
Started printing Al's additional blocks. The previous 140 had an "elephant foot" which had to be sanded off. An elephant foot is an enlargement of the base layers in a 3D printed object that's printed directly on the build plate. While the normal layers are exposed to the UV source for 10 seconds, but the bottom layers are exposed for 65 seconds. This is necessary to ensure that the bottom layer cures harder and adheres well to the build plate. The number one cause of print failures is the forming object to detach from the build plate because the suction on the teflon film is stronger than the adhesion to the build plate.
While the extra exposure provides the added adhesion, it also causes these starting layers to expand laterally. Depending on how much extra exposure is used equates to more enlargement. When the enlargement is on a platform upon which is a forest of supports and then the object, it makes no difference. But when the object is being built directly on the build plate the enlargement is seen as an the base of the object to have a raised edge around it. That edge is the elephant foot.
I had to carefully sand all of the first run's blocks to remove the foot so the sides would be flat. I did some research to find out how to reduce the foot. One way is to keep dialing down the bottom layer exposure times, but you run a big risk of not having adequate adhesion and losing the prints entirely. Another source has produced an app that does some magic with the LCD mask, but throttling down pixels on the edges of the bottom layer so their exposure is lessened by a gradient to keep the foot from forming while fully exposing the rest of the bottom layers. I've looked into this and may use it in the future, but it's a bit arcane and I didn't want to get into it now.
The last way is to chamfer the bottom edges so the elephant foot that will form just fills in the chamfer making the outer walls more or less flat. I modified my block drawing in SketchUp to add a small chamfer on the outer edges and those surrounding the block holes. My first print out of 21 objects had 3 complete failures where the forming block detached from the build plate and was stuck on the teflon. So of the other blocks had some of the base layers partially formed, but not enough to cause a complete detachment, and the remainder were good.
The second run had five complete failures and some partials along with some good ones.
The last run had 9 complete failures. It was time to change the vat teflon and see if it prints successfully. If it doesn't I would go back and remove the chamfers since they reduced the bottom surface area too much and caused detachment. This is what the film looked like when I removed it with the stuck blocks. The stuck ones on the previous runs I was able to remove with damage. These guys didn't want to let go. The film was getting scratches due to using paper towels to clean it. I've purchased some specific wipes and solvent just for cleaning photographic film that does not scratch.
Right at the end of the day I ran another load with the new film and had 21 perfect blocks hanging on the plate, so it looks like it was the film that was failing.
It was my last piece of film and I have to order more. Sometimes I get very long runs on a single film and others not so much. I think it all depends on those micro-scratches changing the adhesion factor of the film. Ideally, you want no surface imperfections at all. I'm hoping this new cleaning system will solve that problem. I hadn't been able to test it on pristine film as the one on the machine already had a lot of parts created on it.
And the blocks with the chamfer have a much smaller elephant foot which was removed with just a few strokes on the sanding block. More importantly, it helped keep the holes open and burr free. I'm going to use the chamfer more often.
