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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi

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# Wednesday, January 14, 2009
distillation 101
You can make alcohol out of anything that has fermentable solids - sugars, that is.  Anything.
POWs making booze from potatoes?  Sure, if you have barley (you need the enzymes to convert the starches to sugars - see barley).
Making the alcohol is easy - you just add yeast.
The yeast digests the sugar, converting it to carbon dioxide and alcohol.
Alcohol, as we know, is toxic - if it's too concentrated, it will kill the yeast, which generally can only handle around 8%.  Some yeasts, such as those used in winemaking, might be able to manage higher concentrations, say 15%, but that's about it.
What about whisky, which is up above 40% alcohol?
[a note about "proof" - pure alcohol is 200 proof - which is unattainable, really, since alcohol absorbs moisture from its surroundings, so even pure alcohol is adulterated with water - 195 proof is as high as one can purify alcohol.
"Proof" refers to the first method employed to assess the alcohol content of a liquid - if a puddle of it caught fire, it was considered "proof" - as in, proof that the alcohol was sufficiently concentrated.  This became known as "100 proof," which is 50% alcohol.]

The only way to make the alcohol more concentrated than where the yeast left off is to remove some of the water from the solution, to concentrate the alcohol.
Or, put another way, one has to pull the alcohol out of the solution.  How is that done?
It's simple - in a solution of liquids of different boiling points, the solution will begin to boil at the lowest boiling point on the list of its contents.
"Boiling point" refers, of course, to the temperature at which the liquid overcomes the pressure pushing down on it and begins to escape the liquid - few days in a high school chemistry class will tell you that the energy of the molecules (from added heat) has now encouraged them to be so active they leave the solution.
Once that first solution has been entirely evaporated, the temperature of the solution will raise to the next boiling point on the list, and so on, until all the solutions have boiled out, and you're left with the ultimate solvent, water.
This is one way water can be purified, with the caveat that solids will still be in the solution - only the distillate, the liquid that has been evaporated, is really pure.
How can we exploit this concept with our freshly-fermented alcohol?

Perhaps you recall that the boiling point of water is 212° Fahrenheit (100° Celsius).
Yet the boiling point of ethanol (ethyl alcohol) is only 173°F (about 78°C).
So if we bring a jug of wine to the boil, it will boil at 173°F until all the alcohol has evaporated, and then, the boiling point goes up to the next one - in this case, to 212°F, since all that's left is water.
All that alcohol evaporated as steam (highly flammable, too, in case you attempt this at home); if only we could have captured it somehow, and condensed it back into liquid…
That's easily done, too - I think we all have the mental picture of a still, with a coil of copper tubing being somehow involved.

Of course, you can guess what the copper tubing is doing - the steamy alcohol is directed up it, and it condenses, by cooling off (the longer the tube, the more cooling you get - since you've increased the surface area of copper that can transfer heat from the distillate to the room).  Out the other end drips pure alcohol.
My own still has a copper coil coming out the top, as well as an old outboard-motor heat exchanger, so I get excellent condensation - it is possible to have such a vigorous boil that the alcohol comes out the coil as steam, but it never does with my still.
I made mine from an old pressure-cooker, which, if you've worked with one much, has three holes in the lid - all with a function:
There is the pressure gauge, and the spring-loaded safety valve - basically a ball-bearing held down by a spring, but which, if the pressure climbs unsafely high, will allow pressure to escape by being budged out of the way.
And there is a little stop-cock, a tiny valve that one opens to let the air out, as it fills with steam, at the onset of pressure cooking.

[NB: pressure cooking works by being able to cook at a higher temperature - remembering that a boiling point represents a liquid's ability to overcome the atmospheric pressure keeping it in place - raise the pressure, and the boiling point goes up.]

To convert the pressure cooker to a still, I wouldn't need the pressure gauge, so I replaced that with a threaded piece of copper pipe, which was then connected to the condenser (the copper coil and heat-exchanger).
I kept the safety-valve, having heard stories about exploding stills (which generally happens when the grain in the mash - from which distillers don't remove the fermentable solids, but brewers do) clogs the coil.  Pressure goes up - boom.
But the last little port, the little stopcock valve in the top, I replaced with a meat thermometer inserted into a cork, for a tight seal.
Why the thermometer?
Well, as soon as the alcohol is all evaporated, the thermometer would show that the temperature was rising, so I'd want to shut it down, not wanting to dilute my distilled alcohol with distilled water.
Once, I had made some cooking wine from a can of grape concentrate, but the protective covering on the fermentation vessel fell off, and it was in the sunlight for some days - all kinds of things started happening to the flavor, so it was unsuitable as cooking wine.
Didn't want to waste that alcohol, though - think of it: in a five-gallon batch of wine, with, say, a 10% alcohol concentration, that's a gallon of 100-proof booze. Let's get that out of there.
So I ran it through my still, and had some nice brandy - a bit raw, but nice.  Did the job.  I felt good, too, by rescuing an asset from what would seem to have been all waste.
Of course, the principles of distillation are easy to exploit - and anything sweet can be fermented - so read on, to learn about an adventure I had, once upon a time, during my long-and-checkered career as a mercenary cook:

I was the sous chef in a restaurant in Seattle.  We did a huge Mother's Day brunch business (a big day in the restaurant year, as I'm sure you can imagine), but even though we served hundreds of plates, we ended the day with about eight gallons of fresh-squeezed orange juice left over (out of about thirty or so).
I noticed them every day in the walk-in refrigerator, wondering what to make from them that we could sell.
A few days later, the jugs began to swell - clearly, fermentation was already beginning… which gave me an idea:
I instructed one of the cooks to prepare a large pot by sanitizing it (washing it out with bleach - didn't want any microbes in there other than the yeast), and then to dump in the orange juice.
To make sure our efforts were more than worthwhile, I also had him dump in about five pounds of sugar, and stir it up.
Then, some yeast from the baker, cover the pot, and put it away (discreetly - it was fun to imagine we could do this without the chef knowing).
Fermentation doesn't take that long, if the conditions are favorable (room temperature is excellent) - in this case, I determined that fermentation was complete after about a week.
Meanwhile, there was a curious, fruity fragrance emanating from the storeroom - which the chef noticed and asked about, but after telling him that none of the rest of us could smell it, he ignored it.
Okay - now we had converted orange juice into orange wine - how to get the alcohol out of it?

Fortunately, I am blessed with attributes that would benefit me on a desert island, or in prison… I know how to make things: alcohol, soap, bread, cheese…
And, being a devotee of alcohol manufacture, I knew the principles behind distilling, and could utilize them to our advantage, using materials one would find in any kitchen.
Let's think it through - there is alcohol in the orange wine that we want to remove: simple to do, merely boil it out.
But we want to condense that vaporized alcohol and collect it - also simple to do: merely put a lid on the pot - the steam will condense there and drop back into the pot.
We want to remove the alcohol though, so how can we prevent it from falling  back into the wine?
In my reading on distillation, I've learned of an old desert trick for getting water: dig a deep hole in the ground, cover it with a tarp that has a rock in the middle of it.  Put your hat in the hole, under the depression caused by the weight of the rock.  
The heat from the sun evaporates any moisture in the soil, which condenses on the tarp, and runs down to the low spot, created by the weight of the rock.  From there, it drips into the hat.  Now, you have water to drink with.
In our case, if we set up a bowl, rather than the pot lid, that was larger in diameter than the open top of the pot, we could condense the steam, which would run down to the low spot - the bottom of the bowl - and drop back into the liquid.
If there were another bowl below the drips, to catch them, like the hat in the desert pit…
So we set up an old colander in the pot, down in the wine, which supported a smaller bowl, and kept it up out of the boiling wine.
We filled the large bowl, which was serving as the lid, with ice, to enhance condensation.
Fired it up, and an hour later, had a nice two quarts of orange brandy ("brandy" being the generic term for distillate from fruit wine).
Everything worked as planned.  It was easy, amazing, and empowering for the staff, since they had just done the impossible - turned orange juice, about to spoil, into alcohol, and distilled it.
All with items one would find in any kitchen.
making alcohol
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 4:10:40 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
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