With the recent surge in micro-distillers, i wonder of you could make better liquor without distillation at all-if you used reverse osmosis, you could remove the alcohol from the mash/wine without heat at all. Distillation introduces all kinds of problems-heat the mash too hot, and you burn it-run your still too fast, and you get fusel oils in the distillate. Plus, the “head” and “tail” of the distillate is unfit to drink-there is a whole pile of procedures you need to observe, to avoid making bad-flavored. undrinkable liquor.
Would whiskey or brandy made without distillation be a good product?
A really low tech way of concentrating alcohol without distillation has been practiced for years, BTW - you can make applejack brandy by freezing a container of hard cider and removing the ice, or drilling into the frozen container to pour the liquid out of the middle - so called “freeze distillation” which is a misnomer because you aren’t actually distilling anything at all.
BTW, the “head” is more than “unfit to drink”. It’s potentially poisonous - fermented grains produce mostly ethanol, but some methanol is produced as well (not enough to be toxic if you simply consumed the mash). Methanol has a lower boiling point, and the methanol that’s present will get concentrated in the initial distillate. Every so often you hear of people getting methanol poisoning because of shoddy moonshining operations which don’t discard the initial portion.
I’ve never been into distilling liquor, other than a few laboratory exercises when I still taught high school chemistry and biology. Even then, the entire product was thrown away. I wonder, though, if using a heat-free method of separation would give different and unacceptable results. The newly distilled liquor isn’t just 100% pure alcohol. There are other compounds in there that contribute to the flavor of the finished product. Is it possible that some of those compounds are created or altered by being “cooked” during the distillation process? If so, have we learned to value the flavor of those compounds so that “uncooked” liquor wouldn’t taste right?
FYI, freeze distillation is illegal in the US. Chances are that any method where you take wine, mead or beer and modifiy it so it has a higher alcohol content will count as a no-no in the eyes of the gummint.
Is it illegal in all cases, or illegal without the relevant licenses etc.? Because I’m pretty sure distillation of any kind is illegal unless you have the right paperwork.
It’s illegal to distill alcohol in the US (including by freeze distillation) without a license. Freeze distillation is no more or less legal than any other kind of distillation.
Moderator Note
Note that home distillation, including freeze distillation, is generally illegal in the U.S. However, if you have the right licenses, etc. then it is legal, otherwise folks like Jack Daniels wouldn’t be able to make and sell their product.
The OP does not specify that they want to make this at home, so I don’t see a problem here.
Just as a friendly reminder though, let’s keep all of the posts in this thread on the legal side of the line. You may discuss the process of freeze distillation (or any other kind of distillation) as well as its effects on taste and any inherent dangers, etc. but do not post any sort of how-to for those that might want to try this at home, and as the registration agreement says, don’t encourage illegal activities.
(ETA - I type slow - Colibri’s post wasn’t there when I started)
The ATF seems to think ice beer is OK. This guy got a response from the TTB:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/2sgzw4/psa_regarding_freeze_distillation_for_us/
That also adresses the “illegality vs. proper license” question. The TTB considers you a “distiller”, whatever technique you use to concentrate the alcohol, and you have to be licensed as one.
Think it’s possible for reverse osmosis to play a part in spirit manufacture, but not in the way set out in the OP - one membrane separating alcohol and volatile flavoursome organics from water and heavy organics sounds like magical thinking.
You can separate water from ethanol using reverse osmosis, although I am not sure the membranes are developed to the point where they’re available as a consumer product. So if you had a crude distillate that was free of heavy organics, it might be possible to concentrate it by water removal in this fashion.
I suspect, though, that the membrane is just one part of the process and that you’d need some engineering to effectively separate the water (e.g. re-circulation methods, prevention of back-diffusion etc), so more of an industrial process than one for the home enthusiast. That this doesn’t currently happen in, say, grain whisky manufacture (largest distilling operation in Scotland), despite the large energy costs incurred through distillation, suggests that it’s not viable with current materials.
A lot of what you describe as problems are avoided by the use of column stills heated by steam (what most modern liquor producers use).
Depending on where on the column they take their cuts, they can get nearly pure ethanol, or whatever mix of heads, tails or heart that they want.
Even modern pot stills can be fairly well controlled; it’s not Junior, Earl & Bubba in the woods with a 55 gallon barrel, a bunch of funky copper tubing and an old radiator making corn likker anymore.
[bolding mine] This isn’t right. Methanol poisoning happens because people add methanol to their shine to amp up the alcohol without much effort (it’s way cheaper and drinking it gives an initial sensation similar to ethanol). Even if you kept the entire heads during distillation, it wouldn’t be enough to poison you.
It sounds like modern continuous stills offer much better uniformity than pot stills-so why the mystique of this old distilling technology? I also do not understand why top end brandies are “triple distilled” -doesn’t this remove most of the flavors that liquors have? Or is most of the flavor coming during the ageing process?
Primarily because continuous distillation is so ruthlessly effective - you could almost put any starch source into the process and get alcohol out of it.
Pot stills are less efficient and so allow other substances to make it through to the final product. It’s these extras that provide the underlying base for the flavour profile of various drinks.
A big part of it is just tradition- spirits like Scotch Whisky and Cognac/Armagnac have always been distilled in some sort of pot still, and the makers see no reason to change now.
From a purely pragmatic perspective, pot stills allow a greater amount of the congeners (the non water and non-ethanol compounds present in the wash) to carry through into the final product. In the case of brandy and whiskies, these are what make them what they are. Without the congeners, they’d just be straight ethanol.
From what I gather (I’m not a distiller, but have done a lot of reading on the topic), with pot stills, the trick is getting it properly pure to be smooth and drinkable, without being overly funky. So they essentially run 2-3 distillations. Usually, there’s a stripping run, which is fast and dirty, and meant to essentially get everything out of the initial thick mash. So you might take 5 gallons of mash, and your stripping run might yield 2 gallons of “low wines” at 35% ABV.
Then there are 2-3 actual finishing runs that are done on the output of the previous run. So those low wines go into the finishing still (or the same still again) and are distilled much more carefully (i.e dealing with foreshots, heads and tails properly). You might get 1.25 gallons of high wines out of your first finishing run, and 1 gallon out of the second, and the proof will be something like 130 proof (65% ABV).
Column stills/reflux columns rely on a heat gradient from top to bottom to separate the various distillates out of the wash- if you pick the right point, you could draw off pure, or nearly pure ethanol if you so chose, which is what vodka distillers do. Or you can let it all stabilize, and then open it up and condense what comes out the top, which will basically be in the order from lightest to heaviest just like a pot still, but will be far more separated and refined than a pot still, due to the reflux column doing a continuous redistillation of sorts until you open up that valve on top.
So, with that said, the trick with a column still is actually to get the proper proportion of congeners INTO the finished distillate, rather than attempting to remove them like in a pot still. From what I gather, there are really 2 ways to accomplish this- either by letting your still reflux for a while to let everything separate out well, and then doing it by time/taste off the top, or by drawing your cuts off the column at particular levels in the column.
This mystique is absolutely essential to the sales and marketing effort of higher end malts, whiskies, bourbons etc.
The malt distillers don’t advertise heavily here in the UK (as far as I am aware), but stuff like Jack Daniels does. Huge branding exercise based around images of heritage, tradition, beards, auld blokes rolling barrels around by hand and all that shite. Efficient industrial process at something that looks like an oil refinery is not really the vibe they’re aiming for.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the Scottish distillers had similar ad campaigns in the US.
Not just the Scottish distillers.
You’re absolutely right about the marketing angle, but a column still does produce different liquor than a pot still, so it’s not all marketing. Bump explains it well above. For vodka, you’re going for purity and a fractionating column still is best because it removes pretty much everything. For a whisky/whiskey, and especially for a smokey and peaty Scotch, you want to retain some characteristics from the mash. A pot still is better for this.
This points out a problem with using reverse osmosis for liquor production. I think you’d have trouble creating the right membrane that would separate the ethanol without also stripping out stuff you want (unless you are going for pure spirits). And a membrane that leaves the congeners will also leave some of the stuff you want removed, so distillation is probably still needed.
I saw some studies of using RO as a supplement to distillation. There’s even a patent for it, so it certainly is possible. I couldn’t find anyone who actually did use it for production or came up with something drinkable.
To sort of pose a parallel question to the OP, what about vacuum distillation? Seems to me that the lower temperatures involved might make for a different distillate.
Not sure if it would make much difference after years in an oak barrel though…