I’m wondering, hypothetically. I’m aware that distilling is illegal in the United States, and I’m not planning on actually doing any distilling. I like my eyesight too much to mess around with that. This is more of a question about the process and does not aim to encourage illegal behavior.
I’m a bit of a beer snob. I’m aware of “Distill beer, get whiskey. Distill wine, get brandy.” Does ‘beer’ have a special meaning in distilling, referring to a specific substance in the mash-to-whiskey process, or could you conceivably distill Labatt Blue and get something like unaged whiskey?
For that matter, what the hell would unaged whiskey taste like?
Would the ‘impurities’ that make dark beer dark stay with the beer after it was distilled? Like, would distilling Sierra Nevada’s porter make a different whiskey-like substance than distilling Labatt Blue?
I’m not even sure that I understand the question, and I don’t think you understand what makes dark beer “dark”. It’s not “impurities”, it’s that whatever grain was used in the brewing process was toasted (roasted?) longer, giving the grain a darker color.
For example, there is a particular type of stout called “oatmeal stout”. It is - as you might guess - made from oatmeal, something you’ve probably had for breakfast many times. If you roast the oatmeal in a pan, it will eventually get darker and darker. If you roasted it for only a couple of minutes, the beer would be “larger colored”. If you roasted it a bit longer it would be “ale colored”. It you roasted it for ever longer - so that the oatsmeal starts to caramelize - you get “stout colored” beer.
Please note that lagers, ales and stouts use different ingredients and different types of yeast. The amount the grains are roasted only determines color.
I’ve never heard that before but I guess the base of whisky is a beer of sorts. However it’s vastly different from the beer you’d get on the shelves as the type and amounts of the base ingrediants would be different. Not to mention whatever your big brewers add to the finished product.
Nasty. Like barely flavoured alcohol and some water. Which is, essentially, what it is.
I’m not sure how brandy is made or where the colour comes from, but I know with whisky the liquid that’s distilled off is largely alcohol and colourless. To make whisky it’s diluted back down and matured in casks of some kind or other (this imparts most of the flavour and colour).
Some of the stuff in the beer might make it through distilation but I doubt it’d have a significant effect.
If you’re lucky chemist/brewing/distiling doper will be along with the boiling points of alcohol and the various flavour bits (flavanoids ? something like that).
So, you could distill alcohol from beer, and you’d have some strength of alcohol solution that you could do something with. But it’s going to be nasty and need some serious mixing or maturing to make it drinkable, and even then it ain’t gonna be whisky.
It’s not the sort of thing you’d want to do anyway, but if you did you’d be better off starting with your own fermented whatever – at least you’re controlling what goes into that. Who knows what some of the stuff in some beers might do at high tempretures.
Thanks for the information. It just occurred to me today while I was out, and although my phrasing was sloppy in the OP, trust me that I do have some idea about what goes into making beer.
Beer can also be fortified by simply freezing out some of the water content (freeze beer, remove ice). You get a kind of syrupy higher alcohol drink which definitely retains the original flavor - it tends to be pretty sharp.
This question was just so bizarre (to me) that I had to google it. I’d heard of distilling wine, of course, but never beer. I conjectured that distilling mass-market beer would probably give a strangely “hoppy” whiskey, and these cites seem to bear it out. But it seems that premium beers give a satisfying result.
If you want to distill something, use a fermented mixture of sugar and water. If you use or add **anything ** else, you get a higher percentage of non-ethanol alcohols and stand a VERY good chance of poisoning yourself.
A lot of people in Saudi distill at home but bitter experiences have taught them to stick with sugar-water. We have 3 or 4 cases of methanol poisoning every year over this issue. (Blindness, deafness, and occasionally death.)
If you do decide to distill, you should probably do a 4-run distillation, ie pouring the distillate back into the empty still and running it through 4 times total. If your temperature control is good (a critical, vital, super-important point!) you will wind up with around 180 proof grain alcohol, ie Everclear. This tastes a lot like unscented lighter-fluid and is damn dangerous to drink unless you dilute it.
There is also the slight issue of a vapor explosion if alcohol vapor is escaping your still. Some acquaintances recently did an explosive disassembly of their kitchen. The neighbors were seriously pissed!
Well, if you DID start with off the shelf beer, there would be no danger of poisoning yourself, assuming your still wasn’t made from old air conditioner parts. Methanol is created during fermentation, not distillation.
If the fermentation process DID create a small amount of methanol, the danger in distillation would come from taking the wrong fraction and/or concentrating it.
That is exactly the problem that people have discovered over here with home distilling. Using “kitchen-chemistry” equipment; pressure cookers, copper tubing and the like. It is very difficult to monitor and control the temperature with sufficient precision. The end result is that a significant fraction of methanol is captured. (And consumed.)
It would be more appropriate to say that oatmeal stout is made with oatmeal. The grain bill in a batch of oatmeal stout would still be almost entirely barley. Like you state, the degree to which the barley is roasted accounts for the color or the beer. Oatmeal is added for flavor and body, but is a fairly small percentage of the total amount of grain used in the beer.