How they make alcohol 'harder'

this video is sponsored by squarespace hey what even is liquor well i suppose by the broad definition liquor is any alcoholic beverage what even is an alcoholic beverage well different governments have different definitions personally i'd say it's anything drinkable that's at least one or two percent ethanol ethanol is the specific kind of alcohol that people drink for fun it's two carbon atoms stuck to a bunch of hydrogen atoms and then all of that is stuck to what they call a hydroxyl group an oxygen atom stuck to a hydrogen atom that's the alcohol that we drink i'll try to refer to it from here on out by its more specific name which is ethanol if a drink is less than like one percent ethanol it's virtually impossible to get intoxicated by drinking it no matter how much of it you drink we'll talk about why another day but for example like fruit juices on the grocery store shelf most of those are like half a percent ethanol and nobody cares most of what i'd call alcoholic drinks are at least a few percentage points ethanol like this lovely canned cocktail it's 6.5 ethanol by volume that's what abv means if i drank one or two of these on an empty stomach i'd be a little intoxicated in the case of traditionally made beer or wine there's actually a ceiling on how much alcohol it can contain ethanol and it's not just like a legal ceiling i mean there is a legal ceiling but it's a biological ceiling too wine or beer in this case is made by introducing yeast to a sweet nutrient-rich liquid that they metabolize they eat it and the byproducts they basically poop out include ethanol and the thing about ethanol is it's poison and i say that with love i mean i really enjoy drinking alcohol in moderate amounts but it's poison in more ways than one when you're making beer from grain or here we have wine from grapes the yeast can only raise the ethanol concentration in the brew so high before it becomes toxic to them ethanol in high concentrations messes up proteins and cell membranes it depends on the kind of yeast you're using and some other variables but usually when the ethanol content gets up into the teens the yeast cannot take it anymore so this is why beer and wine generally max out at an alcohol content somewhere in the teens that's really only as far as the yeast can take it without hurting themselves if you want a higher alcohol beverage you have to take that beer or that wine or some related beverages and you have to extract out the alcohol basically refine the alcohol pull it out and once you do that you have what we call liquor in the narrow definition of the word which is a very high alcohol drink something that's higher alcohol than yeast can naturally make by themselves how exactly do you strip the alcohol out you distill it this is cardinal spirits a relatively new relatively small distillery in bloomington indiana that i visited that's justin huey their head distiller the big green barrels there are filled with grape juice and we've been watching him ferment that juice into wine in these giant fermenters it's probably not the best wine you'd ever taste but it doesn't have to be it's just the precursor the real magic happens over here in the distillers we run two stills here the one you're looking at right now is our pot still so we use this to run we're washing it right now we ran yesterday so we use this to distill uh anything with grain in it we do some distillation with it with uh like dirty black strap rums now rum is a liquor that is made not from beer or from wine but from a wash they call it fermented from sugar cane in the case that he was just talking about there they're making their rum from molasses which is this brown sticky by-product of sugar making the reason they do that rum and their grain-based distillation here in the pot still is because those precursor liquids are dirty they're sticky they're chunky and the pot still is really easy to clean because it's an incredibly simple machine it's the original still distillation goes back to the ancient world this is a famous illustration of pot stills used by a greek alchemist working in egypt in the 3rd century ce but evidence of basic distillation goes back way earlier in mesopotamia and india i think it's pretty easy to imagine how ancient people might have figured this out they knew that if you boil a liquid it changes into a new thing steam you can figure this out because you see the water level in the pot starting to go down as you cook it and cook it and cook it and this new substance is coming up this steam it's pretty easy to surmise that this is turning into this and then they would have noticed that this gas condenses back into a liquid on nearby surfaces but upon closer inspection they would have noticed that the condensed liquid is not the same as the stuff back in the pot i mean look the muddy water i have in here is brown the liquid that's condensed on the lid is clear and it does not taste like mud it tastes like pure perfect water here's an even lower tech way of doing this this is called rag distillation what you do is you take like any piece of fibrous material you know i'm using a dish rag but it could have been just a bundle of wool and you just tie it around a stick and then you hold the stick over some boiling water in a fire and then the liquid condenses onto the fibers and then you can just squeeze the liquid out we heated the substance we want in this case water to the temperature at which it evaporates and we collected it and all the stuff that we don't want is left behind in this case mud dirt ash and what we've made here is pure distilled water very drinkable water from mud this is actually a pretty good survival tip come to think of it people all over the ancient world used clay and later metals to make what are called retorts a fat jug to hold some liquid over a fire opening up to a narrow neck through which the vapors will rise and cool and convert back down into a liquid that then drips out the other end into a little cup you'd call a receiver here is my elementary pot still that i assembled out of like 50 bucks worth of cheap glass laboratory equipment unlike the real still back at cardinal spirits mine is clear and thus i can show you exactly what's happening in there i should point out first that distilling ethanol is illegal in the united states without a permit but those laws are meant to control the production of drinking alcohol alcohol for human consumption what you're going to see me do is make literally drops drops of not actually very drinkable ethanol and i'm doing this for purely educational purposes and this is something that is done in the united states all the time in an educational context or in a scientific context by people who do not have distilling permits so i don't think i'm setting a bad example for you plus if you wanted to like illegally make moonshine at home this would be a terrible method don't do what i'm doing you'll see why into a standard distillation flask goes only the finest dregs of last month's box o wind from the ragusa household underneath it i'm lighting a lamp for heat and an open flame is definitely not the safest way to distill a highly combustible substance like ethanol but it is the cheapest way and it's the original way which is why i'm doing it but you really shouldn't the flame heats a mesh gauze that evenly distributes the heat across the bottom of my flask which has a thermometer in its column and then at 78 degrees celsius 173 fahrenheit something amazing starts to happen the ethanol in the wine starts to boil way below the temperature at which water boils water of course boils at 100 degrees c 212 fahrenheit we're nowhere close to that the water in the wine is just sitting there the bubbling is mostly ethanol once boiling the ethanol converts into a gas that's what the bubbles are literally made out of and then that gas travels up this column and this column is really too short to do this at any kind of scale but again i'm just making a couple of drops i then need to convert that gas back down into a liquid again to collect it i need to cool it to condense it and for that i have another piece of standard laboratory equipment this is called a serpentine condenser tube serpentine condenser tube it's actually a tube within a tube there's this kind of squiggly inner tube that is inside sealed inside a cylindrical outer tube the squiggly tube on the inside is squiggly to maximize surface area so there's just a lot of area through which my ethanol can transfer its heat out into the substance that i'm going to put into the outer tube which is going to be my coolant which is just water and i don't have any kind of pump so i'm setting up a simple siphon suck on the tube the resulting pressure differential and gravity cause water to flow from my upper vessel through the tube and around that squiggly inner tube heat from the ethanol is transferred through the glass into the water and then out the other end i just have to constantly recirculate the water every few minutes another reason why you would not want to make moonshine this way even if doing so we're illegal which it's not so anyway the ethanol vaporizes out of the wine it condenses back down into a liquid as it is cooled by the serpentine condensing tube and then it drips out the other end into a receiver it drips out the other end into a receiver this little purely educational setup is so tiny and inefficient that the weight of what little liquor i had made was so small it wasn't enough weight to push the air bubbles out of the way that were in here and backing up the line so i figured it's time to suck out the poison oh man there it goes did it taste like alcohol there's some on the counter oh yeah that's booze it's funny doing that i could easily imagine how some ancient people might have figured this out maybe they were simmering like a wine based stew at a low temperature over a low fire it was a low enough temperature that the water was not boiling out only the ethanol and it condensed on some nearby surface and this ancient person happened to run their finger across that surface and and taste it and they were like whoa that tastes like alcohol they got that kinesthetic sense of heat that you get from alcohol but much stronger than they had ever perceived it before now let me be clear with you about this clear liquid that i got this is poison and it's not just poison in the sense that alcohol is normally poisoned in the sense that like a little too much of it might cause you to make some really questionable decisions and a lot too much of it could like kill your liver and give you cancer and all that kind of stuff no this is poison in all of those ways and in some other ways because there are things in something like wine that evaporate at those low temperatures that are not just ethanol there's other things that are also volatile and boil off at those low temperatures and they are in here right now these things are traditionally referred to as congeners and congeners would include non-poisonous things like tannins from the wine esters things that could make the finished spirit taste really really good if you decide to leave them in but we're also talking about fusel alcohols fusille is german for bad liquor alcohol is other than ethanol most notably methanol methanol is just like ethanol except it has one carbon atom instead of two as little as 10 milliliters of it can destroy your optic nerve permanently blind you and as little as 30 mls could kill you dead fortunately though methanol is a little more volatile than ethanol is so most of the methanol comes up through the still at the beginning of the process you're supposed to throw away the first bit that comes out that's known as one of your head cuts or sometimes it's called the four shot there's subtle differences between those terms that someone's going to call me out on i'm sure but regardless it's the stuff that comes out at the very beginning that you want to throw away because it's poison now how much of that first bit that comes out you throw away it's hard to tell distillers have traditionally made the judgment with their noses and with their tongues by tasting a teeny teeny little bit of it and it's really harsh yeah so they would just sort of perceive it traditionally in order to tell where the cutoff is and then after the head cuts that's the poisonous stuff you throw away then there's what they call the heart cuts that's the stuff from the middle of the run that's like the best stuff that's the purest ethanol that comes out from the first distillation and then at the end you have what are called the tail cuts the last little bits that come rising up out and those also apparently contain a lot more congeneries and stuff that people might not like so that's what you're supposed to do traditionally and now in the modern age they have all kinds of scientific instruments to help them with that i'm sure but for me because i had only made this teeny tiny little like dram of liquid there was really no way for me to tell the difference between the head cuts and the heart cuts and the tail cuts it's all just in there and i could never separate them out from each other so this i am not going to drink this is not safe in a traditional old-fashioned pot still like this one they have a cardinal spirits you might take your distillate and run it through again repeat the whole process send the vapors up through this column and down through this heat exchanger to cool it off and you throw away the toxic head cut that comes out at first and maybe the tail that comes out at the end and then maybe you repeat that process over again and again and again traditionally this is called rectification and if you do it enough times you'll strip out every single thing that's in there except for the ethanol and a teeny little bit of water you can get it up to 95 ethanol and once you've done that you have vodka usually you dilute it down again with some water to make it a little bit less intense but yeah that's vodka regardless of what kind of alcoholic beverage you started with vodka just has to be distilled to above 95 alcohol by volume so it could be made out of grapes or a lot of people talk about like potato vodka it could be made out of corn or wheat or rye or oats or whatever i mean if you could figure out a way to prevent dog turds you could make i suppose vodka out of it i don't know that you'd want to but you could and indeed they do not use dog turds here at cardinal they use grapes wine to make vodka or to make the juniper flavored vodka that we call gin and what if you didn't strip out all of the congeners what if you you only got out most of the water and most of the methanol but a lot of the other congeners the ones that aren't poison you left them in there well then you would have something more flavorful like brandy in the case of something that started with grape juice right or if you started with something like beer you would end up with a whiskey this kind of so-called batch distillation that you do one at a time in a pot still that worked out darn well for many centuries and people still do it for a reason these are simple machines and easy to clean which is why they still use wanted cardinal spirits for certain things but people quickly came up with more efficient stills and they have one of those at cardinal as well this is called a column still it doesn't have any kind of bulbous pot because you don't need a pot to contain the batch of booze that you're distilling within a closed system the column still is an open system where you are continuously pumping say wine into the middle of the first column and you're just sending it through and you never stop you're constantly making booze not going one batch at a time so basically the water is going to want to keep falling down and ethanol is going to go up so the ethanol goes up out of the top of column one into the bottom of column two and again it is heated up here and pushed through the system um it goes top of column two in the bottom of column three and every time that happens that's called a distillation so if you see like vodka says like oh it's distilled nine times or it's distilled seven times they're not running it through still seven times or nine times uh it's just being rectified or cleaned up if you will after that it goes into column four column four is called the bar bay that strips out our heads for us so basically we distill the heads out the top of that and then out the bottom column four comes our our product our good stuff basically once you've done that you might throw the good stuff into a wooden barrel to age originally people would have done this just to store the liquor but very quickly they found out that it changed a lot inside the wood over time got a lot nicer this is a 53 gallon new white oak char-4 barrel and it's uh aging our four grain bourbon right now char four refers to the extent to which they burned the inside of the barrel historically people might have charred barrels just to clean them sterilize them get out any lingering flavors from whatever salted fish or whatever that had been stored in there previously but they quickly realized that smoky taste gets into the liquor especially if you leave it in there for a really long time in a space that is not totally climate controlled where the barrel can expand and contract with the weather it gets based on the temperature changes sucked in and out of the wood as it's sucked in in and out of the wood it's going to push some of those wood flavors into there now if you're working with something like this it's charred you're going to get those flavors which are like vanilla sometimes like cherry brandy a brandy barrel you know that's toasted wood so you're going to kind of get some different flavor profiles there it can take years during which time the alcohol itself undergoes its own chemical changes independent of the wood that it's in it can take decades to get a really really nice smooth spirit which is one of the reasons why most of the companies that you've heard of that make these kind of aged spirits or at least the famous ones they are hundreds of years old you know a lot of new places that come online us too will sell unaged spirits so that's why you see a lot of places selling vodkas and gins and un-aged rums or liqueurs which we do all of those things and and they're all great but that definitely helps things to helps money to come in right while you're spending all this money putting grain back um that you're not gonna see any returns on for four or five years but this part is kind of where the the magic if you will does happen um sometimes you'll get a barrel that that is just awesome you know just perfect barrel and then you'll have another barrel that the exact same product it sat next to it its entire life um you know no difference and that barrel right next to it will be garbage i'm not garbage it just needs more time and a master distiller like justin huey at cardinal might actually blend the liquor from different barrels to combine different qualities together and make something that's really really special it's also pretty complex alchemy but fundamentally it starts from a very very simple place your basic thousand or two thousand year old pot still almost as elegantly simple and effective as squarespace the sponsor of this video hey thanks to everybody who bought a custom adam regucia chef knife from my squarespace website a couple of weeks ago we sold all the knives in six days i got to edit my site accordingly and you'll see how easy that is we'll probably make more maybe for christmas the knives have all shipped out to you and i have all your money thanks to squarespace which processed all your payments for me it was a snap squarespace makes it ridiculously easy to sell 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imbibed you responsibly and in moderation which is most of the time thus i've been able to enjoy you with minimal risk to myself and others and hey thank you science

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,681,669

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Id: lcssRU5G9Gk

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 11 2022