Whisky... The Finished Product! - Part 2/2

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi this morning I checked the fermentation to see how it was coming along and it's coming along well but it occurred to me it might be interesting for you to see how I can say it's coming along well but I can also determine that it isn't finished yet so I'm going to do is I'm going to go inside here and we're going to take a look and see what's going on with the fermentation one little warning is that you should try to minimize the opening and closing of this container because obviously there's a chance that you could introduce contamination it's less of a threat as you get farther and farther along in the fermentation because initially we placed a fair number of yeast grams of yeast in here and after a few days we've built up a huge bio load of the desirable yeast and we've also now started to accumulate some somewhat toxic alcohol as well as eaten up a bunch of the sugar so even though the risk of contamination is the same each time we open it up the potential effect of the contamination becomes less and less as we're moving nearer and nearer to the final conclusion of the fermentation so I'm going to open this up and we're going to take a look inside and I'm gonna show you a few things to look for now the first thing that you'll notice is that there is no foam and part of the reason for that is because much of the sugar is gone there's nothing much to support a foam inside of here in addition there's a sharp smell that comes off of here it's a it's a pleasant smell it smells a little bit like beer a little bit like whiskey a little bit like breakfast cereal it brings back memories of that movie taxi drivers so if you know the scene I'm talking about you'll know what I mean but in any case one of the things that you can do in in in a poor man's chemistry analysis is use your senses in order to determine what's going on the first thing besides seeing no foam is that smell includes a tang to it and that Tang that bite is due to the carbon dioxide when the carbon dioxide gets on your moist mucous membranes it forms a small fraction of carbonic acid which is tangy a little bit like lemon juice or you know citric acid or acetic acid in vinegar it it gives that bite to anything that's carbonated and you can smell that so you know that co2 is being given off the other thing that you'll notice if you look very very closely and I'm not sure the camera is able to focus on the surface but you'll see a very very subtle fizzing those are the very tiny bubbles that are rising from the surface of the liquid and so it means that the fermentation is still continuing we're still eating up sugar in addition to that I'm going to hold my microphone take my little lapel mic off here and I'm gonna try to hold it closer to the bin and we'll see if you can actually hear the fizzing I can hear it with my ears now another thing that you can do for testing purposes is taste because as the first wash was produced we produced a fair amount of sugar and the sugar makes this liquid very very sweet taste like - sort of watered-down breakfast cereal there's still a little bit of sweetness but you can now start to taste the tang of the alcohol - the bite of the alcohol but it's still sweet so we know we're not done because of the bubbles we know we're not done because of the co2 and also because of the residual sweetness the final thing that we can do is we can test the density if you remember from the last time we had a specific gravity of 1.06 and if you look at this meter here that is the specific gravity they've left out the zero in front so it's one point zero one zero one point zero two zero and that's a specific gravity above one which represents water now over here this other scale if you look and you'll see percentages that is the percent alcohol that would be available if for example you floated this this hydrometer in the liquid and it floated around here you would end up producing approximately seven percent alcohol if all of it were converted into alcohol that's about where we were when we first started last about three days ago at about the 7% level as the alcohol is converted the sugar converted into alcohol this will begin to sink lower and lower because the specific gravity of alcohol is lower you'll find at pure water and alcohol this would be way over the scale it'd be way up here but because there's residual dissolved solids in here we'll never ever even if we convert all the sugar to alcohol achieve the density of pure water we won't get down there but we'll get close and so the potential 7% that we could get to right around here if we converted all of it will probably not be achieved will probably get somewhere around seven minus one seven minus two five or six percent maybe extractable now the trick to using this is put it in the cylinder first because that way you'll know how much liquid you want to add and you don't end up pouring it over the top if you add too much or too little and it doesn't float now I'm gonna fill this thing up hopefully I won't make too much of a mess and we'll see where this floats and remember it was one point zero six zero before I go a little more so we gotta make sure it's completely levitated here now another little trick is sometimes there are dissolve bubbles on this hydrometer so you want to make sure you get rid of the bubbles that could potentially be floating it and then you want to dip it down a couple of times to try to get it away from the sides because that can also give you some false readings if you look here at this that blue you'll see that our density is about one point zero one zero I'm sure it kind of levitates and at one point zero one zero that means that we've got about 1 percent potential alcohol that could still be gained if I turn this around a little bit so the camera will show it I'll show the specific gravity you can see point nine nine zero water would be right at that line that I have that I'm supporting this at right now and if I let go we're very close to completely converted it's a little frustrating to see it but on the camera you'll see that it's floating a little bit below the blue and if we take this out just for a second the place where it was floating was right about here so we're very very close to full conversion we've only got probably a half a percent more alcohol that we would gain if we drop this down and let it go down you can see that it's bouncing right about 1.00 five ok so it's been about 24 additional hours of fermentation and I have a pretty strong suspicion that this has been completed so what we're gonna do is you're gonna take a look inside of here and then we're gonna measure the specific gravity and see if we've converted that last little bit of sugar into alcohol so take off our little seal try to avoid shaking the container because the debris on the bottom we don't want to get that up into the distillation and if we're gentle with this we won't churn up a lot of the material at the bottom okay no chipmunks in there and based on the smell the sharpness is faded a little bit so I think we are probably complete and I'm not seeing a lot of fizzing or any bubbles so again I I suspect we're probably there so we're gonna do is you're gonna get our little hydrometer now if we look here see where this guy is floating oh yeah okay so we're at one point zero zero one one point zero zero zero that would be one point zero zero zero so basically we are at complete conversion and the only reason as I said before that we're not below one point zero zero zero because of the fact that we have alcohol and water which would be a lower density is there are some dissolved solids in there that are not fermented and so you're rarely ever going to get below the one point zero zero zero which is pure water so what we're gonna do is we are going to fill our four gallon or 16 liter pot and the way I'm gonna do that is I'm gonna use gravity to do this and I'm going to siphon off some of this liquid into here with the idea that I'm going to be pulling it from the top with this tube in order to try to avoid adding any of the debris that's at the bottom now if you have say a four gallon still you're probably at most want to put about three gallons maybe 12 liters in there you don't want to fill it up to the top because there's inevitably going to be some foaming that occurs when you put this saw in here and that foaming is not such a good thing because it can actually push it right out of the still and into your your final product so you want to avoid the foaming and the best way to avoid it is to make sure that you have a lot of headroom above the liquid don't worry this is all going to be boiled so don't worry about the contamination here now as you can see I'm filling this up and then I'm carefully looking in the container here to make sure that might draw to what I'm pulling the liquid from is as close to the top as I can get it it's a little difficult to see it but when you get near the end you can almost see a little tornado a little whirlpool forming and you don't want to obviously sucking air and break your your vacuum but the higher you leave this the purer of the mixture is going to be nevertheless you'll still see some foaming in there as this is pouring in and that's the potential risk when you do the distillation if you're if you're in a hurry a lot of that can end up getting pushed up through the through the still and into your final mix it's not a disaster if that happens you simply have to empty your containers and you're gonna end up having to put it back in here and do it again but if you're very slow you're very patient generally speaking you'll get away with that another way to prevent this is just make sure that your pot is a much larger capacity then you're gonna fill it with so if you have a lot of headroom for that foam to break while the boiling process occurs all right I'm gonna break this siphon as you can see in the bottom here we've still left a fair amount of liquid and you could probably get a little more out but I don't want to get that into the pot it's just gonna lead to more foaming and actually some off flavors yeah that feels like about 12 liters I'm going to put the bail on here and some moonshiners will actually use dole or cornmeal and water to seal this I end up using polytetrafluoroethylene or teflon tape to do that work this silicone tubing is not actually guiding the hot vapors but acting is a connection between the two pieces so that they hold together rather than just depending on friction excellent put a thermometer in here and then if you look down there you can see that I commandeered our heat exchanger from our previous video on the solid state freezer took it up here because it's is so effective and it's quiet when you saw our brandy video about a year ago I used a small heat exchanger produced a lot of noise and lot of people complained about it this is quieter and about four times as effective it flushes water in and out of this container here where the spiral of copper is located that cools off the vapors it's coming out and then eventually it comes down through here which is a silicone tube that is lined with essentially a Teflon or of polytetrafluoroethylene coating so that it's good for food and for ethanol content so let's go ahead and fire this guy up and get him started now the secret here is slow if you get impatient what you'll find is that they're foaming that a that generally occurs because of the debris in the the dissolve solids in here really only seems to occur over the first few minutes of the distillation and so if you can if you can move through that zone very slowly it tends to break down and then you get a very stable result but that transition once you get to around 170 Fahrenheit around 80 centigrade which is where you're starting to get the vapor forming up here that's when you really want to tweak this temperature down and creep through that zone and the first indications that you have that you're going to be producing something is you're going to get a few small drops of the initial liquid which will contain some methanol we'll get into that in a little bit so let me leave you for a few minutes while we get this thing close to temperature and then I'll get into the some of the details about how to get this thing started and how we're gonna do the separations see in a little bit all right it's been about 20 minutes 30 minutes or so and the temperature has risen here you can see that we're up to around 85 86 degrees centigrade which is above the boiling point of methanol when the fermentation occurs of the sugar with the yeast of the sugar there is a little bit of breakdown of pectin when you're using fruit or cellulose when you're using grains and that will be broken down into methanol which is toxic it also has the highest vapor pressure or the lowest boiling point and it will end up being the first thing that is separated out of the mixture a typical rule of thumb is that you'll get about two or three percent of your final distillate as methanol and because it comes out first that means you want to throw away about the first two or three percent of what you're going to end up producing now remember we added about 12 liters and we expected to get about one fourteenth of that in pure alcohol this still will provide about a hundred and twenty to 130 proof maximum concentration of alcohol and an average over the entire distillation somewhere around a hundred proof so we should be expecting to get about two liters of final volume out of five percent of two liters is 100 CC's so to be conservative what I'm going to do is I'm going to dispose of the first 100 milliliters of liquid here which is primarily methanol to be a tiny bit of water in here there'll be a tiny bit of ethanol but we don't care we're gonna get rid of that because this is toxic you don't want to drink it you can burn it but you don't want to drink it now a little trick I've got here I don't know if you can see this little tray but because we're using a heat exchanger that is depending on air temperature to keep the water in this bath cool the liquid that's coming out of here is at room temperature or tepid and ethanol still has a significant vapor pressure it evaporates at room temperature so to save our precious ethanol and prevent it from evaporating and still have the open containers that makes this easy to work with what I did is I took a tray of water and placed a metal grid in the bottom of this this is the same material that we use to build a shelf in our freezer video and put about three or four litres in here put it in the freezer and froze it so that I have a block of ice that's going to be sitting on the table underneath my beakers the reason for the metal is that this will allow me to put the beakers in here and keep them on top of the surface so that they're not tipping and tilting because it's filled with a bunch of water and I'm also able to use a large quantity of ice so that over an hour to this remains icy cold the heat that's taken out of the beaker out of the Erlenmeyer means that the walls here are going to be extremely cold and because they're cold any additional vapors that want to make their way out of here are also going to be condensed and we're going to retain most of them the ethanol now in order to get a very good thermal contact I'm going to add an additional quantity of water to the top of this bath and this is primarily just to provide contact surface with the beakers so they're not just sitting on a couple of points in the ice and I found this is very convenient because then the beakers don't tip the Erlenmeyer czar nice because they tend to be very stable and they have gradations here that allow us to measure now as you can see we're getting near the 100 milliliter point and once we get to that point I'm gonna begin doing the cuts even though we have a thermometer in here I really don't depend on the thermometer other than to warn me we're getting near the point that we're gonna start producing liquid because what we're gonna do is once we start producing this liquid we're just going to slice little bits of the distillate into individual containers and then when we're done with the process we can take our sweet time to mix and select what we're gonna end up wanting to put in the final container that we're going to age to produce the whiskey so we're getting close to 100 once they hit 100 here we're going to hit number one and we're gonna begin with the material that we're actually going to save [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay it's been about 45 minutes to an hour worth of work and I've accumulated about nine samples of the distillate and in testing I've found that the concentration of the oxidant of the alcohol goes down with time and when I tasted I found that as we move further along the flavor was becoming a lot stronger but also it was beginning to get a little bit gamey or near the end and I elected to stop saving the material that I'm going to end up using for the the aging process at number nine if we look this is not really debris but it is additional material that we're not going to be using in testing these I've discovered that I like the flavor of all of them the first component of any distillation breakdown is what's called the the four shots and that would be present in say the first beaker here it contains a very high concentration of alcohol as we saw it was around about a hundred and I think it 140 proof but it also contains a lot of esters and aldehydes and could be kind of a harsh flavor so we're not going to use this again we can add this to a subsequent distillation and pull some of that alcohol and some of those flavors out so don't really need to waste it but we're going to be using all of the rest of these in the aging process and so right now what we have is a very raw whisky it's got some very interesting flavors but it's harsh and in order to create something that tastes very nice we want to age it now to create what's called a true Scotch whisky we got to be in Scotland and we aren't and in order to be called at least a whisky we've got to age it for at least three years so we're not going to do either one of those things but we are going to produce a Scotch style whisky type of beverage and the way that we're going to age it is we're going to do a sort of an accelerated version of what done in an oak barrel what happens when you take this whiskey and you put it into a barrel what will happen is that the barrel the oak and the barrel will impart additional flavors and the most sought-after type of barrel will be a barrel that contains or has been used to age sherry and that the the flavors that are available from Sharia that imparted to the Scotch as it ages and an interesting physical phenomenon occurs that when you place the liquid into the barrel and you place it in an unheated room or shed the diner all variations in temperature will cause the the liquid inside the alcohol inside to expand and contract and as it does so it will be pushed into the walls of the barrel when it warms and pulled out of the walls of the barrel when it cools and as a result you'll get a constant inflow and and excitation of the liquid in and out of the wood and that imparts the additional flavors that's why you don't want to contemporarily one of the disadvantages of a barrel though is it has a very large volume to surface area and so it takes a long time to do the aging process because of that disadvantage in terms of just geometry so to accelerate that process what we're gonna do is we're going to place the liquid into a jar and in the jar we're going to take oak that we've treated in order to make it like the oak that would be in a typical barrel now the way you do this is you get white oak not red oak white oak and you can age this by placing this into an oven and there's a very nice expose about this process done on a channel called still it it's by a New Zealander that's very much into distilling and I'd highly recommend taking a look at his channel because he goes into a lot of detail about the temperatures and the duration and the effects on the flavor and we'll put a link in the description below this video to his to his channel you might want to take a look at it because he goes into a lot of detail what we find is that as we age or as we toast to the oak in an oven it will become darker it will begin to carburized change some of the molecular structure in the oak and it will darken and depending on the temperature we will impart different types of flavors to the final whisky now what I did is I experimented as per his video at several different temperatures and I found that the temperature that seems to produce the nicest flavor in my opinion is two hundred and twenty degrees centigrade or about a hundred and four hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit for two hours and then what you do is you run the temperature all the way up to broil and after about fifteen minutes you'll begin to get a slight amount of smoke that enters it into the oven that will create the outer char that we're looking for which creates a charcoal which acts as a filter in that process of the infiltration and the excitation of the liquid that's moving in and out of the oak because of the fact that we have these little 10 centimeter strips and they have a large surface area if we place these 100 grams of chips or sticks into a bottle we can then add the alcohol to this and age this over a period of months instead of a period of years now particularly one of the things that I found is that you can use these very inexpensive ball jars but I find that the alcohol will find defects in the plastic eventually get through to the metal and you'll get some rust spots on here I much prefer to use these phyto jars and get them on Amazon they're about eight or nine dollars a piece they contain or they get will hold up to two liters and we've got a hundred grams of oak in here so what we're gonna do is we're gonna add all of the distillate that we have here into here and we're gonna soak this now we will not have the advantage of that diner all variation in temperature pumping the liquid in and out will have to depend on just the random diffusion because once these oak sticks become saturated and the air has been dissolved from here we no longer can compress the the air volume inside the oak so we won't force the the liquid in and out but what we will do by placing this in a warm environment is will increase the molecular interchange or X change and this will cause the aging process to to accelerate I don't think I'm gonna get all of this liquid in here I'm going to need to use another bottle for this process but after a couple of days you can begin to taste the the raisin flavor of the the fig like flavor in this the the nutty flavor it's a very nice quality and because these jars depend on a rubber seal and all glass there is no component that can rust and therefore you're not going to get any problem with the jar itself you can mix these you can shake them up a little bit and even within a few minutes you'll begin to see that color develop after about a week you'll see this this is some of the low-temperature I believe this is a 180 degree toast this was a 220 toast and within about a week you begin to get a very nice rich color here and you can begin to taste the flavors so this is just starting this is about a week into it you can taste this every so often decide when you want to start it stop it there's no real problem in adding a lot of oak you could just it'll go faster you've got more surface area and you can speed up the process a couple of caveats here obviously follow your local laws there are certain areas where it is not legal to do distillation and so if you're doing an actual distillation of actual ethanol you need to make sure that you're compliant with your local laws but in any case I've gone over the physics of the process the some of the little tricks and techniques that you can use if you're going to do distillation and hopefully you found this interesting in future videos what we're going to do is we're going to look at different types of still designs higher reflux stills that have a higher filtration capability higher flow capability will also look at distillation that not only is used for drinking beverages also distillation for chemical processes because some of this can be used to drive a laser or can be used to power a vehicle and so hopefully you found it interesting if you did take a look at our other video on distillation we did about a year ago and let people that you know that might be interested in this know about the channel because we really appreciate the recognition and the the broader exposure of what we're doing here also comments and thumbs up will help in the promotion of our videos with YouTube's algorithms and so I want to wish you a very happy afternoon and stay safe have fun with science and we'll see you soon [Music]

Channel: Tech Ingredients

Views: 354,697

Keywords: scotch, whiskey, barely, fermentation, sparging, distillation, malting, oak aging, amylase, scotch whisky, whisky

Id: xieYuOJSS40

Length: 30min 9sec (1809 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 14 2019