Fractional freezing

SnickASaurusRex said:

On a lighter note: I'm just waiting for the day when a cop shows up with a warrant to search my freezer.

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Nonic or Tulip officer?

Arkador said:

Take your fermented wort and place it in a clean, sanitized bucket. Seal the bucket and place in a freezer overnight. Make sure there is room in the bucket for the ice to expand. Do not use glass, as this could have disastrous results if you do not leave enough space. The next morning, remove the block of ice. The remaining liquid is fortified ice beer.

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wow , so many posts, and most don't try to answer the question!

Anyway, I read here and there about this in the past.
a similar method is to put it in a freezer and trying a more controlled approach:
after a few hours of cooling, when it reaches close to freezing point, attend to it every half an hour or so, checking the crystallization state. shaking gently occasionally will help create smaller crystals. remove ice crystals with a strainer - make sure to collect them all for measuring.

when satisfied, measure the volume of removed ice (after it melts, obviously) to calculate the new & improved ABV.

note I didn't try this, it's just the general idea that I have after long hours of surfing... (the web, that is - not the waves. I get sunburned easily)

ohad said:

wow , so many posts, and most don't try to answer the question!

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Generally, threads related to distilling of any kind of immediately locked. The discussion quickly moved to illegality in order to find a resolution because if it is considered illegal, we won't be talking about it.

I could care less about freeze distillation myself, but the illegality is of interest.

A good way to do this is use 2 liter bottles to freeze in, then freeze to nearly solid invert over a collection container and allow to melt until you collect half the original volume. This will insure that you capture some of the alcohol that was frozen, and some of the other compounds that might be desirable to flavor and mouth feel.

After all you are trying to reproduce an actual style of beer.

After watching Basic Brewing™ : Home Brewing Beer Podcast and DVD - February 20, 2009 - Barleywine Ice Beer, I just don't know if you want to carbonate it considering the Alc% and concentration of taste.

After freezing the beer and turning it upside down to collect your new yield, I suppose you could potentially repeat the process with the previously frozen (and partially empty of alcohol) solution to get more taste and alcohol out of it, and then reintroducing it to your concentrated beer, and then repeating the process to further the concentration of the main batch. Only problem is that the higher your concentration gets in alc%, the lower temperature it needs to freeze, and the more alcohol will get stuck in the ice, until the process becomes impractical at best, but by refortifying you're byproduct (with its increasing amount of 'stuck' alc), throughout the process, you could probably get your final output extremely concentrated.

I will definately be making an eisbock at some point in the future. This sounds like fun

You definitely want to carbonate it... a flat Eisbock... that sounds weird and nasty. Now if you are trying to make hooch this way, well.... that is why these get locked a lot.

I would think 1/2 the volume would be overly aggressive.

According to the BJCP guideline for Eisbock they start out with OG of 1.078 – 1.120 and then are concentrated by 7%-33%, leaving a beer with 9-14%ABV.

Using these guidelines you should still be able to carbonate by traditional methods, as Doppelbock yeasts should have pretty high alcohol tolerance to begin with (e.g. WLP833, with a tolerance of 12%.) I suppose you might have slight problems with the very top end ones depending on the specific strain.

If the original yeast didn't work out, I guess you could add a little ale yeast with an even higher alcohol tolerance at bottling.

(Which, thinking about it some more, you'd probably want to do anyway. Stressed out yeast from the high OG plus a long lagering period might not leave you with much carbonating power from the original yeast, even if it could tolerate the resulting ABV.)

Ysgard said:

...This thread should be locked soon.

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Many homebrew competitions have special Eis-brew categories.

As long as the discussion centers around the art of brewing, no need for immediate concern.

One distinction:
The intent of hot (boiling) distillation is to extract "pure" alcohol and leave all else behind. The intent of fractional icing is to remove excess water and leave behind a more concentrated mix of both flavor and...yes...alcohol.

I wonder if one of those slushy machines would be more efficient in removing more water than alcohol since it is constantly stirring?

Not a question regarding the legality but more the process... Just watched the video about the Iced Barleywine. We all know that barleywine needs a good 6-12 months of aging before it's good to go. Here's the question, do you ferment the beer fully, age it for a year and then freeze? Or do you ferment down to your terminal gravity and then freeze and age after it has been separated?

My instinct tells me to freeze right after it is done fermenting. This would still allow me to age the beer for a year to ensure that all of the harsh notes of the beer have subsided after being frozen. Any information regarding the process would be awesome.

I would age the beer first and allow the yeast to clean up and properly condition the beer. By that point, any "off" flavors will be as cleaned as they will get.

Then, you would fractionally freeze to the desired concentration. After making the eis-bier, you would then age for a shorter time, to simply allow the flavors to properly meld and to perhaps allow some of the effects time has on a brew.

Note: long term aging generally does not remove "off" flavors caused by chemicals in the beer. The active yeast absorb these compounds after primary fermentation and during conditioning. Long term aging is a different effect.

I just remembered where I have read about Eisbier! It is in Jamil and Palmer's book, Brewing Classic Styles. They have a very nice write up and include the details of calculating concentration as well as a general discussion of how to treat the brew for conditioning.

I would think you'd want larger crystals and not slush to form, that way the eisbeer will drain faster and not have the water melt again before you're done.

A few guys in our beer club have made awesome eisbocks with the corney in the freezer method. The one issue they had was the ice also builds up in the dip tube and creates a blockage. Hot swapping dip tubes or putting it in after freezing might help

Cheers

Trying this process as we speak on a IPA that ended up being slightly too sweet for my taste. It froze once already in my freezer, and I easily separated the beer from the frozen water. Refreezing it until I no longer get an ice yield from my freezer at 7F. It tasted much stronger after the first time around.

simps984 said:

wow interesting legal debate here. since we seem to be reaching a consensus "legal" opinion, can someone provide a simple step by step guide? I've got: brew wort and ferment until complete, transfer to a corny and allow to freeze.. partially?

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Don't kid yourself- there has been no "legal" debate in this thread. No law -federal, state, or local- has been cited, nor a single instance of case law (a precedent), only anecdotal statements of what you have to assume may -or may not- be legal in a particular jurisdiction.
When it comes to the subject we all love, and love to talk about (making alcoholic beverages), how what we do interacts with the law is a very thorny and complex subject, a legacy not so much of the 18th Amendment, but of what was done in the 21st, something called "local option." That is just what it sounds like, and 76 years after repeal has mutated and evolved into a horrendous.....mess.
As long as you do what you do as a homebrewer, nobody cares, and nobody is going to do squat about it.... and that would include {things people think threads should be locked for} for your own consumption.

Nota Bene: As a final note, since there seem to be a few contributors to this thread who are a bit confused on the issue, it's not illegal to discuss an illegal act. I read a number of beer forums in which homebrewers routinely discuss making far more than the 200 gallons of beer / household /year allowed in the federal statutes.....

I've been experimenting with Mead these past couple weeks, from an initial 5 gallon, I've freeze fortified about 2 gallon. The taste is intensified significantly and taste excellent. I just double freeze-distilled 1/2 gallon of mead into a 12 ounce bottle, and from an initial taste, you can tell I didn't lose much alcohol.

However, I am rather curious if there is any semi-accurate way to measure the alcohol content. Anyone know of a way? Guessing a gravity reading is useless at this point.

(alcohol%before freezing) * (volume before freezing) = (alcohol % after freezing) * (volume after freezing)

Therefore, alcohol % after freezing = (alcohol before)(volume before) / (volume after)

PseudoChef said:

(alcohol%before freezing) * (volume before freezing) = (alcohol % after freezing) * (volume after freezing)

Therefore, alcohol % after freezing = (alcohol before)(volume before) / (volume after)

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Isn't that only true if you are removing the frozen water only? I understand the equation, but wouldn't you actually need to involve a hydrometer in the melted ice block and the collected sample - to figure out what your "jacked" drink is now? Because your waste is still going to have some residual alcohol in it I think - so that needs to be subtracted from the calculations for the final product.

-OCD

PS - Funny how any mention of distilling draws us out like ants to a picnic.

I think the fraction of alcohol removed with the aqueous portion of the beer would be nominal. Could be wrong, though.

Very interesting debate on the legality of the subject, however, on a homebrewer's level, how does this affect us?

Po-Po doesn't normally come into our homes looking to see if we are homebrewing, and even if they did, I doubt they would know what they are looking at if someone was fractionally freezing their ale.

Just an observation, if hombrewing is legal in your area, and even if fractional freezing can be construed as illegal or even a grey area, how would a homebrewer be affected by it?

Of course, unless you are a boyscout and follow the law no matter what!

I looked into this when looking to do a high abv winter warmer cider. This wikipedia article on fractional freezing gives a lot of great info.

It seems that the line of "illegality" is drawn when fractional freezing attempts to create a beverage in the "liquer" range of ABV such as applejack. The reason presumably is that in creating a 40% beverage by fractional freezing, fusel alcohols are concentrated. For homebrewers only using this method to bump their ABV to 15-25%, there are no real concerns.


I'm still a little foggy on the science. It seems that some alcohol does get frozen, or rather suspended in the frozen water. That makes sense. If you freeze a beer, its not like the water freezes and the alcohol separates from the solid. Its probably not significant since homebrewers usually freeze one time.

Edcculus said:

I'm still a little foggy on the science. It seems that some alcohol does get frozen, or rather suspended in the frozen water. That makes sense. If you freeze a beer, its not like the water freezes and the alcohol separates from the solid. Its probably not significant since homebrewers usually freeze one time.

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This is where stirring will help. Small crystals will be pure (or pretty close to pure) water crystals. Larger crystals will have voids and defects with EtOH inclusions.

Found this youtube video showing a rather easy way to separate out the ice.

Boerderij_Kabouter said:

Maybe add a packet of that turbo yeast stuff at bottling time???? They must do it somehow.

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German beers are not bottle conditioned, they are krausened. Eis beers from, say, Brew Dog are probably force carbonated. So while you could bottle condition one, I doubt it is ever done commercially.

As for the OP, Utopias is not concentrated by freezing or in any other way.

In discussing the super-beers made by BrewDog with a friend, I stumbled upon this:

http://www.ttb.gov/rulings/94-3.htm

Now I don't know if this is outdated or not, and I'm not sure if "0.5 percent" refers to 0.5% (ridiculously miniscule) or 50% (half). Either way, demonstrably legal to do this up to one of the two amounts. The former is pretty much useless, the latter I'd think a full fledged Eisbock is perfectly legal.

I'm drinking an "ice" irish red ale right now. It's a keg that I accidently froze when my keezer temp prob slipped out.

I let it thaw, but the beer permanently separated. The same thing happened to my dubbel. No amount of shaking will mix this beer back together. The first several glasses from the dubbel were basically imperial dubbel. It's the same with this red. It does not taste as good as it originally did, but this style isn't the best to ice. It's not bad, however. Really mother ****ing strong. I think bock is most suited for this process though.

If I were to make an ice beer, which I am probably going to do some time soon, I would freeze an eisbock in a 6 gallon better bottle with my metal siphon jammed down there. As it froze, I would look to see about how much had turned to ice. Once I had achieved the desired amount, I would pour some boiling water down my siphon to unfreeze the beer inside, and then start racking the beer out. It's not something that I know how to do precisely and accurately, but who really cares, you're making eisbock, the manliest of all beers!

Umm is legal. Try looking up "freeze concentration". This topic gets brought up often. This is almost a Zombie rez...

Its totally legal for several reasons. First off, it is not distilling, its a form of concentration but not technically distilling. The reason distilling is so illegal is because people blow themselves up doing it and can start serious fires. Most people who are against legalizing distilling often say it can make people blind but this is an old myth that originated when people would mix methylated spirits with their whiskey and make people blind, you dont really see that now adays. The amount of methanol in even poorly made whiskey is low, and it will just give you a bad hangovet. Also, Applejacking is not very efficient so you can not really make too much profit off of it eithe; the government isnt too worried about it.

So this says you can reduce it legally by 0.5%:
https://www.ttb.gov/rulings/94-3.htm

Anybody have other references?

Mutant said:

So this says you can reduce it legally by 0.5%:
https://www.ttb.gov/rulings/94-3.htm

Anybody have other references?

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There was a Basic Brewing episode where they asked TTB directly about it. That is a tax regulation applicable to commercial brewers. It is 100% legal for homebrewers to do as long as it's not sold and subject to the commercial regulations.

It remains illegal for a brewery license to do it above the level in your link. I imagine a spirits license would be a different story.