Distilling - cold vs heat hypothetical question.

[Jokester]

Say you start with 20lb of a blend of grains each. You ferment them, identical process there. Then in 1 case distill with heat, in 1 case distill or concentrate with a freezer like snakebite or something like that. Lets say you're shooting for 40% abv.
Which would get you more of that ?

I believe its the freeze method, but a lot of impurity as well as methanol will end up in it. Not be clear and methanol free like the other new make spirit.

Thanks.
Srinath.

 

[IslandLizard]

Which would get you more of that ?

More of what? Alcohol or residual product?

Distilling with heat gets you most of the alcohol, but none of the sugars. It's the base for making whisky. Depending on the method used, most character is lost too. It doesn't resemble much or any of the beer anymore, it's become a spirit.

"Freeze distilling" concentrates both sugars and alcohol. It becomes a very strong beer, with body, sweetness and all. There's always some lost that remains in the frozen phase.

 

[Jokester]

I'm talking alcohol only, ignoring the carbs, sugar etc. Also you will have the same amount of alcohol in the wort - the worts are equal obviously. So what we toss out and evaporation loss is what we'd have to think of. Again we need to only get 40%, not distill it all the way to 10%. We distill it and hit 40% and we stop there.
But of course yours is a good point.
Now, If you ferment the wort to near dryness you'd get less of it in the freeze concentrate, for heat it wont matter, may be a very important point. Also not all the carbs end in the melt off, I find the split to be linear. If you start with 1gm sugar per oz, you end with 1gm sugar per oz in the melt. Sugar ends up in the melt off, but some of the other types of complex carbs end up trapped in the ice. With heat distilling, its completely irrelevant, nothing will translate to vapor except water and alcohols pretty much.

Cool.
Srinath.

 

[BigEd]

Say you start with 20lb of a blend of grains each. You ferment them, identical process there. Then in 1 case distill with heat, in 1 case distill or concentrate with a freezer like snakebite or something like that. Lets say you're shooting for 40% abv.
Which would get you more of that ?

I believe its the freeze method, but a lot of impurity as well as methanol will end up in it. Not be clear and methanol free like the other new make spirit.

Thanks.
Srinath.

"Freezing" is not distillation. Whether you're working with crude oil or a whiskey mash vapor distillation allows the separation of various components, freezing does not. Frankly, I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish or what the target of your question is. Even if freezing gave an edge in finished ethanol content it is almost sure to be only very slightly different. And you would still have not removed the methanol along with other undesirable congeners from the product.

 

[Jokester]

Its just a hypothetical question. Alcohol per lb of grain, is what I am trying to find out. Just for interest, I am not doing grain and I am not doing heat distillation anytime soon.
Cool.
Srinath.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hypothetically speaking, I imagine that you would get far more alcohol per lb of grain by distillation than you could possibly get by freezing. Distillation can remove enough water from the ethanol to leave you with about 96 percent ABV (192 proof). You might manage about a third of that (about 35% ABV) by carefully freezing the beer and catching what won't freeze after two or three rounds of freezing. BUT you will also get a much greater amount of the more volatile and unpleasant alcohols mixed in with the volume you catch when you freeze your beer than if you were to distill it so the 35% (+/-) would include a significant volume that good distillers would reject as undrinkable.

 

[Jokester]

Yea heat can produce higher ABV etc not talking about that. Just total volume of 40% abv you can get out of the amount of grain. The snakebite guys get 64% of a pretty drinkable beer, no idea how much grain they use. But using some mondo commercial freezer like they use and trying to get a 40% total abv.
It likely would be pretty good to drink because good beer concentrates to a good freeze concentrated beer. Likely hops will hurt the heat distillation process, they would burn. That could be taken out in the batch that is heat distilled. Also it has to be fermented nearly dry for freeze concentrate process to work well, else it will get too much of the unused sugar. Yea too many variables.
Cool.
Srinath.

 

[bernardsmith]

They may be using some chemical means to remove the water. I don't think you can in fact remove enough water by freezing to collect anything like 65% ABV. Sixty -five proof, yes, but 65 % ABV? Did you test that with your traile proof hydrometer?

 

[bracconiere]

They may be using some chemical means to remove the water. I don't think you can in fact remove enough water by freezing to collect anything like 65% ABV. Sixty -five proof, yes, but 65 % ABV? Did you test that with your traile proof hydrometer?

maybe molecular sieves....

 

[doug293cz]

They may be using some chemical means to remove the water. I don't think you can in fact remove enough water by freezing to collect anything like 65% ABV. Sixty -five proof, yes, but 65 % ABV? Did you test that with your traile proof hydrometer?

A traile proof hydrometer won't read accurately for freeze concentrated alcohol. The calibration assumes the measured solution contains only water and ethanol. The stuff in beer that keeps FG above 1.000 will totally bork your readings.

Brew on

 

[Jokester]

Sorry snake venom is what its called. Its 67.5% alcohol.

https://www.brewbound.com/news/brewmeister-releaes-snake-venom-worlds-strongest-beer-at-67-5

It is freeze distilled in Scotland. They use a industrial mondo -150 or some such freezer. My home freezer hits -15 to -18 F. It will easily freeze 15% abv wine. It will make 47% spiced rum thicker and syrupy looking and not do anything discernible to 40% vodka or gin. 40% Whiskey gets thicker but not quite in the same league as the rum.

Now I freeze concentrate a 8% abv beer and melt out 1/4th the amount I am at a theoretical max abv of 32%. I don't know how much I am actually getting but these are my observations.
The melt out will only freeze into a soft Slurpee consistency.
The first 1-2 oz of the remaining - as in the most alcohol content of what I am throwing away - will freeze pretty much hard like water.

I have no idea where the abv is, but I can tell you its pretty high. About 2 oz will kick you like a drink of 1.5oz of 40% whisky.

Cool.
Srinath.

 

[bernardsmith]

Here's a fairly accurate method of measuring the ABV of your "distillate". You measure the ABV of the distillate with a proof hydrometer. It won't be accurate if the beer had unfermented sugars, but it will give you a reading and that is what you want. You then take a sample (say, 200 ml) of the distillate. Carefully boil it down so that you are left with exactly 100 ml. This boiling willl boil off every last drop of alcohol but not the sugars. You then add back 100 ml of distilled water and measure the ABV of this solution. The difference in ABV will be the alcohol content you removed by boiling. It's a sacrifice of 200 ml but you will see then what proof or ABV your whisky has.

 

[Jokester]

Oooo that's brilliant. In fact I'll sacrifice a bunch of crap I would rather not even drink anyway just as a proof of concept.
Cool..
Srinath.

 

[bernardsmith]

Can speak only hypothetically but if you are using crap wines/beers to make spirits what you are getting cannot be any better than crap. Real distillers fine tune their craft so that what goes in is gold and so what comes out is also gold. Garbage in... garbage out. But you don't need anyone to tell you that.

 

[Jokester]

I'd contend that there have been a few beers that went from mediocre to much better - Pabst APA and Sam adams 76 come to mind immediately as to a lot of others, redhare's rewired was great to start with but did get better, hyper fermenting it may actually get me even past that "better" state. Some that were good, got worse, some got better.
I'd also say, my palate is rather unique. I love 4 roses and fine buffalo trace very very salty. If I was to name my favorite whiskey, I'll tale old crow over nearly anything else. I like the harsh bite of some of the cheap stuff, but then again, some of the real cheap cheap stuff is missing that bite. Like Kentucky gentleman or Canadian something or other etc. I have tried maybe 100+ whiskeys because they have sampling in all the big liquor stores in my area, so I have likely tried everything on the shelves - like anywhere.

Cool.
Srinath.

 

[Indiana Red]

My (accidental) experience in this area was quite favorable. After making a aprox 8% dopplebock it accidentally, slowly froze in my kegerator. DANG ! When I finally noticed what was happening I used CO2 to push out aprox 3G from one corny keg to another, leaving behind light amber "snow" the resulting liquid turned out to be delicious. Bottled it in 375s and it was a huge hit at a bottle share. That was a few years ago and just haven't gone though the trouble of doing it again.

 

[Jokester]

My doppelbock freeze distill experiment that comes to mind was Thomas creeks doppelbock, an 8% thick and chewy syrupy monster, and it did concentrate out nice, I tried to get it to 30%+ and it definitely got there but all the sugar ended up in the concentrate. The left over was pretty dark enough so I probably left some carbs behind in the ice but my next attempt will be to ferment the doppelbock with amg and yeast.

Cool.
Srinath.

 

[hootowl]

With a pot still you do get flavors passed through.

 

[Jokester]

With a pot still you do get flavors passed through.

Right, else there would be no point having different mash bills for hard liquor. Freeze concentrating sends a very different amount and type of flavors through, as well as all the hop characters. I am trying to make something that combines the best of both.

Cool.
Srinath.

 

[bernardsmith]

Freeze distillation concentrates all the sugars and flavors. A pot still tends to carry some of the flavors but none of the sugars (I would think) in the steam as it travels through the condenser. A pot still will produce a very clear liquid whereas freeze distillation will concentrate whatever colors are in the original wine or beer (or mead or cider).

 

[Jokester]

Oh yea, I had someone fall flat on her face - I freeze concentrated PBR's APA to 30% and mixed it with a little PBR APA - tasted, mouth feel, carbonation, color etc and total feel of a regular pbr apa, with about 5X the alcohol. The sugars and hop oils go through to the melt but the chunky chewy carbs stay trapped in the ice. The trick is to have the same gravity and refractometer in the concentrate as you have in the base beer.

Now the color seems to be the same as the base beer, the chunky stuff mostly is left in the ice, sugars if any and hop oils end in the concentrate. I'd say I get a linear split of the carbs and majority of the oils. In fact if I cold crash a big enough batch I'll have the sediment ( a very much smaller one than the base beer) and a layer of oil on top of it. Careful decanting, or sitting in the freezer on a bag of frozen peas would get you a no sediment no oil cleared out clean high abv beer concentrate. I used gelatin one time to do this and while it worked, it turned a rather awful but filled with character beer into a still quite awful but completely stripped of character concentrate.

Cool.
Srinath.