So I ended up at a buddies party after going to a homebrew club meeting yesterday. He had his Korean buddy over that had family that just returned from Korea. He shared these soju with us. I had never had these, but they were good once mixed. They tasted essentially like watered down vodka. Anybody have any experience with these or making these? It does appear to be a distilled product that is charcoal filtered.
Looks awesome. I'd love to try something like that but i'm finding with a lot of Asian stores around my town, they don't really stock alcohol per se. The one exception to that is our Japanese market Circle Japan.
I've read a good bit in Sake:USA where Japanese are fond of using powdered GAC (granule activated carbon) to remove yellowing compounds for crystal clear Sake. The problem with that is the GAC also removes some organic flavor compounds, which modifies the character of the Sake in negative ways. Alcohol is one of the compounds that GAC will also absorb, so if you used it in your own jiu, I wouldn't use it more than once on any batch. There is even a style of black sake that leaves the powdered GAC in the liquid. Considering the absorption powers of carbon, it'd probably be good for absorbing gas as well as alcohol in your stomach. FYI, GAC is completely safe for your insides. Hospitals use it to absorb toxins people might've ingested (illegal drugs, poisons, etc.).
One of my crossover hobbies is aquaria. The Wife and I have had aquariums since we were both children and have had upwards of 30 tanks going in the house at one time. We've paired our addictions back to just two tanks at the moment but we have a lot of filtration and liquid pump experience which lends itself well to brewing.
If I were doing larger batches of jiu, say five to ten gallons at a time, I would probably invest in one of these:
http://tinyurl.com/nv383nl
This is a hang-on canister filter that has interchangeable filters. The first filter is a fine mesh 1 micron pleated filter that polishes liquids and filters finer and finer particles as it starts to clog and slow down. What this means is, the dirtier it gets, the finer it will filter particles from the water. With a flow rate of 250 gallons per hour, it has plenty of push and is pressure resistant no matter how clogged the pleated filter gets. Also, after the liquid is polished and you remove the filter, you can simply remove it and rinse it in your sink to get all of the rice solids out of the pleats.
The second filter that comes with it is a chemical filter, which is a basket that sits inside the unit that you can fill with chemical media such as GAC (it even comes with a small box of GAC) to remove very fine organic molecules and coloring compounds.
The filter nozzles are also attachable to tubing at any custom length you can cut up to 20 feet. You can pump sanitizers like starsan through it with the micron filter in it but I wouldn't use sanitizer with the GAC chamber in it as the GAC will absorb the sanitizer, especially idophor. If it were me, i'd probably just use the micron filter and skip the GAC filtration unless you really had to make crystal clear sake for some odd reason.
