"Paul Arthur" wrote in message
om...
On 2010-12-21, Spamlet wrote:

"john robinson" wrote in message
...

Does anyone have any information about making a simple *distilling*
apparatus that they can share? My friend is thinking of trying to
distil some ginger beer.

A problem with distilling is that if 'successfully' done, one ends
up with alcohol and no flavour, so you would not get ginger spirit
from your still. The flavour in gin is added afterwards, and that in
whisky comes from the barrels it is aged in.

Sorry, that's just wrong. Raw whisky has plenty of flavour; some of
the flavours come from the barrel, but others (like the peatiness in
some Scotch) is there from the get-go. You only get no flavour if you
distill it several times (a column still does this internally, while
with a pot still you would have to do multiple runs).

Which is what I meant by distilling *properly*. As a chemist I would have
equipment that generally separated the individual fractions quite well by
their boiling points. In practice, I would throw out the first fractions as
likely to contain methanol, even if this meant throwing out some of the
flavour compounds. The stillers for booze must all have their own
techniques for keeping a mixture of flavour compounds in the distilled
product (Keeping everything that distills over between a range of
temperatures, instead of just at the boiling point of alcohol), but to a
chemist these would all be ways of producing impure alcohol. And even the
best stills don't prevent the water that is bound up with the ethanol
molecule distilling over, so that to get pure alcohol extensive drying
processes have to be carried out.

As a long time home wine maker and lab tech, I did test the alcohol content
of some of my wines chromatographically. They can exceed 20% so, in many
ways, no point in distilling, but when I did try, I decided it was easier in
the long run to buy gin or vodka and add fruit to it, rather than distill
from a fruit ferment and try to keep the flavour.

S


As for gin...gin is made in several ways. "The flavour is added
afterwards" is a good description of compounding, which is the least
popular. London gin is the most popular type of gin and is required by
law to be produced in a more traditional manner, where the flavour is
added before the final distillation.

--
You mean you didn't *know* she was off making lots of little phone
companies?