Distilling

For those of you that haven't heard: We are in the process of launching a new distillery at Blue Pants! We will be unveiling our spirits on November 1st at our 3rd Annual Pinstripe Fest and I couldn't be more excited. I'm surprised the guys at work are still putting up with me talking about all the things I want to make since it is all I've talked about for the last few weeks. The most common question I've been getting seems to be people wanting to know how different distilling is from brewing. The answer is: Not a lot.

Before you ever get to the point of distilling a spirit, you basically make beer or wine. For us, we are using mostly grains for our spirits. Our vodka is made from mostly wheat, as is our limoncello, and our cream liqueur. Our process varies slightly from a lot of distilleries because we are using high quality brewing ingredients, where as typically distiller's malt is of lower quality than brewer's malt. We start off with a mash almost exactly like we would do for beer, except we mash at a slightly lower temperature (63 degrees Celsius compared to the 65-70 we use for beer), so that the most active enzyme is beta-amylase and the wort we produce is highly fermentable. We target a wort that will ferment out to about 8% ABV and after the mash, we do a sparge exactly like we do for brewing.

The next step for us is to boil the wort. A lot of distillers skip boiling, but I like to do a short boil to help break up proteins and to pasteurize the wort so we can have a predictable, clean fermentation. During the boil is where things begin to change from our brewing process. The boil only really needs to be 15 minutes or so (I do 30 minutes just to make sure to drive off some of the volatile compounds that can contribute undesirable flavors) and no hops are added.

After the boil, our process remains pretty much the same as it does for beer. We chill our wort, aerate it, and pitch yeast. Our yeast pitching rate is a little bit higher than our pitching rate for beer because we want to have fewer esters and as small of an amount of fusel alcohol as possible. After fermentation (2-3 days) we chill the "beer" and try to settle out as much yeast as possible.

Next is where we actually distill the beer. Distilling is really interesting as a brewer because it can help give you an idea of how consistent you are being in the brewing process. Distilling is a simple concept where you have a still on top of a boiler. As you boil the beer, the steam that goes up into the column gets condensed with cold water and the condensate drips out of the still.

Most beer drinkers know that when yeast ferments, it creates alcohol. What people frequently forget though is that there are about 900 more flavor compounds produced by yeast. Amongst them are things like acetaldehyde (green apple flavor), ethyl-acetate (nail polish), methanol (moreso if you are fermenting fructose), iso-amyl acetate (banana), propanaol (fusel alcohol), and many more. Luckily, all of these compounds have different boiling temperatures so when you distill, you can isolate each compound.

The first thing to come out of a still is methanol (the stuff that is attributed to making moonshiners go blind). It's boiling temperature is about 20 degrees lower than the temperature of ethanol and the smell is horrific, so it is very easy to collect all the methanol at the beginning of a run and discard it. We call that first portion of distillate "fore shots" and it can contain some acetaldehyde as well (which is known to cause hangovers).

After the fore shots, the next thing to come out of the still is called "heads." The heads contain mostly acetaldehyde and ethyl acetate and are safe to drink, but typically they don't taste very good. The heads portion is saved and can be redistilled or it can be used to mix into the final product in small amounts to provide some flavor.

The middle part of the run is called the "hearts" and is mostly ethanol. The heart of the run is typically light in flavor and should be the largest fraction of the run. Throughout the collection of the hearts, we check on the still periodically and smell and taste the distillate coming out. When the aroma starts to change, we know that we are getting close to collecting the last portion of the run; the "tails." Depending on the spirit being produced, the tails can be mixed in with the hearts to provide flavor (Scotch is typically high in tails because that is the portion of the run that contains the most peaty flavor. Vodka is supposed to contain no heads or tails, just neutral flavored hearts) or saved for re-distillation.

If everything was consistent from the mash and the fermentation than all of the by products of fermentation will be at the same ratios from batch to batch and it becomes easy to know when you are coming up on each fraction of the run.

We are very excited about the spirits that we are producing now. We just got a new still which is very versatile because it is modular. We can set it up to be a short still so that we get a lot of flavor for whiskey or we can stack sections of the still to make it tall and ideal for vodka production. So with our new still we will be able to make any type of spirit that we want. Our first three recipes will be ready later this week and we will unveil vodka, limoncello, and cream liqueur on November 1st. Soon after that we will be distilling a test batch of apple brandy and we will begin experimentation with gin and whiskey. I'm looking forward to all the recipe development that is coming up!