Dragons Breath Mead

[tacomabees]

Hi all,

Just looking for some feedback...I made a 5 gallon batch of sweet blackberry mead: SG 1.150, FG 1.035 appox. 16.5% ABV. In a conversation with my local wine and beer supply, he told me about "frontier distilling" where you basically take a gallon or so of mead, freeze it for a few days and then take the bottle and turn in upside down into another vessel.

I did this and after about an hour produced about 750ml (1 bottle) of gold...I'd like to know if anyone else has done this, and more specifically, is there any formulary to extrapolate the ABV of the condensed liquor/cordial that I've made. I'm estimating it at about 30% just based on the conversion volume and tasting, but it is subjective.

I know one thing...t's crazy good!

thanks!

 

[Toxxyc]

You will need to get a tool to measure the alcohol. What you did is called "freeze distillation", "jacking" or more accurately called "freeze concentration". It's not really distillation because there's no still involved, but it does remove some water from the liquid, since the water tends to freeze quicker than the alcohol. You can also do it with a salad spinner, to leave the water behind in the little basket thingy.

Do take note though that this might not be legal, depending on where you are situated. Some areas allow it (like where I am), in some it's a grey area and I'm sure in some it'll be plain illegal, so do take note of this when playing.

 

[Squatchy]

It has been my understanding it's illegal throughout the entire US.

 

[dingurth]

The reason home distillation is illegal in the US and not generally encouraged worldwide is actually more of a safety issue.

During fermentation yeast produce both ethyl alcohol and methyl alcohol. Ethyl alcohol is what we all know and love, while methyl alcohol is poisonous. As little as 10ml can cause permanent blindness and at 30ml death. In a base fermented form (wine, mead, beer), concentrations can never get that high. You'd be dead from alcohol poisoning long before you drank enough. But when you concentrate the alcohol with distillation, you risk concentrating the methyl alcohol to dangerous levels. Professional distilleries use special equipment and techniques to separate the ethyl from the methyl alcohols to prevent this.

It's just a risk I wouldn't be willing to take, as fun as an idea as home distillation sounds.
(fun fact: one of the ways to treat methanol poisoning is to drink more ethyl alcohol)

 

[bernardsmith]

dingurth, I think that your explanation is what sociologists might call a functionalist account. That is to say, you argue that controls are in place to protect people.
Perhaps.
But I suspect the reason that folk distillation is "discouraged" is because it fails to provide any revenue in taxes and excise that licensed distillers pay.
Chemists on this forum will, I am sure, correct me if I am wrong, but concentrating the alcohol already present by freezing cannot increase the total amount of methyl alcohol available, so if the wine was safe because only microscopic amounts of methyl alcohol were produced by the actions of the yeast that same microscopic amount will not have increased by one molecule through "freeze distillation". And if the amount of ethyl alcohol produced is in fact also the same - only the water content has been reduced - so the alcohols are more concentrated not increased, then you are not going to glug down this drink in quite the same way you might have drunk it when the alcohol level was half as much. That is not to say that the law permits such activity in the USA or that you should engage in this activity... but the rationale would seem to me to be more about a perceived loss of revenue to the government than any real danger to those who jack cider or other wines and meads.

 

[Farmboyc]

100% agree Bernard.

Also the only methy-alcohol that will be in any alcoholic beverage is created during fermentation. Any type of concentration/distilling can only increase the concentration by decreasing the total volume.

Sent from my SM-A520W using Tapatalk

 

[Stasis]

Well, if there's a way to remove methyl alcohol there's a way to keep it.. maybe. Maybe it's also possible that somehow home distillers can do this either by mistake or because they get the methyl reduction horribly wrong. *Maybe* the laws are there to safeguard this.
On wikipedia there's a list of methanol poisoning cases. Now a couple of them occured because people added methanol to alcoholic drinks rather than through distillation. However, I'd bet quite a bit of those were through distillation. Check out india and their moonshine making tendencies on that list...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methanol_poisoning_incidents

 

[tacomabees]

Well, interesting discussion, but I've read this same debate on other sites on legality, definitions of distilling, etc... It seems that no one has any useful comment to my original question however.

So, I'll just drink it until I need glasses...lol

 

[bernardsmith]

Again - I am certainly NOT advocating that anyone engage in any illegal activity but I very strongly suspect that the problems that occur with methanol (the poison) is far more likely to be caused by the the source of the alcohol being distilled itself. Some sources of spirits are not wines or beers or meads. Rather these other sources are inherently very high producers of methanol. During prohibition - I believe -bootleggers would obtain distilled wood and paper (used for solvents, antifreeze and the like) and these contain not ethanol but methanol.

I suspect that those tales of deaths in India caused by methanol poisoning are very likely to be caused by someone either deliberately cutting the distillant with wood or someone out of sheer ignorance using solvents to increase the volume of their wines and spirits.

Far , far more dangerous, I would think, than accidentally producing methanol from wine or mead or beer, is the possibility of the alcoholic vapors coming into contact with the source of heat during distiilation. That is an explosive and deadly mixture.
The other thing is that methanol will condense at a lower temperature than ethanol so anyone playing with a still - and that includes licensed professional distillers need to collect and remove what they call "heads and tails". Methanol and other undesirable alcohols being the first and last things to condense. But you don't really need any "special equipment" to remove heads and tails, just a spigot that you keep open until you know that what is condensing is ethanol.

 

[Toxxyc]

OK so there's a lot of truth here, and I can add to it. When you ferment or brew something for distillation, you don't use your normal 71B yeasts to do this. You don't wait for the fermentation to take 4 weeks to slowly and properly complete. You don't cool down your must or wort so the yeast is happy, and you don't feed it properly either.

What you do is you get as much sugar into water as you can and you dump in and "overpitch" a packet of turbo yeast. Turbo yeast is designed to ferment to very high alcohol content, very fast. You can get complete fermentation up to ~20% ABV in 5 days, and it's designed to do this. Now, as we all know, this produces...shit. And you have to get rid of the shit by distilling it. As such, you distill slowly and in a controlled manner. The person who makes moonshine by distilling this brew and bottling it will cause people to go blind and he's pretty much selling a gamble in a bottle. Properly distilling though, there's the difference... You have to control the temperature in your still (at the top of the column), and with that you can accurately distill the methanol out first, called the foreshots. These smell and act like thinners - and you can actually use it to clean up stuff in the garage with it. If you keep the temps constant, you can get a specific break where the methanol stops dripping, and then you know you should move on to the next range of temperatures to start dripping out the ethanol. Again, you'll get a break, after which you will start distilling off water and other things you don't want, so you'll know when to stop.

Now this is oversimplified, but just like there's been a lot of advancements made in the field of mead making (thanks to technology and modern methods), the same can be said about distillation. It's not uncommon at all to be able to produce a shockingly good whisky at home in a matter of weeks by following very simple rules, so the safety aspect is pretty much moot these days. In my opinion, it's illegal because it can't be taxed, but hey, that's maybe just me. I'm just glad that if I want to distill in South Africa I can, I merely have to pay a still permit fee, which is R2 per year. Yes, R2, which works out to... $0.17 USD per year.

 

[bernardsmith]

There is a method of determining the actual alcohol content of a solution by heating say 1 liter to evaporate off the alcohol (boiling) and then adding enough water to replace the lost volume. I am not sure of the calculations involved but there is a direct relationship between the volume evaporated and the % alcohol of the solution. (it may simply be the % evaporated off - so if you needed to add 500 ml the ABV is 50%

 

[Stasis]

Hi all,

Just looking for some feedback...I made a 5 gallon batch of sweet blackberry mead: SG 1.150, FG 1.035 appox. 16.5% ABV. In a conversation with my local wine and beer supply, he told me about "frontier distilling" where you basically take a gallon or so of mead, freeze it for a few days and then take the bottle and turn in upside down into another vessel.

I did this and after about an hour produced about 750ml (1 bottle) of gold...I'd like to know if anyone else has done this, and more specifically, is there any formulary to extrapolate the ABV of the condensed liquor/cordial that I've made. I'm estimating it at about 30% just based on the conversion volume and tasting, but it is subjective.

I know one thing...t's crazy good!

thanks!

You could make a spirit indication test but you'd have to waste a pint of your stuff and use a precision scale hydrometer. MAYBE you could use less than a pint but it's still going to be a large portion of your batch. The precision scale hydrometer I use has SG from 0.980 - 1.020 and cannot be substituted with a normal hydrometer if you want to be any sort of accurate

 

[tacomabees]

Thank you! this was helpful.... On a search, I found this... http://valleyvintner.com/Tips&Links/MeasuringAlcohol.pdf

While the test would require sacrificing a liter/pint of my concoction, once I can determine the alcohol content, I can extrapolate...and always make more... Along with ending up with some pretty great mead, I want to understand the science behind it as well. To me, as I develop and taste different recipes and tweaks, and find ones we like the best, it is important to add "repeatability"... I've only made about 30 gallons so far in 5 gallon batches, but am happy with the results so far. This recent foray, was an effort to salvage a Blackberry Melomel that essentially finished too sweet, and even with the addition and continued fermentation of EC-1118, was still holding a FG of 1.035 or so.