A lot of times you are reading the back of a liquor bottle and you see that it was distilled in a pot still – and it sounds fancy and great but what does it really mean?
First – what is distillation?
It is the removal of water from an alcoholic substance.
Distillation is what turns wine into brandy, apple cider into applejack, and fermenting potato water into vodka. They’re a couple of ways of doing this.
The first is jacking which is one of the simplest ways to extract alcohol from the liquid. Pure ethyl alcohol freezes at -114 °C (-173.2 degrees Fahrenheit) but water freezes at -0 °C (32 degrees Fahrenheit). So you take your fermented beverage and freeze it as cold as you can and start taking the frozen bits out (water) and what is left will be a highly concentrated alcoholic beverage. This is where the term applejack comes from (it was an easy way for people to turn hard apple cider into a spirit during prohibition). It is not nearly as efficient as the other form of distillation.
Distillation by evaporation can be carried out either in a pot still or a column still. Pot stills were the first stills developed and you can think of them as being a big metal Hershey Kiss with a door at the base and a condensation tube coming out of the top. You take your fermented juice, toss it inside the Kiss and turn up the heat – but not too hot. Alcohol has a lower evaporation temperature than water. Since alcohol evaporates at 78.3°C (172 degrees Fahrenheit) and water evaporates at 100°C (212 degrees Fahrenheit) the alcohol starts to go to the top of the chamber, through the condensation tubing, and drips out the other side (and the water stays in the bottom of the still). Typically the more times you put your liquid in the distiller, the higher proof (the more alcohol) you are going to get and the more pure the product will be, as little tiny particles are left with the water in the still.
Column distillation is really a lot of pot stills connected together to streamline evaporation distillation. The alcohol goes through a series of chambers in the distiller and in each chamber is becomes a little stronger and a little cleaner. It is much less expensive and much more efficient than other types of commercial distillation.
Want to know more about spirits? Check out this post:
Alcohol 101 What is Vodka, Gin, Whiskey, Rum, Tequila, etc?
I am a mixologist bartender and this is my blog.
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Love it! So much info….one day we shall have to share stories over a glass….or two….or three…LoL
Major thankies for the blog article. Cool.