Freeze distilling

[drunk2much]

My roommate and i were consuming some adult bevages the other day
when he took his bottle of beam out of the freezer he notice that it had
small crystal froming in it. And i,in disbelive whent and looked it up how
cold it would have to be to freeze around ~-40 Degrees celcius. (this is a fridge/frezzer on campus apartment. (that what really shocked me))

Now this got me thinking i have access to a freezer at -80C that houses our genetic and molecular research and i could probally get away with this since most of the people in the lab are in the brew group that i am in.


so i could ""strip it at our apt."" and then take it up there to finishit out

I have had fris vodka and it tasted alright. Has any body else tried this and what proof did you get to and was it drinkable. " I know this dosent seperate the heads or tails since methanol freezing point is 98C and propanol is -126.

[jmc91199]

Given that

this is a fridge/freezer on campus apartment

my initial guess is that some one skimmed some beam and back filled with water. If I were you I would check the proof of the beam.

Thinking back on fond memories of a miss spent youth. I have also experience the quandary of ice crystals in Dads bottle of Johnny Walker Red. He too was at a loss to explain the occurrence and I was not about to clue him in.

I've tried freezing before and the problem I was faced with was that the water had frozen but a good bit of the liquor was trapped between the crystals. I didn't have access to a press nor the patients to wait for it to melt. I've seen it described here that freezing the mash might be a good first step (instead of a striping run) but should be followed up with a still run. Search the site for Apple Jack

[Big J]

Thinking back on fond memories of a miss spent youth. I have also experience the quandary of ice crystals in Dads bottle of Johnny Walker Red. He too was at a loss to explain the occurrence and I was not about to clue him in.

Ha ha - haven't we all!

[Watershed]

It's a problem of diminishing returns - yes the stuff that doesn't freeze will be higher in ethanol but freeze 'distilling' does not result in the water freezing leaving the alcohol behind. It causes a mixture of ethanol and water to freeze, the lower the temperature, the more ethanol will freeze out in the mix.

You'll get ice crystals in a bottle of spirit in a domestic freezer, that doesn't mean you've hit the freezing point of the spirit - only a low enough temp for some of the water to start dropping out of solution.

By the way, I've come across a couple of references saying that freezing is illegal in many countries - any more info? I'm suprised as it's not exactly easy to enforce and implies that you're comitting a crime by keeping your vodka in the freezer ( which is the only place to keep a good vodka ) or by chilling your wine fast and forgetting about it.

[jmc91199]

I think the leagal issue with freezing isn't so much the freezing as it is that the law stricly forbids artifically increasing the %abv by any unnatural method. so you can fortify you wine with brandy made by a legit distiller but apple jack is out of the question.