Tree Bark??

[8Ball]

My father-in-law is 88 years old and has lived his entire life in rural North Florida. When I travel to visit with him, we sit around the smoker and have a little cold beer with a few sips of clear. I try to pick his brain on how they did things years ago. He said he used to help his dad and older brothers make turpentine from pine sap. They also made a little shine while they were at it. They would sprout some corn, dump it into a barrel, then fill it with boiling water and sugar. Pretty sure they allowed the wild yeast to take over in an open ferment. They let it work off, then they ran it once and done in a wood fired pot. This is the interesting part: he says that sometimes they wood take the bark from a live oak tree and use it to flavor the corn shine they made. In all my readings on aging and flavoring, I’ve never heard of using tree bark. Not sure that I would want to try it either. Just Thought I would put this out there to see if anyone else heard something similar?

[contrahead]

By adding tree bark to the corn shine, your father in law and friends were adding tannin to the product. The word “tannin” actually derives from an old German word – for tree bark. During the aging process inside a normal oak barrel, ethanol literally extracts tannin from the wood. This adds complexity to the final spirit; affecting its color and taste.

When making red wines vintners sometimes add tannin to their juice to improve its taste by adding a little bite, bitterness or astringency. Tannins are mildly acidic polyphenols. The source of additional tannin used for wine might come from aging in an oak barrel, from dried grape skins, crystals from dried wine or from tree bark. Dark chocolate, red beans, cloves, cinnamon, walnuts, almonds and tea leaves all contain tannin.

The best tannin comes from tree bark. In the past the commercial tanning of leather with tannin required massive amounts of tree bark. Entire plots of forest in England and in the American Catskill, Adirondack and Allegheny mountains were denuded of trees, just to collect tree bark so that leather could be tanned. While Hemlock, Oak and Chestnut were the most sought after tree barks (for their color), Eucalyptus, Mangrove, Maple, Sumac, Wattle, and Willow trees or bushes are high in astringent tannin too. On a smaller individual scale, adequate vegetable tanning liquors can be made of boiled tea leaves, wheat bran or just dead and dried deciduous tree leaves in autumn.

What I want are some pictures of an old time turpentine still and some explanations of how it was done.

[8Ball]

Well that makes sense as his direct descendants were immigrants to the US from Germany in the late 1800’s.

He said you have to take the bark from a living oak tree, then you bake (toast) it, then they crumbled it up and put it into the jugs and corked it.

They would collect the pine sap by cross hatching the pine tree and placing a funnel to collect the sap into a small clay pot that hung below it. Don’t have any pictures, but they just collected the sap and delivered it to a turpentine mill where it was boiled and condensed like making whiskey. So I misspoke when I said they actually made the turpentine.

[NZChris]

Dis they use a particular variety of oak? White oak bark is used medicinally.

[8Ball]

Dis they use a particular variety of oak? White oak bark is used medicinally.

NZC,
They used the “Live Oak” variety. It is very common to the local rural area in north Florida. You had to cut it fresh from a living tree, then bake it. Using bark from seasoned wood was not discussed.

[NZChris]

I'm going to have trouble finding that at this end of the planet

[contrahead]

Florida apparently scores highly in both live oaks and in pine tree sap. I've a friend living in Slidel, La who has a couple of monstrous live oaks in his back yard. The wood is extremely heavy and dense. It does not grow very straight though and therefore does not get converted into straight lumber very often. Nonetheless live oak was highly sought after during the age of sail, finding its main use in the bent knees and ribs of a ship.

Researching turpentine stills just a little bit led to the revelation that many of them looked identical to regular 7' or 8' tall pot stills for liquor. Many were made completely of copper too; perhaps because copper was affordable, malleable and easy to fabricate with.

I don't like to post links to pictures if it can be avoided – because of potential copyright issues but also because of the inevitable “link rot” that is bound to happen sooner or later for most Internet sites. But here is a link to a Google images query.

After they gassified and then condensed the turpentine oil though, how did they remove the sticky pine rosin from the bottom of the still?

[8Ball]

What I want are some pictures of an old time turpentine still and some explanations of how it was done.

Did some clicking and found this article on how turpintine was made :
https://americanroads.net/happy_trails_ ... 222018.htm

Apparently, the molten rosin was dumped from the bottom of the still via a valve and trough.

[contrahead]

Apparently, the molten rosin was dumped from the bottom of the still via a valve and trough.

Evidently that rosin gets pretty hot (hotter that boiling water maybe) and it likely turns into a rock as it cools. The link says that their Festival- rosin boiled potatoes are cooked @ 350º for one hour.

{Water can not reach that temperature. At sea level water boils @ 212 ºF (100 ºC) and /or about -1ºF less for every 500' in elevation gained. In a typical stove top “pressure cooker” the atmospheric pressure can be effectively doubled, allowing the temperature to reach a maximum of 239 – 250 ºF perhaps.}

Plenty of uses for pine rosin: glue, soldering flux, sealing wax, photocopying & printing inks, varnishes, pharmaceutical and soft drink emulsifiers...

[contrahead]

This picture is and isn't what it looks like. It isn't running, although its fire is making smoke and water is running down the flue. (It's display only; the fire is far too small to be of any practical use and the water isn't circulating or running out of the barrel).

It looks like a moonshine still, but isn't.

This picture (found on Wikipedia) is named “Birch_beer_still”; but how many people do you know that make beer by Distilling it ? This is an essential oils still.

My questions are numerous.

-Birch oil can be used as an antiseptic; it kills both fungi and bacteria. Some people (linked below) say do not drink it; it's toxic.
-Others make small beers from boiling birch twigs or by collecting sap by tapping the tree (as Maple syrup is collected). It is as old or older than the Root Beer that Iroquois Indians taught the colonist to make.
-The sigh at the back of this picture alludes to oil distilled from Black birch (bark ?); because searching for “birch bark tar” that Neanderthals used 200,000 years ago, led me here. But birch bark tar is made by “DRY distillation (pyrolysis). Presumably birch bark is intended to be boiled off in water, within this kettle. Commercially, steam distillation is used.
-The bark and wood both of pine trees mostly, were used to make traditional turpentine and rosin. Was water used in the turpentine stills that 8Ball and I were discussing 3 years ago, or was the process dry?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... _still.jpg
https://www.aromahq.com/birch-oil/
https://renegadebrewing.com/birch-beer-recipe/
https://www.wildernesscollege.com/birch ... ecipe.html
viewtopic.php?t=76872

[Demy]

Extraction of the pine resin