Home Distiller

Been picking up and reading books on this hobby of ours, usually a mix of dated information, new knowledge and things I've already read/known. Always enjoyed history so this book seemed like a good read. It has a very slow start and is quite a slog to read, as the author constantly references other books, other writers, and can go off on tangents, yet the closer the distillation topic gets to spirits, the more interesting of a read it is and I sped through a large portion of it while on a job-site visit for work. Ironically the visit was at an ethanol plant where they create fuel-alcohol from soybeans. Also the number and size of shell-tube heat exchangers really gets you in the mood.

I wanted to share some of the interesting excerpts with you all, as my friends and family bore quickly and do not seem to enjoy it as much.



First off - not directly related to distilling, but he touches briefly on the myth of creating gold, back in the day, and this paragraph has me now reffering to my home-distilling as "The Divine and Sacred Art"


Here is a great word to add to our slang dictionary; Schnapsteufel or Brandy Devil


The first mention or venture into Dephlegmation


A page on distilling sea-water on ships. What really catches my interest is the idea to run a worm condenser outside the ship, to utilize the sea as the cooling water. This would of course have complications, issues and the like. Yet Its neat to see that sort of out-the-box thinking.


The following suggests the Liebig condenser is not properly named.


This page, the author being quoted, recommends 10x distillation for pure alcohol. And also talks about a theory of a very tall column, getting one pure alcohol.


A short paragraph on CUTS.


Now reading this was a bit strange and reminded me that there are no new ideas in this world. I was discussing with my father this past Sunday, while doing a stripping run, about my pre-heater ideas for the new keg-stripper still. In which I was planning on just spearing a keg through and through with a 2" copper pipe, and how that perhaps it would be better, to just turn the keg into a worm and flake stand, with a three-way valve, to route the vapor to a shotgun condenser, once the keg with wash in it, reached a close-to-vapor temp. Not 2 days later do I read this exact idea in this book.


Here's a diagram with Moor's head, which was very common in the early days, cooling the still head, rather than a down-stream condenser like we use today. The author also points out the lack of understanding with fresh/cold water being introduced at the bottom, rather than the top, of condensers.


Here is a great image of a still with a mechanical agitator


Millar's new Still Design

Said figure of Millar's Still Design


And then here are just two images that I found rather neat.





Anyways, I am at about the 1800s now, maybe 1/4 of the book left to go, not sure how quickly I will get through it, but will likely share anything of interest here.

Interesting.

I noticed there is a bird on each faucet.
May refer to the origin of the calling of a tap, a cock.

Geoff

BlueSasquatch wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 6:37 am Here is a great word to add to our slang dictionary; Schnapsteufel or Brandy Devil

Picking out that one word, to expand upon and research – has burned up about 5 hours of my time this morning and another couple this afternoon. I halted that chain of research somewhere after finally reading about the Greek philosophy known as “Cynicism”, its probable founder Antisthenes (student of Socrates and the person who might have inspired the word “antithesis”), and another famous and contemporary philosopher named Diogenes of Sinope. I was curious about Diogenes because he was rather famous. He mocked both Plato and Alexander the Great to their faces, and also walked around in public – carrying a lamp (in the daytime) “looking for an honest man”.

But the only reason Diogenes was brought to my attention is because he is famously associated with living in a “pithos”. Many homeless Athenians were forced to sleep in pithoi after the Greek civil wars. What is a pithos you ask? The Greeks (followed by the Romans) stored large quantities of olive oil and wines in these clay pots. Sometimes the pots were huge (up to 10 ft high with a mouth 3 ft in diameter), smeared with pitch or resin inside and out and were buried deep in the ground. “This treatment reduced porosity and gave to the wine a peculiar and much appreciated flavor, still characteristic of the Greek "resinata” (a type of white wine from Greece).

The text where I found this and much , much more historic information was within another digitized book, much like the one BlueSasquatch refers to but does not seem to link to in this thread. My book: A History Of Technology(2) (THE MEDITERRANEAN CIVILIZATIONS AND THE MIDDLE AGES c. 700B.C. TO f.A.D. 1500) - is a 447 page book published by the Oxford University Press in 1956.

Buy searching for the rare term “Schnapsteufel” on the in-omnipresent Internet, I was distracted by anamie like characters and unicorns linked to the term, but found very few English references or definitions for it. The Internet did lead me to this book – but only to a page that was OCR scanned (they used to call the process Optical Character Recognition). In other words a confusing, boring and ugly, text only digital representation of the book. It took me more than 3 hours to find the text that included Schnapsteufel, but the numerous other tidbits of historical information read, far outweighed the time lost in distraction. If one looks to the right side of the page in <<this link>>, he'll see “SEE OTHER FORMATS”, and find the opurtunity to view the book as intended / pictures and all. I chose to download the 28.3Mb PDF file.

The book is a wealth of information. Much coverage about VITICULTURE but very little about brewing beer. Concerning distillation, one of the interesting things the history has to say about using Quicklime to dehydrate the water from a spirit, reinforces information that I've seen elsewhere. (Some products called “Plaster of Paris” have some calcium carbonate – but others are all calcium sulphate). Somewhere it was stated that from the 12th century on, alchemist distilled alcohol 3 times – with quicklime – to produce “the liquid w'hich we call absolute alcohol”. The timeline regarding the development of distillation, from physicians during the 14th century Black Plague breakouts – bears further investigation.

Another consequence of reading this work is in attempting to ingest some of the vocabulary and other little factoids. I plan to go back to read some of it more closely.

Schnapsteufel = ‘Schnapps fiend’

Amuraca - olive dregs. (The picture is of a lake filled with only amuraca; probably centuries old, in Jaén – Andalusia, Spain. The province is the largest producer of olive oil in the world. It produces around 45% of all Spanish olive oil and 20% of the world's production).

Pithoi – see Diogenes and Alexander

Greek vinticulture: 6 month fermentation, filtered and racked into smaller amphorae 1 yr later, acidic, almost always consumed mixed with water (not neat), instability, short 3 or 4 yr shelf life

Roman vintners: whom later adopted wooden barrels – often grew willows – to supply barrel-hoops.

Verjuice: sour / acidic condiment for cooking, from green grapes.

Defrutum: sweet syrup made from boiling down grape must. High quality of Officinae Defrutum probable forerunner of today's expensive Balsamic Vinegar.

Sapa: an even further condensed grape syrup, reduced to 1/3 of its original volume, frequently used to sweeten wine. Lead acetate cooked down wine in lead pots to crystalline form probably helped lead to the fall of the Roman empire.

Aqua ardens - an old Latin name for burning water, later a brandy refined enough to burn. Aqua vita is an archaic name which could include weaker concentrated aqueous solution of ethanol.

Rosoglio -a distilled type of Italian liqueur made from a base of alcohol, sugar, and water in the same proportion. Or a very sweet liqueur prepared from raisins, made by apothecaries and distillers spreading throughout Europe and reaching Paris about 1332. Dutch brandewijn, burnt wine or brandy was causing the Schnapsteufel (public drunkenness problem) endemic in Frankfurt by 1360.

That is not all that I read this morning but its enough to relate; how a body can loose track of time once he steps into one of these learning wormholes. Five hours or more reading, a little time to eat breakfast and another hour or two wasted typing this reply. The day is pretty much shot; but it is rainy outside anyway.

The original books containing those last 2 images can be found in the list of books that was recently mentioned in another thread by rakijamaker. Hard to read, being in ye olde german and a difficult to read font, but the images in the books are great.

contrahead wrote: ↑Sun Sep 25, 2022 3:21 pm
That is not all that I read this morning but its enough to relate; how a body can loose track of time once he steps into one of these learning wormholes. Five hours or more reading, a little time to eat breakfast and another hour or two wasted typing this reply. The day is pretty much shot; but it is rainy outside anyway.

That's great man, I've done that plenty of times, time spent in the pursue of knowledge is never time wasted.

Diogenes was brutal with his words, I've read about a half dozen other comments on him just roasting his fellow man, the original troll maybe.