27 of 30 - Resolute

[aggienaut]

Three days left of 30 in 30 and I'm still wondering WHY oh why I thought it would be a good idea to try for 60 in 30. Fortunately I have a slew of entries that were posted to the other blog but not this one. As such, here's one from last January that was in resposne to a prompt of "resolute."

   I have a hot and steamy resolution. It involves a lot of alcohol, and possibly explosions. I've been doing a lot of resoluting lately actually. Generally, it is preceded by soluting, and desoluting.

   It begins with creating a solution of, basically, water and sugar. Sometimes we use molasses, sometimes we use malted barley. You'd think we'd use the sugary substance we have literally tons of laying about -- honey -- but honey is naturally antibacterial and we need bacteria (yeast) to live in the solution. Over the next few weeks to as short as a few days, yeast will thrive in the solution and convert the sugar into EtOH, ethanol, the alcohol we know and love.

   Once this process has completed, it is time to de-solute it (ie divide the solution into component parts). We do this by heating it to a temperature between the boiling point of the two major components, alcohol and water. Alcohol evaporates above 78.3 celsius, and water, obviously, evaporates at 100. This is distilling.
   Over the course of a few hours, if the still does not explode and kill us all, it will divide the solution into two new solutions -- one of between 60-80% alcohol (and water and some other materials from the original solution), and in the bottom of the still a slag of everything that didnt evaporate.
   There is a pervasive urban legend that amateur distillation can yield a product that will make you blind. This is totally incorrect. Distilling does not make anything that wasn't in the original substance. What caused blindness is back in the days of prohibition people would load up their moonshine with methanol and other dubious substances in order to artificially up the alcohol content or volume.

   Then it is time to re-solute. Since an 80% alcohol solution is kind of gnarly, one typically waters it down 50-50 with water (preferably distilled, so it is pure water). One then filters it through activated charcoal to get out anything else less desirable that made it through the distillage.
   Then, my latest thing is to mix honey into the solution. Honey is sweet and delicious, flavoursome, and kind of has a little bit of a bite itself really (and I have a metric shit-ton of it). The flavour (and colour!) in most commercially available distilled beverages comes from months to years of barrel aging. Most home distillers don't have time for this but you can buy "rum essence" (or brandy, or tequila or...) and mix it in and have something that tastes exactly like the commercially available product (this seems kind of like cheating to me, however).

Legal Note: It is unlawful to distill in California without a license from the Alcoholic Beverage Control agency. However, you don't necessarily know whether or not I have one and I should be assumed to be in compliance with the law until proven otherwise right? (=

Comments

[doodlemaier.livejournal.com]

Raw honey is full of "things" including bacteria and wild yeast so I suppose it's not impossible that honey contain tannic acid, although it's certainly not enough to get your yeasts off. I'll bet buckwheat honey probably has some tannins, in fact there's a contributor over at Got Mead (http://www.gotmead.com) who always includes a couple ounces of buckwheat honey in his "quick" mead recipes, although I always figured it was for color because he always supplements with processed nutrients and "energizers". If Vikings can do it. . .

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

We got plenty of buckwheat honey here, it grows everywhere. (: For some reason the bees seem particularly bad tempered when foraging on buckwheat -- I've heard this observation independantly from a number of beekeepers!

Haha yes "if the vikings can do it..." I'm always hearing all these complicated instructions for mead and getting intimidated.. but as we say ITVCDI...

[doodlemaier.livejournal.com]

The Vikings, when faced with complicated instructions like: "Water, honey, shake!", probably said to themselves, "Hey, if the Phoenicians could do this. . . "

Yeah, I don't know why people want to twist shit-simple things like making mead into brain surgery. Probably because they can.

• Above everything else: cleanliness
• 1 part honey to 3 parts water (feel free to fiddle with this ratio, anything less than 2 lbs honey/1 gallon (finished) mead probably isn't worth your while, anything over 4 lbs honey/1 gallon mead is rocket fuel. . . eventually)
• boiling/skimming is un-necessary and over-rated! 140° F for 10 minutes is all that's needed to sanitize honey and it preserves subtle aromas (I didn't take mine above 110° tonight)
• keep covered and let cool to blood warm and pitch yeast
• (here's the hard part) leave it alone for a month, or so
• uhm. . . rack it into a clean vessel every now and then
• put interesting things in secondary (fruit, spices, flowers) or not!
• when you can read newsprint through the carboy bottle and drink!

It blows my mind that you've never made mead what with all that honey at your disposal. Strange, that. Is it because malting, milling, and lautering grain is that much fun? Well, It's getting late here on the right coast and I 'm seeing some bubbles in my yeast starter. Time to pitch that and hit the hay!

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

Thanks! One of these days!

[doodlemaier.livejournal.com]

Skill and persistence! It's been nice to have made you acquaintance.