Cold Distilling??

myk

I've been brewing my own beer for about 8 months now. At a party another brewer described cold distilling to me. The theory is that as alcohol has a lower freezing point than water, therefore if you half freeze a bottle of home brew beer, and save the liquid part; then you will have a drink with a higher level of alcohol. This process probably needs to be repeated several times in order to have significant impact.

Has anyone ever tried this or heard of it before? I don't want to try regular distilling because quite a lot of equipment is involved and I know its dangerous if it is done wrong. But I'm tempted to experiment with this cold distilling idea.

Fad

I put a Bicardi Breezer in the freezer over the summer during a rather hazy night, took it out the next morning and drank what was coming out of the bottle (Not a lot!), which was pretty strong tasting.

It seemed to take most of the flavouring out of the drink too (Ethanol being an epic solvent, at least that was my conclusion!)

BeerNut

This can be dangerous too. As well as concentrating the ethanol, you'll get concentrated amounts of whatever nasty alcohols are in there as well. I suspect it's also illegal.

myk

BeerNut wrote: »

I suspect it's also illegal.

I'm not in Ireland

Mantel

myk wrote: »

I'm not in Ireland

That would have been useful in the first post since the first few replies would point out the illegal nature of it in this country; what country are you in? Distillation is illegal in Ireland and this is an Irish site and even this kind of distillation can still be illegal when heat distillation is permitted as

you'll get concentrated amounts of whatever nasty alcohols are in there as well.

Some of the brewery's in the state use the process to make brands of beer, like Bud Ice or Molsen Ice although they only increase the alchol content by a small amount (to around 5-6%) The cider verson is called applejack over there and the Canadians do something similar but allow grapes to freeze in order concentrate sugar and then make Ice Wine out of them.

It sounds like a decent safe way to increase alcohol content if you use it to increase by a few percent but doesn't sound very healthy when highier levels are aimed for.

myk

Mantel wrote: »

Some of the brewery's in the state use the process to make brands of beer, like Bud Ice or Molsen Ice although they only increase the alchol content by a small amount (to around 5-6%) The cider verson is called applejack over there and the Canadians do something similar but allow grapes to freeze in order concentrate sugar and then make Ice Wine out of them.

It sounds like a decent safe way to increase alcohol content if you use it to increase by a few percent but doesn't sound very healthy when highier levels are aimed for.

thanks, i'll keep that in mind!

Blisterman

I don't see the point. Couldn't you just add less water to it when you're brewing it?

rubadub

BeerNut wrote: »

This can be dangerous too. As well as concentrating the ethanol, you'll get concentrated amounts of whatever nasty alcohols are in there as well. I suspect it's also illegal.

It will concentrate them but people will usually drop their intake accordingly, if you usually drink 8 pints of beer but instead distill it most people will not drink 8 pints of the resultant distillate, if it goes from 4% to 40% people will tend to drink 10 times less, and you will have less nasty stuff in the distillate.

There are loads of myths surrounding distillation, nothing new is created in the process. The poisoning risk would be brewing massive (and I mean MASSIVE) amounts and intentionally separating the "heads", which is quite difficult to do, it really requires a fractionating column, and if you know how to operate one you certainly would know about heads/tails etc. If you distilled it and collected all the distillate then per unit alcohol ingested you are intaking less harmful alcohols.

Any reports I have ever read of poisoning from illegal distillations ended up being people drinking industrial alcohols, e.g. gangs robbing methanol and selling it, not poorly distilling brews.

There are far easier methods to increase the alcohol content, very safe methods requiring no boiling at all. If you brew beer you might well have all the equipment already needed, many would say it produces a far superior product to regular distilling too.

Knowing what I do, I would consider barbecuing as a more dangerous hobby/practice than distilling, both during operation and people ingesting the end result.

thetourist

Sorry to resurrect such an old thread but the information here is pretty off and freeze concentration is not something that people should be put off doing IMO.

1. The process the OP refers to is not considered ( in any country that I know of ) to be distillation but rather concentration and therefore not illegal
2. Regarding being dangerous - it depends upon what you're concentrating but freeze concentration of beer or something that you're going to drink anyway is not going to do any harm because there's very little methanol in beer - I suppose you could get into doing a distillers mash or something and maybe there may be concerns there but I can't comment on that. It's more typical to do this with beer anyway. Incidentally the most common alchol to freeze concentrate is cider which turns into apple jack - and is amazing if it's done right. Can be served frozen
3. I wouldn't be inclined to bother trying to do this with a bottle of previously distilled spirits. Not sure what the point would be in that at all. Like the poster mentioned all it would really do is remove some of the taste
4. Regarding the "point" of doing it with other alcohols. Yes I suppose you could just brew your beer stronger, but sometimes that's either not possible, or didn't happen ... or you already brewed up a really big beer and wanted to further strengthen it. I think you could possibly approach 30 or 35 ABV in this way but I've never tried it. Another really good use for this is if you've got a nice bottle of beer that you opened at the end of the night and then decided you had enough or fell asleep in front of the TV or something, you might not want to drink this flat but you can turn it into a great ice beer
5. I wouldn't put a bottle in the freezer. The method I use typically involves pouring the beer or cider ( I suppose you could use wine ) into a ziplock back and then straining it out into a jug via a kitchen strainer over the course of about an hour ( watching it carefully to get the right cutoff between alcohol and water). I'd say you'd need to pay attention to sanitation too. There's a plethora of stuff on youtube about this.
6. You don't have to do it multiple times but you can - I think repeating the process twice or three times is better than once ( unless you were very careful or lucky the first time ) but any more than about 3 times gets a bit pointless.