What Alcoholic Beverages Do Distillers Produce In Plants?

Distillers

Alcoholic beverages are used as recreational drugs and contain ethanol which is a type of alcohol. The different types of alcoholic beverages are whisky, brandy, rum, vodka and more. The beverages are produced by a process called distillation.

The principle used in the distillation process is that the compounds have different boiling points. The compounds can be separated by boiling, vapourisation and condensation. Distillers produce alcoholic beverages by distilling or re-distillation.

The distillation process takes place in a still in which the liquid mixture (water, ethanol and congeners) is boiled. The stills come in different designs like a pot still, column still, gooseneck still and continuous-run still.

Distillation process
The liquid mixture containing water, ethanol and congeners is added to the pot and boiled. The water and ethanol have different boiling points. Some congeners have boiling points lower than that of ethanol while some have a higher boiling point than ethanol.

When the mixture is boiled the lower-boiling-congeners will begin to boil off first. In the middle run, ethanol will boil off. Towards the end, the higher-boiling-congeners will begin to boil off. This is the process that takes place in the still.

The process is divided into three parts called the heads, hearts and tails. The head contains the unwanted lower-boiling-congeners, the hearts contain the ethanol and the tails contain the unwanted higher-boiling congeners. The ethanol is boiled, vapourised and condensed and collected in a receiver.

The different stages bleed into the adjacent ones and therefore the heads and the tails have some amount of ethanol. The heads and tails do contain a lot of ethanol. When they are mixed the mixture is called ‘Feints’. This mixture is saved and re-distilled.

One of the most important parts of distillation is making the cuts from heads to hearts and hearts to tails. The output changes from one phase to another and has to be collected separately. The heads are collected in one receiver, the hearts are the desired output which is collected in the second receiver and the tails are collected in the third receiver.

How can the different phases be separated? This is done by experts by tasting and smelling. The percentage of alcohol in the output can be used to decide when to make the cut.

In the beginning, when the heads boil off a spoon of the output can be smelled and tasted. It will have a sickening smell of solvents. When the mixture boils further the solvent smell will get reduced and the output will start to taste like an alcoholic beverage. The taste will become more concentrated. Toward the end, the alcoholic flavour will reduce and the output will start to taste bitter. This is the beginning of the tails phase.