Submitted by Froggiebuns t3_11xruud in askscience
I was thinking about this when I was eating an ice pop, often times you suck out all the flavoring and are left with plain ice. Would it be possible to freeze a liquid, extract the 'juice' then refreeze that until you get an incredibly concentrated solution?
Not sure why but this question has irked me for years
They’d sometimes get applejack up to 40% ABV, not just 44 proof.
The problem, which comes up with ice wine as well, is that you’re not just concentrating ethanol, which is a desirable toxin. You’re also concentrating undesirable toxins like methanol and aldehydes.
The same thing happens with stills that use evaporative distillation, but there they distiller can divert the head and tail (ie, the stuff that boils off first and the stuff that boils off last) and keep it away from final product. You can’t do that with applejack, which means it’s likely to be a wicked buzz if you choose to drink something at 40 abv
Did you just call concentrated methanol a "wicked buzz" and not "poison that can make you blind"? Or am I missing something?
Depends how much you drink. The methanol is already in your cider or wine; applejack or ice wine just concentrates it, along with everything else that’s not water. That makes it easier to take in too much, whereas the sheer volume will slow you down from doing it with non-distilled alcoholic liquids.
Also, as to methanol specifically, the ethanol will help to inhibit the breakdown of methanol in the body into formate, which (I understand) is what’s actually toxic. That’s the reason that a bottle of scotch can actually be used to treat methanol poisoning.
The other stuff, though, isn’t neutralized in the same way.
I think, anyway. It’s been decades since I took a chemistry class, so I might be misstating some of the finer points.
You’re correct. The gist is methanol in itself isn’t great for you, but it’s not terrible. The problem is the same enzyme in your body that detoxifies ethanol will actually change methanol into something incredibly toxic. The solution is to tie up as many of the ethanol-detoxifying enzymes as possible so that they never have a chance to interact with the methanol molecules, and you end up peeing out the methanol.
>The solution is to tie up as many of the ethanol-detoxifying enzymes as possible so that they never have a chance to interact with the methanol molecules, and you end up peeing out the methanol.
I thought it worked by slowing down the conversion of methanol to the more toxic compound so the body could keep up with the removal - keeping the concentration low by flattening the curve.
Competitive inhibition.
Both methanol and ethanol compete for access the limited amount of enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase.
Methanol is converted to a toxic compound formic acid or formate. That's nasty stuff and your body can't really clear it. It needs to effectively kill the affected tissue and remove that, which takes days to weeks.
Ethanol is slightly better at binding to the enzyme compared to methanol. So if you have 95% ethanol and 5% methanol, practically close to zero methanol is being converted by the enzyme.
Silly analgoy: myself and a really attractive woman are both trying to buy a drink at a bar from the same bartender. A long enough queue of attractive women and I'm never getting a drink. So I give up and go home.
Methanol and ethanol are both removed by urine (and breathing + sweating). So long as the methanol is still circulating and not reacting with the enzyme, you simply urinate it out.
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I wonder what the equivalent of distilled is for fractional crystallization. Crystalled?
Why not just “crystallized?”
Haha, true. But since you are taking the byproduct of the crystallization process I thought it might be called something different.
I had the same thought. It depends on what you’re trying to capture/exclude.
The product of distilling is a distillate, so maybe crystallate? We need an etymologist here, stat!
Crystillation sounds good to me. So crystilled?
Historically it appears to have been responsible for some pretty notorious indiscipline in any army that passed through the Valley of Virginia in the American Civil War. Like ill behavior beyond the usual drunken ill behavior.
I think weather permitting applejack to be made on the Blue Ridge and the forcible conscription of volunteers whose enlistments were running out led to a small revolt in early 1862, where an infuriated Stonewall Jackson sent an artillery piece to start firing solid shot into the mountainside where the revolting rebels were holding out.
One wonders if it had a hand in the dissolution of Hunter's army after the battle of Lynchburg, 1864, the surprise achieved at Cedar Creek later that year, or the intensity of the destruction of the Shenandoah Valley thereafter.
The source for the mini-revolt would be likely found in D. S. Freeman's Lee's Lieutenants, Vol. I. but I don't have it at hand.
But if you pitch a champagne yeast, rather than natural fermentation, isn't it going to be producing just ethanol?
Champagne yeast, as with all yeast, produces mostly ethanol, but a little methanol as well. The amount of methanol isn't enough to affect you, unless it gets concentrated. The worst form of concentration is that it boils at a slightly lower temperature than ethanol (64.7°C vs. 78.3°C), and so comes off at a higher concentration in the beginning of the distillation process.
As to whether the icing concentration would do the same thing, I don't know, but I have some doubts.
It does. See https://serc.carleton.edu/teachearth/activities/180245.html
(The reference to methanol concentration is at the very end, right before the listing of references and resources.)
Still (no pun intended), you aren't ever getting more methanol for your ethanol when concentrating. You're just taking out water. So a shot of apple jack isn't really any more dangerous than a glass of apple jack. Same for two, three, or four. The real problem would be that it's easier to drink a lot quickly, which is its own independent hazard, and one that comes with any high alcohol beverage. So if you're really concerned about it (and yet, making apple jack -- a head scratcher of a juxtaposition) go ahead and drink a glass of water with each shot of jack. In fact, you could melt the ice from the process and drink that. Heck mix it back in. Problem solved.
I don’t think the methanol is the primary concern; it’s just one of them. It won’t make you go blind, because of the ethanol consumption, but it won’t leave you feeling good either.
The net result of 40% abv applejack is something like the worst rotgut whiskey. It won’t make you go blind, and it probably won’t kill you—but it might well make you wish you were dead.
Drinking a glass of water with each shot would certainly help, just as it does when drinking large amounts of any spirit.
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Icewine, though, is traditionally made by pressing frozen grapes to produce a highly concentrated juice, then fermenting that. It's not produced by freezing an already fermented alcoholic liquid.
Depends on the ice wine, but you’re right as to the German/Austrian-style eisweins.
I guess I've just never heard of anything being called "icewine" (or wine of any kind) that was frozen and concentrated after fermentation. There are a variety of alternative ways to achieve the initial concentration by freezing the fruit or the must, but that always happens pre-fermentation, not post-. That's one reason why icewines typically have lowish alcohol - the sugar content of the must is so high that the yeast can't fully ferment it.
This makes me happy to hear it's a legitimate process! I'm not crazy yay!
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It’s how the Native North Americans made maple sugar/syrup before the Europeans brought cast iron pots: they’d leave the sap overnight, in the morning, the water component had frozen and the ice could be removed leaving the higher-sugar content sap in place. Repeat for a few days and you have syrup. They also placed hot rocks in the liquid during the day which helped steam out some of the water.
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The most interesting effect is isotopic fractionation. Heavy water, has a melting point of 3.7 Celsius.
If you repeat the process of removing the melt from ice many times, you'll make heavy water ice.
you need to put a \ before the first close bracket in your link.
[Applejack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applejack_(drink\))
[Applejack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applejack_(drink))
Got it. Thanks!
(Edit: But then it screws up mobile.)
I thought somone would mention isotopic fractionation. Heavy ice, made from heavy water, melts at 3.7 Celsius, so this processes repeated many times would concentrate heavy water.
Yes, it's sorta how icewine is made. Using late season grapes, high in sugar, the grapes are pressed while frozen. "After grapes are picked for ice wine production, they are lightly pressed into the grape must under much higher pressure than grapes in the regular season. Since grapes are frozen when they come to the press, the ice (water) representing most of the mass is left behind in the press. Thus only a small amount of highly concentrated and sweet juice is extracted. Actually, only about 10-20% of the original crops end up as ice wine." Source Article.
Only had ice wine a couple times, what a waste. Tastes more like welches fruit juice than wine.
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One of the first really hard alcohols was “applejack” which is hard cider where you let it freeze outside in the cold then remove the ice over and over until it’s much much higher percent alcohol than you would be able to brew before real distilling was invented
There's a beer called an eisbock from Bavaria that is fortified using this principal. They cool the beer to just below zero causing the water to form ice and then scoop it off the top as it floats on the surface. It's considered a form of distillation.
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ECatPlay t1_jd5waff wrote
Sure! You've basically described fractional crystallization (also called fractional freezing or jacking) as originally used to make Applejack potent.
Just as you can purify a solid by crystallizing it out of solution leaving any contaminants dissolved in the solvent, you can purify a low melting solid by partially freezing it out of a melt, and leaving the contaminants concentrated in the residual liquid. As they are excluded from the solid phase the contaminants get more and more concentrated in the remaining liquid phase, depressing its melting point, so it doesn't all freeze and it can be separated from the crystallizing solid. By repeating the process you can recrystallize the solid and get it purer and purer, like in zone refining silicon to get the high purity required for semiconductor applications.
Or you can turn this around and work with the unfrozen phase, as you are suggesting, getting the dissolved component (the "juice" in your example) more and more concentrated. The classic example of this is actually very close to your idea. It is the original process to concentrate the alcohol in making Applejack: partially freezing fermented cider, removing some water as ice, and repeating the process. The separation isn't 100% so you will never get to pure alcohol: there will always be a little alcohol left with the ice and some water remaining in the liquid phase. (The theoretical limit is 92% pure alcohol). But by going back and forth, thawing and refreezing the "ice" phase to get a little more alcohol out, and adding that to the liquid phase and refreezing that to remove a little more water, they get to 44 proof in Applejack.