Muzyka’s Musings

A few weeks ago I toured the Maker’s Mark distillery.  It was interesting to learn how they make bourbon.  The tour guide referred to the liquid formed in the first step of the production as beer.  I had never thought about how closely related beer is to distilled spirits.  During the making of bourbon, the mixture of grains is fermented, along with added yeast and remnants of the previous batch that are left in the container,  kind of like with sourdough bread.  After fermentation, they distill the liquid to increase the alcohol content.  At Labrot & Graham they distil it three separate times.  (Their stills are made of copper, so they don’t exactly resemble the stills we build from glassware with ground glass joints in organic lab.)  Finally the colorless alcohol is transferred to oak barrels that have been charred on the inside, where it’s aged for years.  The aging in those charred barrels is what turns the liquid from something like vodka into the amber colored bourbon.

Along a similar line, I recently read a blurb in C & E News about how they make gin.  I had learned in previous conversations with chemists that you can make gin by distilling ethanol with juniper berries.  I guess they put the juniper berries in the still pot – I haven’t ever seen it done.  Or maybe they let the alcohol steep over the berries for awhile to extract the essential oils.  The article I read said that they added juniper berries plus several things to give the gin its flavor.  What I found most interesting is that the gin quality is improved by carrying out the distillation under vacuum.  As any junior chemistry major can tell you, vacuum distillations occur at a lower temperature than those carried out at atmospheric pressure.  This lower temperature keeps the essential oils from decomposing into monoterpenes like alpha pinene, which apparently is not consistent with high quality gin.