While mild to medium alcohol drinks can be achieved after the process of yeast fermentation, stronger alcoholic beverages can be derived after distilling alcohol. Distillation of alcohol basically involves converting the mixture of water and alcohol into neat alcohol or strong alcohol through evaporation and condensation.
Mild and medium alcohols such as various types of beer and wine use several processes including the sugar fermentation process that converts all fermentable sugars such as glucose, fructose, dextrose, etc into ethanol or drinking alcohol. The fermentation of ethanol is started by production yeast such as the saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast or its different variants that turn the mixture of water and various ingredients such as grapes, grains or other vegetables or fruits into alcohol.
However, most yeast variants need to be monitored very closely as they can only operate under a slender temperature range of between 15 to 27 degrees Celsius. They can also produce alcohols with limited strengths before they die in that very alcohol. However, new technology in making yeast that is more rugged than ordinary yeasts has resulted in the creation of a super yeast variant fortified with micro nutrients. This yeast is called turbo yeast and it not only has high alcohol tolerance but can also withstand higher yeast temperature. This yeast for distilleries as well as home distillation plants can produce higher yields of alcohol even from weak mashes.
Once an alcohol or spirit producer has used this yeast to produce a high quality alcohol batch then the alcohol distillation process can be initiated to further strengthen the proof levels of alcohol. In distilling alcohol several types of distillation methods including pot distillation, or batch distillation, or fractional distillation methods are used to derive alcohol with specific strength, color, acidity, and finally character.
While batch distillation involves boiling the desired mixture in a batch so as to separate the water from the alcohol through condensation, pot distillation simply refers to the nature of the equipment that contains a pot along with an outlet that passes through a condensing unit. This mode of distillation requires a lot of skill in order to get consistent results. In fractional distillation the vapors are passed through a fractionating column that compels the vapors to react with various condensing agents in the column to achieve the desired alcohol or spirit. This method is a cost-effective one that can help produce alcohol with very high strength levels.
However, the alcohol distilling process can be a success only when the best fermenting yeast is used to convert the mixture of water and other ingredients into alcohol in the first place. It is thus important to choose the best type of whisky yeast, vodka yeast, wine yeast, etc so as to get matching alcohol with the desired strength and character. New and rugged variants such as turboyeast can certainly make a brewer’s or distiller’s job a lot easier by producing top quality alcohol that can then be distilled to make it even stronger.
It is very important to use the distilling process in order to produce strong forms of ethanol or alcohol. However, this process can produce the desired alcohol only when the yeast used in fermentation is of the best possible quality. Stronger alcoholic beverages can be derived after distilling alcohol and distillers can certainly end up with excellent alcoholic beverages once they use the best ingredients for fermenting and distilling the mixture.
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