Is it not crazy knowing that your favorite wine might have been bottled up for the past 30 years? The fact that a small glass of wine goes through a tedious process before it is packed and delivered to you.
This, too, is an art because if you mess one thing up in the entire process, there is a high chance of you ruining the taste of that alcohol along with its notes. If you are interested to know about the art of crafting alcohol, keep reading!
Alcohol is also known as ethanol which is made by refining, mashing, and fermentation different types of grains. Elaborated down below are all the steps involved in making alcohol. Failure to perform any of these would fail the entire process.
1. Milling of Grain for Starch
In this process, you first determine the type of drink that you are trying to make. If it is to have rich starch content, you can opt for corn or barley. These corns are well seated inside the ground, so you must take them out.
2. Making a Slurry
The molecules of carbohydrates are quite large and need to be broken down. For that, you might want to add water to your milled corn and prepare a slurry. This slurry will then be heated.
When heat energy is provided to the molecules, they will expand and separate from one another. This is also known as liquefaction. If you are running short on time, you can always add an enzyme such as alpha-amylase.
3. Making Glucose
When starch or carbohydrates are broken down into smaller molecules, glucose is formed. This is done with the help of an enzyme called glucoamylase. In scientific terms, this breaking down process is also called saccharification.
4. Adding Micro-organisms
This is probably the most important step of the entire process and is also known as fermentation. In this step, you might want to add yeast which is a single-celled microorganism that would feed on the glucose formed and would break it into smaller pieces. Through this, you will be able to produce ethanol.
5. Concentrating the Solution
If you think that by producing ethanol, the process is finished, you are highly mistaken. By now, you only have around 15% ethanol in your slurry solution. You need to add 85% more ethanol to it. For this, distillation is to take place.
Ethanol will evaporate faster than water, so, with a varying heat supply, ethanol is going to be separated from the solution. Even now, your mixture will have at least 5% water.
You will drain this water or dehydrate the mixture, which would leave behind 100% pure ethanol. Purchasing Loch Lomond Whisky would give you a game-changing experience in terms of their alcohol. They certainly excel at the art of crafting alcohol.
6. Byproducts
Every experiment that you conduct will have its byproducts. There are two byproducts in this case. The first one is carbon dioxide which is produced by the yeast. It can be used to make other fizzy drinks or sparkling wine, perhaps.
The second byproduct that is produced is distilled grains which are used in livestock products. These grains are rich in protein content.
This must tell you how complicated the process of making alcohol is. Once you have 100% alcohol, you can decide how long you want to ferment it in oak barrels depending on how strong of a taste you prefer your drink to have.