Freeze Distillation

Freeze Distillation

Notice: Freeze Distillation is illegal in the United States due to the possibility of methanol poisoning resulting from consumption of the distilled drink. In freeze distillation, unlike normal distillation, methanol cannot be filtered out of the resulting drink and will remain in a higher concentration just as ethanol. Consumption of beverages with high concentrations of methanol can cause blindness, kidney failure, and death.

            If you are a United States citizen and decide to attempt freeze distillation, you will need to finish this process while losing no less than 5% of the original volume as to not raise the concentration of impurities. Any removed ice can be replaced with distilled water.

            If you were not frightened off by the warning, freeze distillation is a process used to concentrate flavors and raise alcohol content, most notably used in applejack, ice beer, and eiswein. As water in your beverage will freeze at a higher temperature than the ethanol, the remaining water can be partially removed by leaving your brew either out in a snow storm as it was traditionally done, or by leaving it in a freezer for a few hours and filtering out the ice.

            To raise the alcohol content even further, this process can be repeated until your brew no longer freezes, but it is inadvisable as freeze distillation will not remove impurities from your brew in the same way as traditional distillation.

            There are many ways to handle to go about this, but this one is my favorite so far.

Process:

            -Transfer your brew into one or many freezer-safe sanitized bottles preferably with a thin neck. Leave an inch below the neck line empty to allow for expansion and avoid creating a bottle bomb.

            -Place the bottles in the freezer for four hours allowing most of the excess water to freeze. The bottles should be placed neck up and not sideways to make sure the neck does not freeze shut. Since you will probably be starting with a low alcohol concentration, leaving your brew too long will leave the whole bottle frozen through and you will be unable to transfer out the water from the ethanol.

            -After the four hours, remove the bottle(s) from the freezer and empty the remaining liquid into a separate sanitized container. If your brew is frozen to the point where the ice will not pass through the bottle neck, you can simply pour your brew to the next container straight. However, if the mouth of the bottle is too wide of your brew froze in smaller chunks, you can make use of a wire filter or a bottle spout to keep the ice from transferring.

            -At this point, you can choose to either bottle your brew and put it on a shelf to mellow for a month, or transfer your remaining brew back into your freezer safe-bottle(s) to let it go for another round.

            Drink responsibly and enjoy.

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