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Heads & Tails, Malts and grains, Beer and wine?


Fourlix

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Newbie here, trying to understand this topic. Beer & wine are fermented, and the entire liquid is ultimately consumed, excepting maybe some barrel loss from wine. Are malted barley and grapes not producing in fermentation the "low boilers" and nasties that distillers are losing sleep over? Are sugar, molasses and whole grains responsible for these undesirables? Is liquor distilled from malted barley, like beer, without the methanol, acetone and headaches? Is the high temperature of distillation creating these unwanted compounds? And finally, do big commercial distilleries really just throw away these cuts? I can't imagine corporations throwing anything away. I have had booze in the Caribbean, "Rum Agricole" to be precise, that smells like paint solvent, with an instant hangover headache and liver ache. In Mexico I had some Kahlua that one drink made me sick for two days. So I know it's out there, I just don't understand.

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1. Not certain how to answer the first question...

2. The base material itself is not responsible, except for fruit with high levels of pectin, where it decomposes gradually and forms methanol, which causes nerve damage and blindness. Most of the time the microbes producing the alcohol also produce the things distillers do not want.

3. No, all distilled substances will contain some of these which is why they must be separated.

4.The temperature isn't responsible.

5. Big companies won't throw it away. They redistill it to extract more ethanol. When no more can be extracted, they either sell these byproducts to third parties that will use them to produce pure substances by further distillation, or simply use them as a source of cleaning / fuel material. It depends on how their time and space is allocated since it will not always be efficient to store and sell them.

6. Many companies keep large portions of these unpleasant compounds in because they are cheap.

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So why is there no need, or practice, of removing these nasties from beer or wine? I don't know how that could be done anyway. Distillation offers the opportunity to separate these volatiles, is it just because you do it because you can do it?

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It's also a concentration issue. When you distill you are making concentrations of these substances. In beer it may only be a small fraction of the percentage of the 12oz you drink. When you distill it you've removed most of the water and created a concentrated version of the items that you've collected. Then the compounds you don't want are more of the overall volume or a higher % of the concentration.

This is not accurate but a good example of whiskey distillate perhaps

beer: 92% water, 3% sugars/malt/hops left over, 5% ethanol with a fraction of a percent "nasties"

spirit right off the still: 30% water, 65% ethanol, 3% oils and fatty acids, 2% "nasties"

So even if you water to bottling proof you still end up with more "nasties" by volume.

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When fermenting a wash (a beer if based on grain or a wine if based on fruit) other alcohols other than ethanol are produced. In the beer and wines we drink everyday these other alcohols are of such a small quantity that they don't affect the smell, the taste or one's health. Distillation is the act of concentrating these alcohols and by doings so the bad components become a significant factor to the smell, the taste and ones' health. These lower boiling point alcohols are the things that make people go blind or even die.

Sulfur is also produced, naturally, during fermentation. If the sulfur is not removed the end spirit will smell and taste like sulfur - like rotten eggs. Again, in beer and wine we drink the sulfur levels are so low one does not notice them. How is the sulfur kept out of the end spirit? Copper. Sulfur bonds with copper forming a heavier compound and clings to the walls of the still.

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Actually, ethanol based alcohol will not make you go blind or die ( unless you drink to a blood alcohol level that is toxic). The blindness and death stories associated with "moonshine" and/or alcohol with no head cuts (other than some stone fruit issues) are in fact just old wives tales. Back in the days of prohibition when alcohol was hard to come by, a lot of "rectifiers" sprung up around the county who were running denatured alcohol through homemade stills. A lot of low proof boilers couldn't extract the poisons that were intentionally put in it, so a lot of people ended up.drinking poison.

So yes people did go blind or die, but never from regular ethanol, even without head and tail cuts. That just gives you a headache.

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Thank you guys. I think I now understand why cuts are as much art as they are science. And why cheap booze is cheap booze. Ouch!

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