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#25 Bringing Ancient Stills To Life With Eric Stroud
1.2k Plays3 years ago
Eric runs a farm distillery in upstate New York. He is also fascinated with very old still designs. Could they be viable in the modern world of distilling?
Mohawk Spirits: https://mohawkspirits.com
Nano Distilling: http://nanodistilling.com/
A short history of the art of distillation (the book mentioned): https://amzn.to/3AiCaoQ
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Transcript
Channel Transition Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
Hell's a going chases. I hope you're having a kick-ass week. No ad reads anything like that We're getting stuck straight into the podcast this week But I do have something that is very very important for those of you that watch And or listen to the podcast on the YouTube platform
00:00:15
Speaker
This will be probably the second to last podcast that is going out on the Still It channel. After that it's going to move to a new YouTube channel. So if you are looking for the podcasts on Still It, you're not going to find them anymore. Make sure you click this little button up in the top left corner, top right corner, whichever one it is, this one here. Make sure you go on over to the second channel and subscribe there so you don't start missing these podcasts.
00:00:38
Speaker
when they do move. For those of you that are listening on Pod Catchers, nothing's going to change. If you want to go and find that channel by all means, please do. I'll put a link in the show notes so you can go and find it.
Meet Eric: Craft Distiller & Ancient Still Enthusiast
00:00:49
Speaker
Anyway, today's guest is Eric from Upstate New York. He runs a small craft distillery and also has an interest on the side to do with ancient stills. Weird. Fascinating. I know. But basically, he secured some funding to bring these things back to life or to life. And if you listen to podcasts, you'll know what I mean by that later on.
00:01:12
Speaker
This stuff is absolutely fascinating and I have to give you two links straight away. The first is mohawkspirits.com. That's the website for the distillery itself. But the second one, which is probably going to be more important for you as accompanying material for this podcast,
00:01:27
Speaker
is nanodistilling.com and the reason I bring this up right at the beginning is when we start talking about some of these designs it can be it was pretty tricky for us to try and describe them with audio only so if you're listening to this podcast you know pull that website up on your phone all of the things we're talking about all of his experiments all of his findings are on nanodistilling.com I don't know what else to say guys I don't know how else to introduce the subject matter
00:01:51
Speaker
It's absolutely fascinating and the results and the entertainment that comes out of these ancient stills is absolutely fascinating. So let's get stuck right on with Eric.
Craft Distilling in New York: Challenges and Innovations
00:02:06
Speaker
Eric.
00:02:07
Speaker
from Mohawk Distillery in New York or upstate New York, I should say. Thanks so much for doing this, man. I appreciate it. This is this is the highlight of my job is being able to reach out to people like you on the other side of the world and actually get a response, which is pretty awesome. So thanks for hanging out, man. I appreciate it. Absolutely, Jesse. It's great to connect with you and talk to you on the other side of the planet about some common interests that we have. And thank you for having me on the podcast.
00:02:36
Speaker
My pleasure, man. So which came first for you? There's a few different things we want to talk about. There's a bit of a mystery project that you've got coming up that you want to talk about. And then there's the distillery itself. And also the way I found out about you was your work with these ancient steel designs. So how did you get into this? Where did you come at it first?
00:03:02
Speaker
Oh, sure. Well, I'm a chemist. I'm an organic chemist. And before I got into distilling, I used distillation apparatuses in the laboratory all the time. So in my particular line of work and my research, I was distilling stuff under a hood, in vacuum, all sorts of exotic glassware, trying to get samples and extracts for what we had to do.
00:03:27
Speaker
And then I just kept thinking about craft spirits along that time. You know, it's always great. You're done with research. You come out of lab, have a drink, you know, and you're at a bar and you're looking at stuff. I don't know. Something just clicked. And I decided, you know, New York at the time was making it very easy to get your license. And they were very favorable, very welcoming to wineries, cideries, and distilleries.
00:03:53
Speaker
And this is a good time to do it. So 2015 I went in, I hired an attorney, Hops and Vines. She helped me with the whole process and it was painless really. I was able to get my permit from the state, the TTV license, and I became the first farm distillery in the county that I'm in, in New York, Montgomery County.
00:04:13
Speaker
And it really, you know, if I think of it, if it was another state, it might've been much more difficult, but New York really wants this type of business. So it was a good time to do it. So I started small.
00:04:27
Speaker
And I built my distillery like a laboratory. So it's everything's glassware right out of chem labs, pharmaceutical pilot plants, I built everything around that. So it's it's a bit breaking bad, maybe stuff like that. But I like it because, you know, as a chemist, you want to see what the liquid and the vapors are doing, how they're interacting. And I have lots of exotic different glassware and stills. And so that gives you different things like
00:04:56
Speaker
it'll make your cuts differently it affects the vapor and liquid equilibrium differently so it's just really cool like that. In new york i have a status called a farm distillery and it was relatively new in new york it came about within you know certainly within the last decade probably even less than that.
00:05:16
Speaker
And it's called a class D, where a regular distillery is a class A, you know, and they can buy neutral spirits, they can buy grain, they can source from outside the state, much higher production. The farm distillery is limited to just a certain amount of alcohol a year. We're capped at how much we can make. And the other other thing is it has to be 75% New York agriculture.
00:05:40
Speaker
So we cannot buy it. We can't source it from like M.G.D. or a Midwest supplier and, you know, put it in our bottles and pretend, you know, we made our own whiskey in a year. None of that. So it's it's tough. So New York State is cold when we have some pretty deep winters, but we're renowned for apples. But everyone is doing apples.
00:06:04
Speaker
And so I don't know if I can compete with this. So I did have some property there and we were growing fruit trees, lots of berries and aronia, paw paws, med lars, strange fruit that do really well in deep winters. And so I looked at this and like, let's try to make product around this because we're growing it right here and they're cold hardy fruits and they're a little bit rare. Like no one's really working with it, like a strawberry liquor. Like strawberries grow really well in our region.
00:06:34
Speaker
and the Amish farm it quite a bit. So it's really easy to get strawberries grown basically right in my village. And my pawpaw trees grow on my farm, my berries grow on my farm. Other farmers are doing some similar stuff. So it's good. And it's just something different than apples. Like that's like the most common thing. Corn and apples are everywhere. So that's really cool. So that's that's basically what I'm sourcing my ingredients from. And here's the hard part.
00:07:02
Speaker
I were at the mercy of the weather. So last year we had killing frosts. We had frost that came in in the middle of May and fruit was terrible last year. I mean, I got strawberries and nothing else.
00:07:16
Speaker
and this year it's doing great. We're past the killing frost now and everything has got fruit on it. All I'm dealing with right now are caterpillars and they're gonna be dead next week. I got them all sprayed and it should be a good year for fruit. We actually might have a lot of fruit and that'll help me in the fall make up the curds and you know all sorts of meshes to play with throughout the winter which is great. So
00:07:42
Speaker
That's kind of what it's like as a farm distiller you can be big you can be small i kept it very small i'm only farming about five acres tops not all of it is even planted out and my whole operations two people so we're keeping it very tight very close to the land so.
00:08:02
Speaker
So when you said that the part of, sorry, it was a designation D, was it? Yes. And you said that there has a cap on what you can produce. Are you able to like, is that almost like a quota system? Like you can up that again later on because you said you could be big or small or is it just if you're D, that's it, that's all you can produce and there's no way around that.
00:08:27
Speaker
Technically, for a D, you're maxed out. And don't quote me about it. The number is, I think, 10,000 proof gallons a year, which is an insane amount for a small distillery.
00:08:37
Speaker
So it's very generous. But there's all sorts of ways to be a class A and hold a class D. A class A could buy a farm and put a building there and maybe license it as a D. You can get into interesting combinations. We are nowhere near that capacity. We'll never be near it. I'd have to probably quadruple the size of the farm and hire pickers and everything to even come even close to it.
00:09:04
Speaker
So the state wants it to be boutique, craft, don't exceed it. They want it to come from the land. And for that, we get special privileges that the other distilleries don't. So we're allowed in our tasting rooms to have other farm distillery products there. And we can host them. We can put them in our tasting room. So each farmer kind of helps out the other farmer.
00:09:29
Speaker
the regulations around us for reporting and stuff are a bit more lax. It's the cheapest license. So they go easy on when we have to renew the permits. It's very affordable. But intentionally, it's to keep us small and not turn it into a huge operation, an industrial operation. So. So yeah, they want to keep that that that small farm to play
00:09:53
Speaker
boutique, craft, whatever label you want to put on it. So they're actively promoting spirits in this area too, which is really interesting to me. I hate to use the word progressive because there's all sorts of other tags.
00:10:10
Speaker
associated with that. But in terms of forward thinking, I guess is more what I'm saying. That's quite impressive to me. And I do not get the feeling that that is normal in America, right? That's quite different. I spent some time in New Jersey, and they don't have a concept of a farm distillery here. It's just you're a distillery or you're not. New York created those gradations. And it's interesting because if you're a winery,
00:10:37
Speaker
you could hold a farm distillery and that makes sense because when you're done with your wine pressings, then you could do grappa, right? If you're a guy doing, you know, maybe like some other, you know, a fruit, maybe your cidery, right? And maybe you'll take your pressings and then make an apple jack or brandy out of it, or brewery, right? So the,
00:11:01
Speaker
What are they called the Brewers wines or something or your wastes? You can now incorporate a small farm distillery with your brewery and take your waste stream and turn that into Navy neutral spirits or something like that. So Because there's so many wineries and cideries and stuff in New York State I think that the farm distilleries is a neat match to that because you can basically put this little distillery onto your farm and
00:11:25
Speaker
you know, maybe take some of your waste stream or your excess and turn it into other products. So maybe that was one of the visions New York had for something like this, you know, without having to go through, you know, the tremendous amounts of planning and building to do a real Class A distillery. You just need something small. You're going to be producing like RAPA, you know, from your grapes. Is it a really big operation? Maybe not. And so, you know, they made it convenient to do something like that, you know.
00:11:53
Speaker
That's pretty special, man. Has it taken off? Is there a lot of people using that? Is there a scene? If you're into distilled spirits, is this an area to go to to be able to go and visit a lot of small micro distilleries and see a wide range of products? Is that kind of what it's turned into?
00:12:16
Speaker
Absolutely. New York has, you know, a bunch of trails in the state. And it's like the Finger Lakes region is a big wine producing region for New York. And so if you travel the Finger Lakes trail to do your wine tastings, it's also dotted with distilleries that you can visit. And then out by Lake Erie is another big, like Concord grape growing area. There's farm distilleries out there. I'm in the Mohawk Valley.
00:12:41
Speaker
which is like central New York, it's on the Mohawk River. We're mostly farmland, like corn, grains, but there's about four farm distilleries along the Mohawk River. We're pretty far apart. I like to think that we're a trail. If you're following the river, you could eventually hit all of us in the day. But my nearest guy is probably about 30 miles away or so. And we don't really interact too much just because of the distance.
00:13:09
Speaker
You know, we'll see, but the New York State has a great guild, a New York State Distillers Guild, and it brings everyone together. It brings the big guys together, the farm distillers. They advocate for, you know, plan a day trip around certain regions of New York, visit the distilleries, and taste the tarar and, you know, the different things from different regions of the state. So the guild is really helpful to try to steer people into remote areas like where I'm at, you know.
00:13:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty cool, man. I'll be honest, I did not know that about your area, which suddenly it's moved up the list of places I want to go significantly. New York is two states. It's downstate and it's upstate. Downstate is the five boroughs and Westchester County, and that's where everyone lives.
00:14:02
Speaker
And then when you get up about two hours outside of that, it looks kind of like the Midwest and maybe the Blue Mountains at times. You've got mountains and you've got lots of farmland and it's completely different from Manhattan. It's a very interesting state. And then about two hours in any direction from there gets you to a big city like Albany or Syracuse, Rochester. But in between that, it's really agricultural.
00:14:29
Speaker
Um, it is, it is really close to the land in many spots and a lot of Amish community as well. So you, you said that you're using, uh, what was it? Strawberries, uh, poor, poor or papaya, however you want to say it. Uh, and what was the one other thing you mentioned something else too, but if I'm a horrible person and I've forgotten.
00:14:47
Speaker
One thing that's growing really well for us is aronia. It is the black chokeberry and it looks like a blueberry. It's a little bit more bitter, very high antioxidants and it gives you a lot of berries and the most beautiful dark purple juice. And that one's an interesting product because I entered that one into competitions. Everyone loves strawberries and paw paws, no problem.
00:15:13
Speaker
When you put black chokeberry into a competition, the judges don't know. They see berry and I guess they think, you know, I want a berry, sweet, juicy. And this is a tart and bitter kind of berry. And they're like, you know, where's the sweet? Where's the berry?
00:15:29
Speaker
We've never won any awards, but out around our parts and even in the Midwest of the United States, Aronia is well known. I just don't think that it's popular on the coasts maybe or something. So I have a lot of Aronia berries and I really hope that that turns into a product. I think people have to develop a taste for it maybe, but it would be very healthy for you if you drank it.
00:15:55
Speaker
What are they used for? If you're not fermenting it, what do people do with aronia? Well, I mean, you can eat the berries. They're made into jellies, very popular in Eastern Europe. They'll make those into liqueurs and they'll ferment them and turn them into treats, but definitely jellies, jams. You can press the juice right at them, just drink the juice. I've seen it sold as like a health supplement.
00:16:23
Speaker
you know, just straight aronia juice, but anything like that. I mean, there's sugar in it. It does ferment. It's not great on the sugar content, but it makes an excellent liqueur if you steep it in neutral spirits. It comes out really nice.
00:16:38
Speaker
That brings up a good point, actually. There's, well, for starters, if you want to get rich, having a distillery is probably not the way to go. But if you do have to have a distillery, working with fruit is probably really not the way to go.
Balancing Chemistry Consulting and Craft Distilling
00:16:54
Speaker
Just because it's so, you just need so much material and it's so labor intensive in terms of the amount of product you get out of it, right? And you're certainly buried in that, like,
00:17:06
Speaker
Man, you're growing it yourself as well. So talk to me about that, dude. What's your yield from whatever metric you use in terms of weight or volume through to spirits and
00:17:21
Speaker
It's not much, as you would suspect. So you're looking at around maybe 500 pounds of strawberries. When I'm done pressing, maybe gives me about 80 gallons of juice that I can ferment, like two drums. That's about all I use out of about 500, 600 pounds of strawberries in a year. I save about 100 for infusions later on. That's a lot of strawberries from a farm. But because of the sugar, and even pressing it, you think of it as a juicy berry, but
00:17:50
Speaker
It's not that juicy. It takes a lot of fruit to do this. It takes a lot of aronia berries, you know, to basically have enough to do like a 25 gallon fermentation. Pawpaws are very precious. So over here in the Northeast, the pawpaws we have are not papayas. They're actually an indigenous fruit that tastes tropical, but they grow in the winter and it's different than the papaya.
00:18:17
Speaker
But the rest of the world calls them pawpaws. I know it's just a strange thing in the US. The pawpaw is a tree fruit and it's not like a tropical pawpaw. Those are my favorite fruit in the world to grow. They taste like nothing else. They're delicious tropical fruits that you wouldn't believe could grow in upstate New York.
00:18:37
Speaker
and I've tried harvesting them and fermenting them and the yield is so low for the effort it takes to get to that fruit in the fall. I stopped fermenting. When I pick my fruits it's purely infusion and that's what makes the liqueur. The pulp is so precious. The alcohol is terrible and it doesn't taste anything like the original fruit after fermentation so I don't waste it there, you know.
00:19:02
Speaker
Yeah, so fruit is a tough thing. This is not my primary source of income Jesse, as you kind of alluded to. It's a challenge and that's why I like it. It's not an area many distilleries operate in, especially on a primary basis.
00:19:20
Speaker
a secondary thought. It's a luxury. Everyone's working in grains. But we're keeping it to fruit because that's all that I grow. It's all that I know. And I like the challenge. So I like to think that I pay extra special attention to every bottle of fruit licorice that I produce or Odivise. Probably more attention than anyone else does just because I've picked every fruit, you know, and I understand how much time it took. And I want to get the most out of it, you know.
00:19:50
Speaker
And you said there's literally two of you, right? And you're not talking about two of you in the distillery. You're talking about two of you for the whole operation. Two of me in the distillery. So it's myself and my wife. Out on the farm, I do have help. So I have Amish neighbors and they lend their hand anytime I need it. So they'll weed whack. They'll pick fruit. They'll help me if I've got to plant trees or graft and stuff like that. So it's good to have help out on the farm, but in the distillery, it's just myself and my wife right now.
00:20:20
Speaker
So, you're using the pore-pore as a maceration in spirit. What are you using because you can't just go out and buy neutral grain spirit, right? What are you using as the base spirit for that?
00:20:35
Speaker
I'll either use leftover strawberries. So when you're done pressing a strawberry and I take the juice, which is really what I need for a good strawberry product, the pressings themselves, I can squeak some more alcohol out of that. It doesn't taste great, but I can get neutral out of it. But the primary thing is apples.
00:20:56
Speaker
So I can get apple juice anywhere around me. There's cider represses anywhere. And I make it easy. I buy that by the drum. It's New York State. It's right from within my county or a couple counties away. And I'll do the ferment on apples and then distill that down. So apples are always the backup. It's the easiest way for me to produce alcohol in my neutrals.
00:21:18
Speaker
And I have apple trees as well, but I don't have a press to do it. So it's just more economical for me to visit an apple farm or apple orchard where they're pressing it. I buy their juice. I bring it back. As long as it's New York state and the agriculture was grown here, I can do that.
00:21:35
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah, I find it hilarious that the, uh, the quote unquote easy way out is to buy apple juice for me to distill it, turn it into neutral. Cause I mean, there's the point of, it's so funny. People always, when I first started talking to them about this sort of thing, which is surely it's better, more like cheaper just to make it yourself. No.
00:21:59
Speaker
The economy of scale that you have to get to to make neutral spirit cheap is just absolutely ridiculous. That is very endearing. That's your easy way out. I hate to even use the word easy way out, but that's the easiest way for you to do it. That's awesome. Absolutely awesome.
00:22:22
Speaker
Well, when you think about, you know, like an apple, if you got to grow an apple, right, and you plant your tree, and you got to wait x years to get the fruit, and then during the growing season, you've got water fertilizer, pest management, then you got to pick it, and then you got to press it. And then what you're left with, you know, 100 pounds of apples is going to give you, you know, a little bit of juice.
00:22:45
Speaker
I can't do it. Like you said, my economy of a scale is way off. The easy way out is if I had a different distillery license is to go out to the Midwest and buy a truckload of neutral spirits. But I can't do that as a farm distillery. We cannot do that. We got to keep it close to the state and the land. That's the challenge.
Reviving Ancient Stills: Historical Ingenuity Meets Modern Experimentation
00:23:05
Speaker
But if you ever had to do it and grow an apple tree and pick your apples and press it, and you see how much juice you get, it's a real reality experience.
00:23:14
Speaker
Oh, I believe you. I so believe you. Yeah. There's definitely a labor of love. So what is the day job for you at the moment? What's your bread and butter? Well, I'm a chemist. So there's always work to do with pharma companies and medical device companies, analytical work. So I consult around. So that's no problem. Yep. The world of distilling is populated by people from just
00:23:43
Speaker
everywhere, right? Like all walks of life and all previous specialties and trades, skills, so on and so forth. But do you, I don't know if I've ever talked to anyone that's come direct from chemistry, maybe like
00:23:59
Speaker
I don't know, people that sort of specialize in fermentation or something like that. But do you think that that background has steered you down a different path or given you a different set of skills or made you look at the distillation process different than just sort of the average aggregate of the industry?
00:24:18
Speaker
It's a different perspective, I'm sure. From the distillation side, I think I've got my theory around distillation and separation pretty solid. I'll tell you where I'm weak.
00:24:31
Speaker
fermentation. It's not something I'm a pro at. I did terrible with it, right? So my first year I ran out and grabbed turbo yeast and used that. And it tasted awful. What did I know? And it took me a lot of trial and error reading online about what's a good yeast, the temperature control for that, the nutrients, the aeration. I had no experience in this. And probably half, if not more, of your quality is in how well you do your ferment.
00:25:00
Speaker
and i just didn't have that experience so i was weak in that regard completely i'm not really good at designing labels i'm terrible at making videos i'm so really weak you know in all that area i'm but i'm really strong you know when it comes to i want to see the equilibrium curve of a college i guess.
00:25:21
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, it's different. A brewer would probably be an expert in all the different strains of yeast and their optimal temperature and pH, and they know exactly what to use. When you're dealing with acidic fruits like a strawberry, I didn't know, right? And so it was trial and error. A regular dry active distiller's yeast is not good for something like that. It takes a little bit of finessing. It takes some buffering and changing the pH a little bit to get the yeast happy and get the alcohol yield.
00:25:49
Speaker
where you need it to be. So yeah, there's, I think, like you said, so many different perspectives, you come with your strengths, and then I think you figure out, or you train on the pieces that you're missing, and that eventually brings you to where you need to be, something like that.
00:26:06
Speaker
Yeah, I've heard that story over and over again. How do you put it? It's the same story, but a completely different story. Exactly like you say, right? People walk in and they've got something that brings them into the industry or into the business or into what they're creating.
00:26:23
Speaker
to give them enough confidence that they can kind of do it. You know, oh, I know fermentation. I can do this. Oh, I've just got to work out the distillation side of it or vice versa, you know? So yeah, it's interesting to hear it from different sides. I have to admit, I have to assume that this chemistry background is what got you interested in the ancient steel designs as that kind of spark of interest that that brought along to you.
00:26:53
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Let me see if I give me one second. Well, yeah, they're probably here. Yeah, hold on a second. Let me grab a book. So here's how it all began, Jesse. It was this book. It's the short history of the art of distillation. And it's an old book, maybe 1940s or so. And my wife bought this for me. And I read this cover to cover. And then I read it again.
00:27:20
Speaker
And then I read it again. And in this book are all sorts of old manuscripts and designs of stills over the centuries. And I've seen a lot of strange distillation apparatuses in my time. But when I saw the stuff in here, I was like, wow, this is really wild. The designs that these guys were thinking of in the 16th, 17th century was like,
00:27:47
Speaker
You know, it's like, what were you thinking? You know, these strange zigzags. I'm like, you don't see anything like this in modern chemistry, right? And so then the question to me becomes like, well, why did they disappear? You know, did someone build them and found out it didn't work or was superior? Did it evolve? And you look at the designs and you don't really see how you get from something strange in the 1700s to like a modern column still or modern alembic.
00:28:17
Speaker
you don't see it evolve this certain way. So that's what set me off on the path of the ancient stills. And so I started digging. I started going into a lot of research papers. I found a journal in the UK called the Ambix and was trying to comb through their stuff. And I'm just not finding, like connecting the dots, say from 1550 to like 1900.
00:28:43
Speaker
How did the design progress or did anyone build these things? I'm not sure, Jesse, they were built. I think they were hypothetical things that were sketched in manuscripts and they were just lost to the ages, I think. Oh, kind of like Da Vinci's notebooks and musings of a borderline mad, borderline genius person that's come up with some random idea for a still and you don't know if anyone actually used it.
00:29:12
Speaker
Right. This is the mystery. So the people that did these though, they were learned men. They were trained medical doctors, trained chemists. They were philosopher alchemists on the side. These were people that attended universities and held posts either in royal court or at universities. They knew their stuff. They knew their medicine. They knew how to distill essential oils and stuff like that.
00:29:40
Speaker
And then they'll sketch out like this crazy looking still, like a cone or something inspired by an animal. And you know, you were like, well, that's hilarious. But then you realize this guy was, you know, top of his class at the time. And so you have to think, OK, he was onto something here. The thing is that some of the designs are tough. They're complicated. And in that time, you didn't have modern glassblowing like we do now. They might have built it out of metal.
00:30:09
Speaker
or something, but it would be a lot of art, a lot of craft to build some of these crazy shapes and designs. If they were ever built, they're lost. I mean, I am combing through museums. The Poli Museum of Grappa in Veneto, Italy has reconstructed some of them for just display. They are not the ancient stills, but they read the same book and they built models of it, but they're not like leftovers from centuries ago.
00:30:39
Speaker
So I just think like, okay, they weren't built. They were great ideas. We got modern materials, digital temperature control, everything here in the year 2020, 2021. Let's build it and see what happens. And that was the proposal to the ADI. That's how the grant started. Let's resurrect like five of these and just see what happens. And that that's how the whole research project began. I love it. I hadn't thought about
00:31:09
Speaker
The fact that, how do you put it? They could almost be, it's almost like a daydream or a longing for, if only we had the technology to make this physically, this is what I would make.
00:31:24
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? I don't have the means to physically birth this into the real world, but I can think about it and I can theorize and I can pontificate what would happen if a metallurgy or glass blowing or whatever was that much further ahead.
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting concept. So the fact that you've found these things and bring them back to life, or brought them to life, I guess, is absolutely freaking...
00:31:56
Speaker
I don't know. That's fascinating to me. You said you had five, right? You were going to do five. Yeah, the grant was five and now I'm completely addicted to this and we're building more. I'm just going through the book and looking up the manuscripts from there and just trying to find it. Some of it's in French, some of it's in German.
00:32:19
Speaker
I'm just trying to go back to as much as I can from the notes because the book is really a summary. It's really like a Course through history, but once you got the guy's name and I got his reference then I can go online I can find it and actually read through and see what's going on They were you know
00:32:37
Speaker
Some of them were pretty simple. Some of them were elaborate in the five that we built. But I got to tell you, even the glass blower that I use, who's a chemical glass blower, he had trouble. I told him, build a three foot tall glass cone with standard joints on it. And it sounds simple, but it's not. Because then you have to add this little sidearm down the side that's insulated from it. It's very fragile. It's very difficult to spin that and blow it.
00:33:07
Speaker
Um the zigzag he had to build that zig by zag and fuse the tubes together and then support them And it took weeks of glass blowing just to do that and you look at it and it's like oh, it's just a zigzag It was tough to build it took a long time Um, so yeah, even with the modern stuff jesse, it was it was not straightforward If I had built it out of copper if I went to home depot It would have been a piece of cake
00:33:35
Speaker
You could just get elbows and just solder them together. But then you couldn't see what's happening inside. You couldn't see where the vapor front is, where the condensate is. That's why I couldn't do it in copper first. I wanted to do it in glass because I wanted to see what was going on inside. Now that we know it's going on inside, anyone could go out and get some scrap metal or some copper pipe and build one of these. And I encourage that. I hope craft distillers will check it out and build their own.
00:34:04
Speaker
But the first time I think it's so important, you gotta see it. You gotta see the inside, what's happening so you can communicate to others and craft distillers. This is what's going to happen when you build it out of metal.
00:34:17
Speaker
So that's why there's so much effort up front. That's so cool. I love the little manic laugh that you have. I guess I'm excited. Yeah, it's really cool. You had this book, you had this large sort of vast expanse of inspiration and you had funding
00:34:41
Speaker
or a grant to make five. How did you go through and pick which five? Was it just literally, was it, I think this one might actually work and do something different or special or was it just literally, let's just find the five most sort of different or the most exotic or the most zany, like how did you go around choosing them?
00:35:02
Speaker
Yeah, it was like that. It was, what is the most zany? Because, you know, if you pick a standard cucurbit and an ambix, yeah, there's a hundred variations of that over the last 300 years. All right, we kind of all know how that works. No one has seen a zigzag or a cone or a cow's utter, a horizontal type still.
00:35:25
Speaker
you don't even see this in modern chemistry for the most exotic distillation so i picked those because they're just the zanyest right these are just things you just don't see in modern chemistry so like the question is what do the strange geometries do.
00:35:40
Speaker
What were these guys thinking you know when they came up with this? I looked at them and you know for something like the zigzag Which is one of my favorite stills you could say okay? I can predict this is gonna act like you know a rectification still to some degree There's gonna be some plates of separation as you go up the zig you can kind of predict that When you have a pretzel twist or you have a cone I have no idea you know we had this one that has a cross it looks like the Gemini twins and
00:36:08
Speaker
I had no idea what was going to happen. It's hard to look at it and predict is it going to just be simple short path? Is it going to be rectification? Is there reflux that's going to occur? So that's why. It's like, OK, let's pick the weirdest, the zaniest, and let's see what happens and see if these guys were on to something. And you know what? We found out they were ahead of their time. These stills, go ahead.
00:36:37
Speaker
I don't know. I was just going to say that that's the crazy part to me is that it wasn't just a, how do you put it, an interest piece. There's actually, there's almost like something to be learned from them, from what I would have understood of what I've read and heard from you. So I was sort of thinking in the other places that I've heard you talk, it's kind of
00:36:58
Speaker
people that are interested in spirits, it's kind of an interest piece for them. I think a lot of the people that are listening to this on my platforms are going to be really interested specifically in the technical, what's actually happening in the stills. So maybe we should just pick a couple of the stills that you tested and
00:37:17
Speaker
I'm happy just to let you geek out on this thing and go as deep into the woods as you want to go. So you said the zigzags, your favorite, right? So should we do that one first? Sure. The zigzag was made, original design was by a Frenchman named Le Favre. And he was a learned guy, professor, studied medicine, etc. And he proposed this zigzag. Let me see if I can even show a picture of it. So, you know, one would expect that if you have to move
00:37:45
Speaker
hot vapor through a very long path and then you give it these sharp angles, there's going to be some kind of mixing, right, between the liquid and vapor phases. Yeah.
00:37:57
Speaker
So let's see. It is right there. That guy right there, it appears. That's the Lefabra apparatus. And I've actually built these two as well. I'll tell you about what happens in them. So just for those people that can't see this, and that they'll start hanging. Oh, I'm sorry. No, it's fine. It's so easy to do. We're just talking naturally between us. But it literally just looks like a column that has zigzags all the way up.
00:38:27
Speaker
What are they, like maybe 45 degree angle or something? Yeah. I mean, in the case of mine, here's another one. I know they can't see this, but I built mine that, you know, on the, on the side, they're nineties, right? So it's from the normal. They're 45s. Yeah. It looks like a symbol for a resistor and electronics. It looks like a light bulb, maybe something like that.
00:38:51
Speaker
Well, it's an interesting thing. Like so when you get one of these, we built it and it was like about four feet long, the zigzag. And we have no other information. We don't know how big the boiler is. We don't know what temperature the guy used that we have no indication of the diameter from the favra anything I read his works, I had him translated and everything. He doesn't tell you like diameter to length, the length of the path
00:39:17
Speaker
Anything like that all that we know that there was a boiler a zigzag and a coolant at the top in the form of an am mix And that that was it so when I got this thing I set it up on a pot still 22 liter pot still and I cranked it and I'm like let's let's just get the show on the road and let's get it boiling I got to get the vapor to the top That was a stupid idea It turns out that the zigzag is kind of the condenser
00:39:47
Speaker
And if you push the hot vapor through it and rely on the bulb at the top to condense, you really don't get a very good product. And you shoot hot vapor out of it. Remember, there's really no water on these things. There's no jackets. There's no refrigerant or glycol. These are just air-cooled collars. Second time around, went much, much more gentle. Very gentle boil. Then I could see what was going on. You have to just adjust the energy input
00:40:17
Speaker
and bring it to a gentle boil and those hot vapors will start to work their way up the column and they will heat the walls of the column but air is moving past it.
00:40:27
Speaker
and that gives you some contents that return so as you stare at this thing after it warms up when it comes to thermal equilibrium you see a river of water running down of alcohol rather running down by gravity down the zigzag like a kid's toy it's amazing just a river flowing down it and the hot vapors are going up and every time they need a bend
00:40:48
Speaker
there is a very intimate mixing. And so that is a couple of theoretical plates at every elbow. So the liquid has to flow through the vapor at a tight junction. And then the whole way, think of it as a tube. The liquid is a film around the pipe in the shell and the hot vapor is moving through it. So along the whole path, at a skin effect, really, the hot vapor is touching the condensate, especially where it's running down as a river.
00:41:18
Speaker
The long and short of it is once you get the temperature right and it's gentle and it's patient and the room has to be kind of cool. You don't do this in the dead of summer. I think these guys did this outside in Europe in the fall, you know, like an Armagnac distiller or something like that.
00:41:36
Speaker
If the room is cool, so 60 Fahrenheit, 65 Fahrenheit, works like a charm. When I use this in the dead of winter, when my distillery is really cold, 40 to 50 Fahrenheit, it's tremendous. What we get is rectification. It acts like a column still. Almost. So a modern column still gives you about 192 proof at the top, about the theoretical maximum. This will give you 187.
00:42:03
Speaker
What? Really? Really. Really. Reliably. That is insane. Yeah. So, so there's, it's actually, it's the zigzag park that's genius, isn't it? Because I'm thinking, okay, this is just like contact over surface area.
00:42:21
Speaker
like having a really, really, really tall column on a pot still. But it's not, because every time there's a right angle, the liquid that's sitting on the quote unquote bottom of the tube has to cross that path to the other side of the next tube and the vapor has to basically do the opposite, right? So they're forced at every juncture to almost act like a bubble plate.
00:42:49
Speaker
Exactly. That's it. That's the whole thing. But the secret of it was you go slow and the ambient air has to be kind of cold. All the energy input is into the boiler to move the hot vapor up into a very long path. You don't overheat the bulb at the top. So that should be relatively cool as well. And it works like a charm. And so I just did it with you know, rheostats and I marked it
00:43:17
Speaker
And I said, OK, I'm never touching this dial ever again. I've got it. I found the sweet spot. And now I just put the switch on. What I found was really good for this is I was going to add digital temperature probes all over it. I just got liquid crystal thermometers. You remember those things you could stick on your forehead and it would glow green and tell you your temperature?
00:43:39
Speaker
Well, they sell those, right? That will tell you an indication of like 60 Celsius to 110 Celsius. I stuck them on every zig and every zig. And so I can watch what's hot and what isn't. And so when I see that each area is roughly between 70 and 80 Celsius, perfect. That's exactly where I want to be. And it's cranking right along. So what's interesting about 187 proof at the top,
00:44:10
Speaker
It's not quite neutral, but it's really close and instead what you have is just a little bit of something else from the wash that comes through. Just a little bit. Not like a stripping run or short path distillation. We get tons of notes of everything. Here the alcohol is generally clean
00:44:28
Speaker
It's just something else and you have to make your cuts. You got to make your cuts. So, you know, I let 20% go right off the top and my four shots and heads, I just for safety, I just discard that. The hearts are good. And there's a little bit of like a creaminess or smoothness to it. I don't really know how to describe it. But when the tails show up, the proof will start to drop.
00:44:52
Speaker
And what I did is I built my own parrot out of glass with a very small densitometer in it. And so I could just see it moving. And then, of course, I'm taking samples as it's going. The tails do show up where they're supposed to. And I have, you know, make that cut. You have to kind of do it, you know,
00:45:11
Speaker
You got to kind of know where in the run you want to make your cuts. So the easiest thing is I just put big collection funnels under it, graduated funnels. And I'm like, I'm going to collect the leader now, discard it. Then I'm going to go five liters of hearts and two liters of tails. And boom, I know where I'm at. And the alcohol is good. It's so good. I'm actually thinking of making this my primary still in my distillery because it's so simple. I have no running water. I have no coolant. I turn on a switch.
00:45:41
Speaker
And, you know, I come back a few hours later and the run is starting and I just keep an eye on it through the night and that's it. So this one that you're running is glass still? It's glass. Yep. It's completely glass. I have to imagine that if you went to copper, you'd get a slightly, it's just going to conduct better, right? So you could get away with slightly warmer conditions, running it slightly faster, perhaps.
00:46:06
Speaker
Oh yeah, thermal conductivity between glass and copper is pretty wide. The copper's probably gonna heat up a lot faster. The copper's gonna also aid in the sulfide removal. So if you're doing something stinky, like a peach mash or something that has a lot of amino acids that are containing sulfur,
00:46:27
Speaker
you need the copper to scrub that out. So what I do is I just add a little bit of copper sponge right at the top in the ambix just to scrub it out just a little bit. And it probably gives me one or two extra plates as well. But I tested it without the copper to be 100% sure. The copper can only make things better. Yeah, it's going to heat up better. The the column will come to equilibrium a lot faster and they'll scrub the sulfides better than glass.
00:46:53
Speaker
But now that we know what happens inside, the mystery of how the running stream makes its way around the bend as the vapor folds over it, now we know. So there's two types of different things, right? There's people that almost, and businesses that almost make a product on almost like a commodity basis. We're going to make as much shit as we can. We're going to get it out there, and we're going to sell it at the best price we can, and that's kind of how people consume it as well. And then the very far opposite end of the spectrum is
00:47:21
Speaker
distilleries like yours, even without the still, I can see how someone like you could use a still like this as your main still, and that would do nothing but add to the story, the enigma, the sort of the romance almost of people buying your products, right? Do you think there's something more to it than that though? Like is it actually, could it actually be, could you make something like this on a scale
00:47:50
Speaker
That would be practical to run. Like, is there something that the modern world can learn from this? I guess is what I'm asking. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. When, when I proposed this to the ADI, um, one of the questions was, um, how would this benefit a craft distiller? And I mentioned exactly what you did brand differentiation.
00:48:11
Speaker
you know think of a guy like so around me in new york everybody's doing like say vodka and whiskey right i'm not getting into that there's no way i can compete right there's so many vodkas in new york but you could be the one guy that's making vodka in a 16th century still design
00:48:31
Speaker
Yeah, and that differentiates you right and now it's like oh interesting. He's using a still no one else's right Yeah, you can do that The sky is the limit. So Jesse. What if we added three more zigs? What if we change the angle to 33 degrees? What if we tighten the diameter?
00:48:51
Speaker
the sky's the limit you could probably make this commercial you have to build a few you can't scale a scale linearly with stuff like this you have to build a few of them to understand how it scales but you know any craft distiller can go out you know get a hundred feet of copper and let's see what happens the difference between 20 zigs and 50 zigs
00:49:12
Speaker
or change the angles, or the diameter, the path length, anything like that. You can make a much tighter zig or a very wide zig. Any of this can lend its way to scaling up to Navy commercial scale. It's something I had pitched to the ADI and maybe we're going to revisit it. If we can fund building two more sizes,
00:49:37
Speaker
then we would have the model around how it scales for diameter and heat input. But right now, it's just one. It's just a prototype. And we've got it. Proof of concept, it absolutely works. But I actually don't know how it scales and what happens with angles and geometry changes. So that's just food for thought for the other distillers out there, you know.
00:50:00
Speaker
I mean, the interesting thing to me too is like, what happens if you scale it the opposite way? What if instead of adding more, what if you cut it way back and instead of going for basically trying to make vodka, can you make rum? And instead of having a double retort still, you have essentially a pot still, but with six zigs. And that's, do you know what I mean? Like the kind of roughly the equivalent of double distillation or I don't know, man, there's so much you can do here.
00:50:27
Speaker
That's a great idea actually because you remove the plates and you're going to keep the flavor profile a little bit closer to what the matches right that's actually a really cool idea just take it a little step above a standard pot still. Add a couple zigs and it might give you a great product.
00:50:46
Speaker
for just such a simple thing, just on the top, right? Just before your condenser, just add some zigs. Yeah, it's a great idea. A great idea. The closest thing I can think of in the commercial world is Belkonis Distillery in Texas. And they had a pot still with a huge long line arm.
00:51:08
Speaker
And they upgraded to another facility and made much much much larger stills. And they couldn't for the life of themselves figure out how they could keep that same flavor profile. I might be butchering the story. I apologize Balcona so I'm telling this completely wrong.
00:51:26
Speaker
But the long and short of it was they were trying to figure out, do we literally put a hole in the wall and have the still go out to another building? Because it just got so much bigger that that's what they had to do. So instead of doing that, they turned it into a spiral. So the line arm on the still just spiraled up over and over and over again on itself, and then popped out over the side. And so I'm kind of imagining zigs and that sort of something along the lines of that.
00:51:53
Speaker
If people wanted to bang something together at home or in their craft distillery to just start messing with this, have you got like rough sort of ratios in terms of diameter compared to the pot size or do you think the Wild West approach is best? Like here's a concept, go and try something.
00:52:11
Speaker
No, we can definitely give you, you know, give some starting guidance for it. There's going to be a report out from the ADI, my grant report, that's going to have all the dimensions and everything. But I'll tell you what I did now. So the tube that we're using is about an inch in diameter nominal. So let's call it three quarters of an inch or so internal diameter. And that's sitting on a 22 liter pot that's filled to about 15, 16 liters of wash.
00:52:38
Speaker
and the height of it is about, well the whole thing assembled is about eight feet tall. The ambix at the top is about a liter and I can't remember the path length but you know it's got to be an area 12 to 16 feet at least.
00:52:54
Speaker
You know, that's roughly it, you know that worked really well for us if you put this four foot zig on top of a hundred liter pot It's probably not gonna do a lot for you. You're gonna blow it apart once you start boiling But 22 liters is real nice. That's the standard size I work with in my distillery because it's a few gallons, you know, that's how I work It is the biggest one that we reconstructed. So that is that is the biggest one and
00:53:21
Speaker
You know, the other ones are a little bit smaller and they're a little bit more intricate. I'll hold this up for you just so you see it. This is the pretzel twist. And for the listeners, it kind of looks like a DNA molecule. It's like a single helix. It's a smooth curve helix, like a twist, kind of like a DNA molecule.
00:53:41
Speaker
And this one is really strange. Go ahead. Is that one side goes up and then the other side is coming back down? Think of it like a 30 foot long tube.
00:53:52
Speaker
that is just bent into a shape of a double of a helix. That's all it is. And this is another phenomenally strange still. Again, this was smaller. So my diameter tubing on this one is like about three quarters, three eighths of an inch. And I put it on top of a five liter pot to get it started. And first thing again, I blew at blew out the hot vapors. Didn't understand what I was doing.
00:54:19
Speaker
these things these guys from this time Jesse were patient they they had all the time in the world and they studied things carefully and I think you know maybe at least myself I'm frantic and impatient but really it's an air-cooled design again and you gotta just be careful and so second third attempt I figured it out the secret of this still it's called the bar cousin still is
00:54:43
Speaker
you only heat up to the top of the helix and nothing beyond it. So you basically get your hot vapor to the top and that's it. And you measure your temperature at the peak of the helix. The other half of it is cool and that is your condenser. So once again, what happens if you move hot vapor up a bunch of bends?
00:55:06
Speaker
you get some rectification, right? So as it moves along a curve, it's the same problem. The liquid has to pass the vapor that's rising, and they mix on a bend. It's just a smooth bend instead of a zigzag. And you get all the way to the top. And right there is how you hold the temperature, your heat input to the boiler. You don't really want to cross the tippy tip. But rather, as the distillate falls, it's falling roughly at about room temperature, comes out at room temperature at the bottom. So
00:55:36
Speaker
Even though there's lots of twists in it, it's really only maybe about one, two, three, maybe about six twists going up, six twists coming down. And that's enough. That's enough to rectify. This one is between 183 and 186 proof when you get the alcohol out of it.
00:55:52
Speaker
Just like the zigzag, the twists in the vapor path are giving you theoretical plates like a bubble cap. This one was smaller, you know, it was a little bit easier to glass blow this one. And, you know, so it's sitting on top of a five liter pot, so just a little bit bigger than a gallon.
00:56:11
Speaker
what I use it for. You know when I don't have a lot of something it's really nice to put into a small still like this and get all the alcohol. Air cooled 100% and you got to make your cuts by evaluation right so again taste it as it's coming out smell it and then you kind of know okay here's my heads here come the hearts just like a regular still. Really cool to watch and I also put those liquid crystal thermometers on it
00:56:38
Speaker
so that I can see what's hot and what's cold. So half the twist is hot, half the twist is cold. That's the secret of the barcusing condenser. So when you say you only want to heat it to the top, you're just saying you don't want, you don't want to be like blowing vapor past the top. You want it to kind of reach the top and then fall down, not be blowing down. Exactly.
00:57:04
Speaker
at the tippy top it forms almost a drip tip and the the the vapor will start to condense right around there and it'll start it slide down so as it slides down the hot side it's in reflux as it slides down the cool side it's your distillate right to the receiver so it's kind of like the splitting point half of it goes to reflux anything that makes it just over the top and slides down like a kiddie slide at a water park
00:57:32
Speaker
room, it comes down, it's cooling as it comes down, and then it comes out at room temp at the bottom at a very high proof. It's fantastic. So simple. Again, a crazy design, but it works so well. You're adjusting your reflux ratio by how much vapor you're pushing basically. So if you're pushing more over, it might push over and it might
00:57:54
Speaker
condensed by the time it gets to the bottom. But now more vapor is going past that point of no return and less is going back down the reflux column, basically. If you cross the top and your hot vapor crosses the peak and it starts, let's say the kiddie slide to the bottom, you don't have reflux.
00:58:11
Speaker
because there's no upward vapor pressure onto that. The vapor has now moved past it and all it can do is condense and ride down. It's not really intimately mixing where it's flowing down as vapor's coming up and they're always in constant equilibrium. You lose that if you cross the peak.
00:58:31
Speaker
So what I got to do with this, I got to put a real good thermocouple at the top. What I've done is again, I've used a digital controller. I know within a tenth of a degree where I want it set and it works pretty good, but sometimes it goes a little bit past it and sometimes it doesn't quite make it.
00:58:46
Speaker
So it depends on your wash, depends on the room temperature. It takes some finessing. The real way to be sexy about it is the digital temperature thermocouples at the top. And it's always reading the peak and adjusting the input to the boiler in at least proportional control. And that's how you get it probably in the best operating condition. It's on the to-do list, really. Yeah, right. And then you think of people doing this with a fire.
00:59:14
Speaker
Right. Exactly. A wood fire outside. That's a real skill right there. So I have to wonder with both of these, could you whack a jacketed condenser at the top?
00:59:33
Speaker
of the column side of the still. Like, do you think that just kind of destroys the purpose and the soul of it? Does that give you more control? Does that give you the ability to be able to throw more vapor up the still and potentially have, you know, like there's, there's more vapor going up. There's more condensed liquid coming down. Does that change your, you know, the, the, the highest proof that you can get out of it? What are your thoughts on all, on all of that?
01:00:00
Speaker
Oh, yeah, absolutely. If you added a reflux condenser at the top, you would change the reflux ratio, you're creating a deflegmator basically at the top. Sure, you can do that. But these guys didn't do that. That's the thing, right? So how would how would a guy in 1610 have continuously flowing water at the top of his still? Yeah, be pouring it in or an assistant would be pouring it in unless he's tapping the stream or spring or something. So
01:00:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, in our modern thing, to add a jacketed cooler is trivial. That's easy for us to do. You can buy those stock and add it right to the top. They didn't. You don't even see jacketed condensers really in the literature. What you see are water baths.
01:00:46
Speaker
here and there. But nothing where you see jacketing along the distillation path. So yeah, absolutely. A modern day craft distiller, you could probably bring the reflux ratio up and order a magnitude by doing something like that. Controlling that refluxer, yeah, you have very fine control about how much you're returning back down the column versus how much you're bringing out to the other side. But now you're evolving it into like a modern column still.
01:01:12
Speaker
You know? Yeah, yeah. And what's really the purpose of like, why are you building this thing? And when I say you, I don't mean you, I mean the collective you. Yeah, that's fascinating, man. I must admit too, like the idea of, from the idea of being able to test little batches or something, right? Like having a little mini gin still, that's one of these things that you can just
01:01:39
Speaker
You don't have to hook up to water, you can just pull it out, throw a couple of liters in, run it through. I don't know, there's something very intriguing for me from the point of view of these things were conceived so long ago, probably never built, and now they've been brought into life and I'm intrigued to make one.
01:02:04
Speaker
legitimately think I might go and build something after thinking about which sort of version to build and just to be able to mess with it. I don't know. There's something very romantic about it. Anyway, what's the third? Well, the other weird one is the cone. So this is what this guy here, and it looks just like a really tall pyramidal cone. I'm trying to think of, you know, maybe you want to think of like a trombone or clarinet.
01:02:34
Speaker
you know, standing vertically, it just looks like a tall cone. And this is by a gentleman, Bohr Hav, and he just describes a cone that's shaped like a sugar loaf. I've never seen a sugar loaf, so I don't really know, but that's the description he gives in a literature. We went completely off that single diagram.
01:02:55
Speaker
And what I did is I tried to just measure it from there, the diameter at the top, diameter at the bottom, the spacing. And we gave it to the glass blower and we did the best we could.
01:03:07
Speaker
So it's just a cone. There are no zigs, there's no twist or no zags. What would you think would happen, Jesse, in something like that? You're putting energy in the bottom. Energy is dissipating. You know, the more surface area and the more height you have, the more likely that energy is to dissipate. So as you get nearer the top, more and more of the vapor is going to sort of just condense. And I have to imagine onto the walls of the cone, like the outside,
01:03:35
Speaker
And then it would trickle down the outside of the cone towards the bottom would be what I would imagine. But the thing that I'm struggling here to sort of rectify in my head is I don't see how that's different to like a whiskey still, right? Like something with a big helmet and a tall column before the line arm.
01:04:04
Speaker
Is it exactly the same thing? I don't know. The interaction between the vapor and the liquid seems like it's going to be very, very passive. It's going to be surface area, basically, is all it is, as opposed to the last two where the design of the still is forcing the interaction of the liquid and the vapor. Not actively, but actively. Yes, I'm a little bit stuck on this one. I'm a little bit stuck as to why this one is intriguing and what it's going to do.
01:04:32
Speaker
Yeah, I had no idea either. So you notice in this, and you can see on the website, again, at the tippy top of the cone, there is a sidearm that comes off of it. And that's where your distillate comes from. So you've got to get the vapor to the tippy top.
01:04:48
Speaker
and not past it because this sidearm slides down the whole length of the cone and that's your distillate return. I had no idea what was going to happen either. I thought it was going to be like a glorified short path condenser and it turns out it rectified.
01:05:03
Speaker
So it's a film effect. It's a thin film You are absolutely right. So the hot vapor comes in and what's the cold part? It's the shell it's the outer walls the condensation happens on the outer walls which are surrounding the vapor and the higher you go the closer the vapor and the liquid are mixing and
01:05:26
Speaker
It rectifies, but it's not great. This one was around 180 to 182. Not as great as the Lefabra apparatus, but we're up there with this. What? Sorry, I should have asked too right at the beginning. I'm assuming you had a standard ABV for the wash in the pot that you're testing all of these against. What was the wash ABV? I do too. The first one is vodka.
01:05:55
Speaker
Two ingredients, binary system, 40% alcohol, 60% water. So I know exactly how much alcohol is going to come over, and I know where the azeotrope is. The second is I do a wash. I've used grape mark washes and low proof, you know, something down around like five to eight percent alcohol, and it'll still rectify it. So it works. The principle is the same.
01:06:22
Speaker
The cone is not my favorite. It's difficult to operate. The side arm off the top of the cone is basically your condenser. Just a little skinny tube. Borhave only describes it as a take-off arm that's insulated from the cone. That's it. It's like an eighth of a diameter, eighth of an inch of diameter. That's where all the distal, the condensation is occurring.
01:06:46
Speaker
If you move the hot vapor past the tip of the cone, you blow it because then the hot vapor starts wanting to push out the sidearm and the proof drops dramatically at that point. You have to keep it within the cone. Temperature control on this is very difficult. It's fascinating to watch because at times you could almost see the vapor coming out of the boiler and into this cone. And then there's a great volume at the base of the cone. So you have a flash drum.
01:07:13
Speaker
And you can see the vapor start to fog and then start to condense. But then the walls start to warm up because the vapor is moving to the liquid phase close in temperature. And so the walls warm up on the cone. And as you go up the cone and higher, it heats faster and faster because the diameter is getting smaller and smaller. And so it starts slow and then it gets very hot, very quick. And at that point, you're like, oh, my God, I got to back off the boiler. And now the side arm is hot.
01:07:41
Speaker
And now you got to cool it. And so you just lost part of your alcohol. So this one, it's intriguing because there's really no geometry to it. But in just that long, very tall cone with the constricting diameter is enough to create theoretical plates. I had no idea on this one. The Holy Museum of Grappa built one of these out of copper.
01:08:06
Speaker
at a very large scale, which I think is what you were talking about with the whiskey pot stills. It looks like that. They put it right on top of the boiler. And it's just a big copper cone. It's not an operation. I think it's just for demonstration. But I wonder if they got inspired from seeing this, and that's where those cones came from. They just realized it didn't have to be ridiculously tall and skinny. It could be more stout.
01:08:34
Speaker
but just give it that cone and then you get a little bit of equilibrium mixing along that. A little bit of reflux as the cone constricts.
01:08:45
Speaker
So another intriguing one. It looks really cool, but it is a pain in the neck to operate this one. So I guess the difference between that and a pot still, like just a standard, what we think of a pot still with slightly different geometry is that in this situation, it is a really, really delicate
01:09:10
Speaker
balancing act about not pushing too much vapor out of the top, whereas in what what I think of as a pot still is you throw the vapor through and you just it's the condenser's job to break it back down. So I guess when you think about it in that way, I mean, that makes a little bit more sense to me in terms of how it can rectify more than just like one distillation. Do you know what I mean? Sure.
01:09:37
Speaker
I guess that kind of makes sense, but still I find that you're going slow. You're going so, so slow. So that yeah, in a stripping run, you want all your alcohol right now. So yeah, you drive it hard, make the condenser work. Not, not in these because all you have is the air. You just have the difference in temperature between the boiler and the room. And so you have to go slow because it is so easy to overwhelm these and overheat it. It's just gentle boil, get the vapors gently into the path.
01:10:05
Speaker
and let them heat up the walls and do the work. Don't let the boiler do too much work. Just let it climb and let it slowly come to thermal equilibrium and then you got it. That's it. Patience is the key. The room temperature is the other key to run in these types of stills. So again, you can't use this in the dead of summer or you got to run air conditioning past it. It would be very inefficient in a hot room. It would shine in autumn or the winter. Absolutely shine. That's when it's great.
01:10:36
Speaker
Actually, that's an interesting point, too. What part of the world were these designs conceived in? Europe. France and Germany, for the most part. Borhav was Dutch. Marcuse was Dutch. Lefebvre came from France, but ended up in the UK.
01:10:59
Speaker
Was also France and Europe and then the last guy was my favorite was on Della Porta and he was Italy But you know, they could there could have been cold nights in Italy I'm not sure where where he was in Italy But certainly he would have had seasons and some cold nights and if he built it it would have worked really well That's cool, man. So I have to ask did you build the one that's kind of like a cow's other? I
01:11:26
Speaker
Um, I did, um, that was not part of the grant. And this one is really weird. That is the horizontal still. Um, it is known as a per latus apparatus from the Latin, um, um, lateral, um, to lateral. So it's, um, it's ridiculous. Um, this one has one extent example and it's in.
01:11:52
Speaker
It was purported to be in the Museum of Munich. And they said in this book from the 40s that the museum had it, and it was blown out of glass. And I have looked and tried to write to the museum, but I have not come across it. So off of this picture, and one other from a manuscript, we built this. And there's a picture on nanodistilling.com. It's interesting.
01:12:20
Speaker
It's another gentle air-cooled thing. But it's crazy. It's perfectly linear in proof as you cross the udders. So the game of this still, it's really a game. You have to heat the boiler and come into the cow udders. But not too hard. Otherwise, you end up in the other udder at the other side. And you don't really get a great proof. But the first udder that it falls into gives you about 160 proof.
01:12:49
Speaker
Let's just say, for this storytelling sake, the next one's 170, the next one's 180, and then the next one is, should be 190, right? When you check the proof of these, it's perfectly linear. And so it's like, yes, the fifth utter is gonna give me pure neutral spirits, 192. The problem is I can never get the condensate to get to the fifth utter. I can get it into the first, the second, the third, and the fourth.
01:13:17
Speaker
But as soon as you push it a little bit too much, you don't really make it into the fifth or just a couple drops. And it's just enough that I can't even measure it with my alcohol meter. My digital meter needs about five mils to sample. I can't even get five mils. The first utter fills up.
01:13:35
Speaker
The second utter is about three quarters full. The next one is about half full. So as you're condensing the alcohol, they fill up at like 160 proof, 170 proof, a little less, 180 proof, a little less, 190, a little less, until there's just drops of the theoretical maximum in the fifth utter. And so the mystery is how the heck can I get all the alcohol into that fifth one? Because then it would be pure neutral spirits. I haven't figured it out because as soon as you give it more heat,
01:14:04
Speaker
then you just blow it. All the alcohol just is hot, it doesn't condense, and it ends up in the receiver at the other side, and it's only about 160, 170 proof. Or you'll fill up all the others out of lower proof. So it's either impossible, we built it wrong, or I'm missing something. So we're still tinkering with this one. Just by math, it should be possible to get true neutral spirits out of this.
01:14:32
Speaker
But we haven't hit it. We've come close, come to about 180 and change, but cannot get to 190, 191. But it should be. It should be. The math is there. It should line right up. We can't do it. So this one, I'm really struggling to understand how this is happening. So once again, for those at home, it looks almost like a half moon upside down. So it's like a circle.
01:15:00
Speaker
half-circle arc, and then on either point of that circle, there's a large reservoir, and then a smaller, for want of a better word, tube following up in that arc, and then along horizontally across that arc, there's thinner tubes that come down to another bulbous reservoir
01:15:26
Speaker
at each of those bowls that you're talking about. So just to make sure that I'm understanding this correctly, the wash goes into one of the bulbous, the larger bulbous sort of reservoirs on the end. Yes. And that part is heated. Yes. So how is the vapor and the liquid interact? Like I don't get how it doesn't, like you said, just blow straight across to the other side or. Yeah.
01:15:55
Speaker
I don't understand why there's separation between the different others, for want of a better word. It's the thin films effect again. There's a name for this. I believe it's called the weir effect, W-I-E-I-R. I've seen it in photochemistry. Once you start putting liquids into thin films and molecular films,
01:16:16
Speaker
He transfer starts to become a little bit different. So yeah, the left receiver boils it comes up and then you have condensate on that crescent moon and It's only wants to hang around the walls because they're cooler and there's hot vapor trying to come through the moon but as it's doing that the shell is cooler as you go from left to right and
01:16:40
Speaker
The shell is going from warm to room temperature. So it's condensing along the path. But as you warm it up, it starts to come to thermal equilibrium. And the crescent starts to warm up and starts to want to come to a constant temperature. If you make that whole crescent the same temperature, everything just wants to go across and end up in the other receiver at the other end. Not really impressive. That's basically a short path receiver with some drip points.
01:17:07
Speaker
But if you do it gently, and again, bring the heat and the energy to maybe about halfway up the crescent, three quarters of the crescent, what happens is we put little drip points above those udders, the receivers underneath the crescent. It will condense, it'll drip, and it'll form into the flasks. And the first flask that fills up is the first one. And then volumetrically, a little bit less, the second, then the third, then the fourth, then the fifth. And the proof increases as you go from left to right.
01:17:36
Speaker
Again, it's gentle heating. The rectification is somehow happening via thin film effects. Again, it's condensate on the outside shell, the hot vapors passing through, and the interaction is at a very thin molecular film along the wall. Nearest eye configure right now, but the proofs are high for both vodka and for both about a 10% like a wine that I put into it. It's the same way, but we just cannot get
01:18:04
Speaker
the last one, it's just drops of the purest alcohol at the end. I just cannot get yield out of it. I have no idea what this was used for. I suspect it might have been essential oils or maybe some kind of medicine. I doubt it was used for alcohol. I really think it might have been used maybe for a higher boiling point compound or maybe rose oil or, you know, geranium or something.
01:18:30
Speaker
It's probably a physician's
Kercher's Horizontal Still: Non-Alcoholic Applications?
01:18:32
Speaker
tool. I guess based on what I could read about it Kercher is the scientist who came up with it again another learned guy who was considered a little eccentric in his time but for alcohol it's doing its job, it's just When you compare this to the other ancient stills the other ancient stills are winning this one looks really cool and you're basically distilling horizontally rather than very Yeah, but it's
01:18:58
Speaker
You're not going to sell a lot on this one, I don't think, Jesse. A couple of questions. Number one, it's totally not, but almost like a little nuculation site, like the drip points you call them, right? Where the vapour is going to drip down and it's going to guide it into the receptacle underneath. Could you see those in the original plan or was that something that you just had to kind of
01:19:25
Speaker
No, I added those. Yeah, because when I looked at the diagram, it's smooth across, it's completely smooth. And so, you know, I began to wonder, well, how how can I accurately get the condensate down into the flasks? I really wanted to come straight down by gravity. I added the drip tips. And that might be incorrect, because from the diagrams, there are no drip tips.
01:19:50
Speaker
I was thinking it more. I want to aim it to my receiver. I want to give the vapor a place to condense and then aim the droplets down to my flasks. And it works. And the flasks fill up. But in the original design, it's smooth. And maybe that's one of my errors. I don't know. When I look at it smooth, I struggle to figure out how am I going to know into which flask I got, which fraction, at what point in temperature. When I have a drip tip, I know exactly what the temperature is at the tip.
01:20:20
Speaker
And I know, okay, I'm collecting 160 proof and the tip is at 78 Celsius. That gives me a lot of information at that point. And then as I move here, this tip is at 76 Celsius and I'm collecting at 170. I can now start to make some correlations. When it's smooth, who knows when it condensed where it's going. It could even fall and split into two flasks.
01:20:44
Speaker
It's mysterious. So this is another one, like you just don't see these things these days. And maybe for a good reason, maybe this one failed. And maybe this one didn't end up producing what was the goal. There's no explanation about why are there five receivers hanging under the crescent. Kercher doesn't elaborate on it, why he picked five. Why not six? Why not four? So I'm also intrigued
01:21:13
Speaker
In the diagram, it just looks like it's one piece. Is there any clues on how you get stuff into it or out of it?
01:21:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. In most cases, I would think I'm looking at my diagram as well from Munich. One of the sides of that thing had to have come off to load it and unload it. I mean, for us, those receivers, the cow udders, we want those to come off, right? That's where we're basically doing our collection. From the diagram, it's so dark, you can't see it.
01:21:47
Speaker
I would suspect though that they came off. They were sealed by cork or something and they had to have popped off because what would be the point if you had to take the whole thing and turn it over to get your fluid out, you would mix everything. So what's the point of separating? They had to have popped off. It's just not obvious from the pictures, you know.
01:22:05
Speaker
That was exactly what I was getting at. And this is me completely talking out of my ass, but what if the point in those receptacles was to separate almost like cuts? So, you know, you've got like whatever chemical goes on this side and it's splitting the different chemicals into the different receptacles or
01:22:32
Speaker
Or like you said for perfume, right? So the rose oil goes on this side. We know that the far left or the far right receptacle is going to be horrible. The two middle ones are going to be nice. I don't know. Do you know what I mean? It's purposely dividing it up. Or what if one of those other receptacles was actually to put something into, not to take out of?
01:22:57
Speaker
almost like a gin basket or something. There's no interaction with it. That's a great point. I had not considered that. It's so hard to tell because it's...
01:23:10
Speaker
We don't have a lot from Kercher to go on about the heating and the cooling of it, but that's interesting that there could have been things that were aromatic herbs and stuff along the path and it was actually a mixing device. That's a pretty cool idea, Jess, so you had not considered that.
01:23:31
Speaker
That would be interesting, actually, like junipers in one, you know, and anise in the second, and, you know, all your your gin components, and then you bring the alcohol across it. That's very interesting. You know, it could potentially work. The only thing I would fear is that you would condense right into those lower receivers, you'd have to get the alcohol out of that. It'd be so concentrated, like you would have to almost heat the whole bottom of it.
01:23:56
Speaker
But then it would make sense. If the whole bottom of it was warm, heat was coming up from the bottom, and your herbs were in the udders, it actually might produce a very interesting gin. That's a really cool...
01:24:09
Speaker
like, like, heat the middle ones and have it go out. Yeah, because you don't want all the settle in the middle ones. Like if you put your herbs in it, you want it to contact but then you want the volatiles to move on and get out of there, right? I don't know.
Exploring Unique Distillation Devices and Techniques
01:24:24
Speaker
That's a fascinating idea. Jeez. Yeah. All right. I have to think about that one some more, Jesse. You really intrigued me on that.
01:24:36
Speaker
All right, man. So I think we've got one other that you did on the funding that we haven't talked about, right? Or have I miscounted? No, no, that's right. I mean, I'll show you the interesting one. The Gemini one was unimpressive. It operated as a pot still. And it came out like a short path condenser. The one that was really bizarre is the Lonestr condenser. And it looks like a key.
01:25:03
Speaker
Once again, it's 90 degrees. Let me just find my diagram and I can talk to it. When I found this manuscript, the inventor says that there's two of them. There's one right above the boiler, and then there's another one that comes out of a drum. I'm like, what is the middle drum? It's a thumper. You basically drive the hot vapor all the way through the first one,
01:25:32
Speaker
And then it would come into a thumper and whatever escape that went through the second one. And when I looked at that, I'm like, well, that's really cool. But that's kind of a waste. I just want to see if this thing is going to work. I don't need to build two of them. So let me just find that.
01:25:48
Speaker
So there is an example of this at the Poli Museum of Grappa. When you walk in the door, it's on the left. They have one standing there. It's not in operation. And I think that probably 90% of people would walk right past it because it's right after the entranceway.
01:26:05
Speaker
But it's tucked in the corner and so they read the same book and I wonder if they ever tried it for their grandpa because it would probably work really well. I'm sorry I can't seem to find the page. It's on the website but anyway just think of basically something like a skeleton key.
01:26:25
Speaker
you know, where you have, you know, a two, and then there's some hard 90s in the two. And that's all it is. So kind of like, you know, the father use zigzags on a 45. Lannister said, you know, screw it, let's just go a complete hard 90 degree angle, like a complete outer loop. And that's what he did. And so as we know, those hard 90s are going to give you rectification, they're going to create an effect like a bubble cap tray.
01:26:56
Speaker
It just looks weird. It's a hard one to balance because it's a straight tube, but there's this outhang of this 90 degree loop that comes out and it comes back in. And so when your vapor's moving through it, it gets a little heavy on that side and you have to balance it. And mine, as it was running, almost fell over. So I had to put some really good clamps on it. Again, the secret of this one is now that we know how it works is you heat it to the top.
01:27:23
Speaker
the tippy top, and don't go beyond it. And all your rectification will occur in basically the 90 degree bend. And that's it. Again, it's somewhere like in the area of like 184, 186 proof. It's just a little bit subpar from the Lefabra condenser. But it looks cool. I just don't think it looks as cool as the twists and the cones and stuff.
01:27:49
Speaker
But again, another one lost to the ages, you know? Here we go. Okay, I got it now. I'm so sorry. It looks like this. Oh, so when the original design again, a boiler went into this like weird 90 degree key shape thing and then it went to this mysterious second vessel.
01:28:10
Speaker
And then off of that vessel came another one. And then clearly that's going into a condenser, a barrel filled with water. So near side configure, Jesse, this might be the earliest indication of a thumper that's between the two to basically move hot vapor into some condensed alcohol and increase the proof. And then since this was warm to hot, some escaped and went through this and came out.
01:28:34
Speaker
air-cooled condenser.
The Role of Chemical Analysis in Craft Distilling
01:28:36
Speaker
We only built one and I will tell you that this shape alone will get you rectification. Just one, two, three, four 90-degree bends like that will give it to you. So that's the story of Lona Sir and it's not just his design. Other philosophers at the time
01:28:53
Speaker
Picked up on it and you see that weird key shaped thing in the thumper up here By his contemporaries, so they were reading each other's works Lorna, Serla, Della Porta These guys were checking out their stuff and they were all sketching out their design some of them were a little bit smoother on their bends some of them were very sharp on their bends and
01:29:16
Speaker
I would reckon that this was made out of pipe, you know, maybe some kind of lead tubing or copper tubing, whatever they had at the time. The glass blowing is, you know, a little bit difficult to do something like this. So anyway, there you have it. That's the other one. So this is the most elegant one. And this is by Lona, sir. And this is exactly what we built. The top of it is actually a 45 degree little peak that comes off.
01:29:42
Speaker
And that is your condenser. So if you can move your hot vapor up through a two 90 degree bends, which is the key, you're rectifying and it's flowing down through this. But if you get to the point, you can condense and then it slides down and it's just an air cooled tube that's about two or three feet long. And that's what returns your distillate to the receiver at room temperature. So again, you just don't heat it past the top point. You keep it in the 90 degree bends of the key.
01:30:10
Speaker
You're home free. And Sky's the limit for a distiller. This is like a $20 project. It's Home Depot, a couple 90 degree plumbing bins. You could put three or four of these together in an hour. Yeah, totally. I know that there is people that are listening to this, that are going to go out and mess with some of this stuff. If people do, is there any way or is it even desirable to kind of pull
01:30:39
Speaker
knowledge or pictures or anything on this. Is there something people should be doing to let others know that they're doing it?
01:30:47
Speaker
I would love to. I would like to turn nano distilling.com into like a little community forum. Unfortunately, Jesse, this stuff is so weird that I haven't had a lot of interest. That's why I appreciate the podcast to see if people might explore it. But so far, no, no one's taken me up on it. If anyone built them, I would even make a small club or society around this and
01:31:10
Speaker
Just i would love to see someone put one of these into practice in that even a bigger distillery than mine and i would just be awesome we're bringing back. Our predecessors the guys that created distilling centuries ago we're bringing their work back to life and we're finding new things about it that can improve our craft right now so why not make a community around that that would be so cool.
01:31:34
Speaker
You know, that's pretty exciting, man. You teased us right at the beginning that you've got another, you've got another project on the go. Yes. Do you want to tell us about that? Sure. Well, I'm buying a GC mass spectrometer. Okay, I needed one. I have HPLCs. So in my work, I deal a lot with liquid chromatography and that's okay. But
01:32:00
Speaker
A gas chromatograph coupled to a mass spectrometer is a fantastic piece of equipment because if you were to take, you know, let's say two different bourbons, okay, that are on the shelf and I run the analysis through my instrument, I will tell you the difference between the two chemically. And
01:32:21
Speaker
For me, the pawpaw is a very fascinating fruit, and I know from publications roughly what's in it, but now I can analyze that on my own. The fruit changes its profile as it ripens completely. It will go from mango and bananas to caramel.
01:32:37
Speaker
over its writing time and so the chromatic graph the mass spec will tell me what are those compounds that are creating a flavor right so what are the esters at first that are decomposing by million and giving me caramels later on the mass spec will tell me.
01:32:54
Speaker
By by software what's going on. So it's a very cool piece of equipment it basically takes molecules and breaks them into fragments and then a detector sees the fragment and says I know that fragment and Here's the software library that says exactly what that fragment is and it's that molecule and tells you the probability so I think this is a great tool for a research distiller, right and
01:33:21
Speaker
You know when you want to play around with aging a spirit in wood Okay, you know everyone lives after your vanilla notes from oak and stuff like that. What if you used, you know a different wood? Okay, um an instrument like this will tell you What is that wood giving you other than like say vanilla or tannins or charcoal like whatever? It'll tell you like syringe aldehyde or I asked it aldehyde is coming from the wood
01:33:45
Speaker
You can see now this stuff at very, very trace levels. So it'll be up and running in about a month. And I'm really excited about it because I've never, I've never aged my spirits. I've never put them in wood.
01:34:00
Speaker
And this will help me understand how far to age something like this, or even if I want to in the end. I'll see the chemical profile change of the product and like what makes it brown. Why does it add these certain notes after a certain time? So like now you can say it's these molecules that come about it.
01:34:20
Speaker
It's nothing new, Jesse. I mean, there's guys out there in the spirits world that have these things, mostly tied to universities and stuff. I just think I wanted to make the investment in my own. And I think it's going to help me learn a little bit more about what's going on. So even if these ancient stills, right, when I say I make my cuts for the four shots and heads, well, a mass spec will tell me how much methanol was actually in my heart's cut.
01:34:46
Speaker
Right? I can see that. And I'll know if I actually made a really good cut, too deep, too early, too soon, whatever. And then, you know, my tails. I don't really know what causes the strange tails tastes, you know, in fruits like a strawberry. It's not really well studied. But now, you know, the instrument will give me some clues to that. So I'm excited about it. And all I'm going to say is eBay is a really great place to find surplus analytical gear. Are you serious?
01:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, you can get anything. There's a dual flame ionization detector out now that I got an eye on. You know, Jesse, these things brand new are between $70,000 to $200,000 US. That's for a craft distiller.
01:35:33
Speaker
That's out of the question. And any university or laboratory is going to get you $100 to $300 a sample in analysis time and workup time. So the way I look at it is it's going to pay for itself. I'm not buying a brand new one. Just so your readers know my distillery is not that successful.
01:35:56
Speaker
He's got a diamond ring on every finger. Oh, no, no, no. Light behind him is colored gold.
01:36:05
Speaker
Not at all. No, no, no. Oh, that's amazing. My wife works at the local university. And I've often, when I'm at work, functions and stuff, thought about who I should talk to, to talk to, about who I should talk to, to get a backdoor into the, you know, being able to use some of that equipment just for interesting content and stuff. And it's interesting that you say it's nothing new. I mean, of course, like,
01:36:34
Speaker
There's people out there that do this and study this. But I get the feeling that you've got a kind of a different take on this sort of thing. From what I've talked to you, from what I've heard you speak elsewhere and from what I've seen written on your page and talking to you today, I'm going to be very, very interested to see what you end up doing with this thing. I get the feeling that you might have a different take on that than a lot of other places. So that's pretty special, man.
01:37:00
Speaker
Cool. Well, I'll have pictures of it up on one of the websites once we're rocking with it. I'm going to take a little bit of training from the company that's selling it to me, which will be great. And yeah, I have to get a cylinder of gas, so either hydrogen or helium, to feed into this. So it's kind of an interesting setup, but it feels right at home.
01:37:22
Speaker
In the past, I found universities are great, Jesse. If you can find, like you said, that contact in the chem department, usually they will work with outside groups and consultants for a fee to let you get access to their instruments. They'll run the samples for you. And I've had access in the past to some amazing stuff in past research that only really universities can afford. So if there is that hard question on spirits,
01:37:50
Speaker
word alcohol or some say jesse you find an ancient cocktail somewhere or you know a historical spirit is dug up you know. You literally need a micro leader of it to get to a chem lab and they can tell you what's in it.
01:38:05
Speaker
you know if you can get it to a university so they're I mean they are valued partners even in what we do.
Building a Community Around Ancient Distilling Techniques
01:38:11
Speaker
I'm setting this up and I'm gonna make the offer that anyone that's you know up in New York a craft distiller when I get this thing running you drop me a line and if you want to run a sample on it I'm happy to do it just in the name of the craft and we can take a look together at what's in your spirit we can we can compare.
01:38:29
Speaker
That is very cool, man. All right, so where do people go to? I'll put this in the intro too, because I mean, there was a lot of stuff we talked about here with diagrams and stuff. I think it would be nice for people to be able to see it if they're not watching the YouTube version of this. But where should people go to see your distillery, what you're going to be doing in terms of research and the stuff with the ancient stills?
01:38:54
Speaker
Excellent, sure. So my distillery is Mohawk Spirits Distillery and our website is simply MohawkSpirits.com. So there you can find out about our little farm and our products and basically what's happening on the distillery side of my business.
01:39:13
Speaker
Nanodistilling.com is where I'm showcasing the ancient stills and all the wacky research that we talked about today. So any new still that I built, and I'm going to let you know, Jesse, you'll be the first to know, I have built probably the biggest Snyder column still around, and it is a fascinating thing. And I will put it up there and share it with you guys probably in about a week or so.
01:39:36
Speaker
but all these strange columns and stills, I like to showcase them on nano distilling and I hope someday we can create a community there if anyone wants to dive deeper into the chemistry and design. So yeah, just kind of keep an eye on nano distilling for the research updates and the weird stuff on the chemistry side and the usual business stuff is at mohawkspirits.com.
01:40:00
Speaker
That's awesome, man. Thank you so much for talking. I get the feeling I'm going to have to go and do some research, maybe shoot you an email and put together some... I don't know. I'll be interested to see what the viewers think and the listeners, but I think there might be some home distilling scaled projects in the work coming up. That would be awesome.
01:40:21
Speaker
Definitely Jesse, I appreciate the exposure and I encourage the craft distillers to just tinker and experiment. And this is easy stuff. Now that we know it works, we can learn a lot from our old alchemical and research distillers. So let's give it a shot. That's awesome, man. Thank you so much.