*34C3 preroll music*
Herald (H): Let me introduce: It's Sir Wombat and Nero Lapislucis. So, give them
a warm welcome and everybody is interested in how to get the stuff done.
Nero (N): *unaudible*
We are going to present our juice press, which is this gorgeous instrument you can
see over there. And then we will talk about the fermentation vessel
you will need if you want to build one yourself. And we will explain shortly
again how you can create alcohol out of the yeast and the fruit juice. Afterwards
we will present the model of a still which you can see over there on the desk.
Sir Wombat (W): By model we mean it doesn't actually work, it only looks like it.
N: It's a kind of a hypothetical operation of a miniature still. Afterwards you will
get to know an alternative method of getting high percent alcohol, which is the
ice rifing. This is that. So, who are we? I'm Nero, I am kind of a professional
viking. Why am I presenting this talk? I was studying abroad in Norway and I was
too broke to buy the beer, so I had to find some solutions and I started making
the wine. And Sir Wombat over there is an electrical engineer and he's just trying
to build stuff since forever. Let's start with the juice press. I don't know - Do we
have the camera? Or are we doing it without?
*Laughter* W: I can just hold it up and maybe you see it.
N: So basically what we have is a wooden frame
and then there is a car jack attached to it.
With that we press this kind of wooden block down. And then we have on the
right hand side it's like this wood part which has a special shape so the juice can
run off. This is on the lower side. And there is the fruit between it. And with
the car jack you get lots of pressure. Actually if you boil the mash you can just
use the kitchen towel. But it's a lot of work. So this is actually kind of nice.
*Inaudible question from the audience* N: Yeah, you can do it with whole apples.
You can cut them beforehand: You can put them in the oven for a little while and it
makes it a lot easier. I don't know, I think it's easier if you kind of boil them
or put them in the oven beforehand and cut them. Then you get a little bit more juice.
Because what you see when you try this is that you have a lot of work.
And a lot of fruit for actually very little juice. Yeah, it's a lot of work
W: *Inaudible* N: The thing is that the fruit juice, what
is useful for the alcohol, it's basically just the sugar water. You can cheat which
is actually not allowed, but in theory you might cheat and add sugar to your fruit
juice, then the yeast has more kind of fruit and more basics to produce the
alcohol from. So you can add molasses to the fruit juice and that will increase the
alcohol outcome of your molasses. This is in basics the process you just heard
about. You have the sugar water and yeast. And the yeast is working in the sugar
water and by that creating alcohol and CO2. That's why you need the fermentation
vessel, which we will talk about in the next part. You can basically just use
normal yeast from the supermarket. You could also use some yeast cultures which
are on the fruits. There are also some kind of hippie wine producers which just
use the apples like they are and use the cultures which already are on them. But
it's better to use this specialized yeast, because you have optimal alcohol outcome
and lower risk that there are other bacteria evolving. What you don't want is
that there is oxygen coming into your fermentation process, because then what
you get isn't alcohol but vinegar. It just kind of tastes disgusting and it's not
what you make it for. That's why we are building the fermentation vessel. It's
basically just a mechanism to keep the air away. These are the ingredients you will
need to do. On the left hand side is my first experiment, on the right side is Sir
Wombat's. He has this special thing that he puts a pen in a kind of peanut butter
jar beforehand so the whole thing sticks better. You don't really need to do that
if your hose is kind of thick enough. I had this guzzling hose and it worked just
fine. You have to fix the hose in your fermentation vessel and in this kind of
jar which is filled with water. You can just use glue for that but it needs to be
airproof. What's happening is the CO2 which comes from the fermentation process
can leave the vessel through the hose. So it just goes into the glass of water. The
effect is that no oxigen can come in and go the other way around. So it's really
simple. It's useful to have a fermentation starter. For that you start with
activating the dried yeast. The thing with that is, that you give the yeast, which
you want to have a good life in there, a head start ahead of all other bacterias or
kind of microbes which would want to evolve in there. It's not that important
that you keep the air out because you don't keep it for that long. What you do
is: You take the yeast you want, you put sugar in there and you put the molasses in
there. You just give it a head start with a lot of sugar and you keep it in there
for kind of about 12 hours. Then you put it in the fermentation vessel and add the
rest of the molasses. So it's not really in there for that long. Because of that
it's not that important to keep the air out. It doesn't have that much contact.
Here you can see the fermentation process. This is kind of a peanut butter jar and
there is the air and CO2 coming out. It looks like that when the fermentation is
running on high it can get a lot faster. But most of the time - It's also this nice
blubbing sound. If you keep it in your room - you will have a good night. How
will you know when your fermentation ends? Some of the yeast will die. You will
notice this at the bottom of the fermentation vessel. It will just float
down. You will also notice that the fermentation process is getting a lot
slower. Why does this happen? Either you have already too much alcohol for the
yeast to survive. This depends a bit on the kind of yeast you are using, but
mostly it's about 15% you can get. Or maybe there's just no sugar left. You
don't really want that to happen because then it doesn't really taste that good.
But basically it's also a possibility if you just want the alcohol. Just remember
that you shouldn't bottle it before it's totally finished because there's... As
long as there is still some fermentation going on, there is also CO2 coming out and
your bottle might explode. You don't want that. But if you continue with distilling
the whole thing it doesn't really matter because you work with it and you don't
bottle it. So what do we do now? We have the finished wine in the fermentation
vessel and you have the dead yeast on the ground. You should be careful when you
fill it in bottels or another vessel, because that yeast tastes kind of nasty.
So you should siphon it off. You can also pour it but then you should take a lot of
time and be very careful with it. Yes, to measure the alcohol content which will be
as said, explained before about 15% in the mash there's different tools. For the mash
we have the vinometer. If you want to measure it in the steel output you have
the hydrometer.This is when I give over to my friend. Yeah, sugar is a problem in
measuring actually because it confuses the instrument - both of them. So you should
consider this. And actually it's not really that fancy so you can get both of
them for like 10€. It's useful to have. We had that already. The results you get with
the fruit wine is normally between 6% and 13%. 13 is already kind of high. If you
just use the process like I explained it, it's probably a bit less. So that's
actually why you would want to destill it afterwards. W: So we're talking about what
would happen if you'd want to build a still. We're not talking about an actual
still. We're talking about a model that looks like it could work, but doesn't.
Because as we said - we wouldn't break any rules, and Stefan said it's not allowed.
It's not legal to do so. The thing to build such a model - such a home sized
model, not an semi-professional one, you don't need all the... like 5000€ was the
cheaptest professional one we talked about. For such a tiny model you could get
away with 75€ if you're really resourceful like using an old pressure cooker from the
GDR. Those are finally the cheapest ones you find on eBay This size is like 10€ -
it's a nice thing. Some copper pipes you can get in your hardware store. The type
of copper pipe is used to connect fridges. Like for that fresh water and ice cube
feature fridges have. *unaudible*
The cooling system is just an old canister and some electronics I'll talk about
later. Let's just get back to the slides. Back to the slides please. Thanks.
The temperature sensing - we'll talk later about... And then that's it. So you just
connect the copper pipes like this in a T-form with a cork on top. And the screw
thing on the bottom to connect it to the lid of the pressure cooker. At that point
you use like an end cap for the copper pipe, drill a hole into it and connect the
thinner copper pipe to it. That will go onto the pressure cooker like this. Then
you need to do some soldering. Most of you probably know how to solder. This another
kind of soldering. It's the same thing - you use tin and copper and some flux to
make it flow easier. And not a soldering iron but a blow torch, but that's all the
difference there is. And then you just drill a hole into your cut open canister,
push it on there and use lots of glue to make it waterproof - It's no rocket
science. Then the temperature measurement we want to have that because in theory you
need a very precise measurement. In practice it didn't seem like we couldn't
live without it, but it's very interesting and it's helpful. How do we do that? Just
use on of those cheap integrated digital temperature sensors, a Raspberry Pi, a
real time clock to date the measurement protocol - that's just nice to have - and
a bit of python script. Mine is ugly, so it's not published, but everybody can do
it. It's like a day of work that will output a small website that shows the
current temperature graph. You can click on this link and download the current
temperature, like all the measurements as an Excel-file, and you can even download
former measurements. And that's why we need the realtime clock so that we don't
start a chaos. That's all there is. If you have WiFi that's nice because you can
leave the room well it's running. But yeah, you see something is not going well
and then you rush back. So you probably stay with it anyway. Now, this is how a
hypothetical run-through would look like. A tablet in the background, showing the
temperatures, the WiFi-router ... *Laughter*
It's a really great guy that he puts up with this. So yeah, you open the lid, you
put in your mash. Remember this is only a model. Then if your pressure cooker has a
broken locking-mechanism you use some chains and a screw to keep the lid closed.
It's not as critical as actual pressure cooker operation.
*Laughter and applause* Yeah. It's not as critical as actual
pressure cooker operation because there will be no pressure. If pressure builds up
you made some big mistake like plugging up the cooling pipe. If you thought the chain
was funny then come around and show the safety valve. it's like... yeah... as As I
said it's all cheap and made up. But it works. No, it doesn't.
*Laughter* It could work, so, as I said, you put mash
in, close the lid, turn on the gas stove. It's a gas stove because with no other
kind of stove you can regulate the power as fast - maybe with an induction heater - but
that doesn't work with a GDR pressure cooker. Then you started heating. At some
point evaporation will start, it will go up here, pass the thermometers so that we can
see the gas temperature. And then the gas will run in here in the cooler. And there
it hopefully condensates so that we don't blow up the operation. Yeah, we put some
great effort in into our non-functional model. We even painted it to look chalked. (Laughter)
There is another thermometer in here so that we see that the cooling system is as
cold as it's supposed to be.
And then if it would work the alcohol would drop out
here and run over the last temperature sensor so we can see
how warm it is.
Because if it gets too warm it will be vapor and that's bad.
And just for the fun of it there's an
additional temperature sensor on the connector board that's this
one here. Yeah. It's just to measure the room temperature.So, yeah, now we come to
a totally made up graph of an operation.
The red line is the gas temperature that
is always the most important one. Because at the current gas temperature, you can
see what, or you can at least guess, what chemical is currently running ...
evaporating.
The big plateau you can see at the top that is where the alcohol would
be, assuming that for a long time there would be alcohol coming out of the mash,
that turns into a plateau. The orange temperature is the air temperature. The
green line is what the output temperature would be. At the beginning it's something
like the room temperature. And then at the point where actual product starts dripping
out it cools down to the cooling water temperature and then running through it at
some point it will start separating because the cooling can't keep up because we don't
have a run-through cooler, we just have water in there, and that will start to
heat up. The ticks at the end, where the temperature suddenly drops, yeah, that
could be caused by having too high temperature and too much alcohol running
through the cooler. So then you'd turn down the heat a bit and it would start to
drop, and then you turn back up and it starts rising again. And at the end of a
run-through, when you open the lid again and the cold air comes there all the
temperatures drop again. And you're done with it. So as I said, it's all
hypothetical. And the hypothetical results could be something like ... Stop! There
was this methanol thing. So, with a still of this size, you won't get any dangerous
amounts of methanol. Yeah, we just...To be safe we drop the first 15 ml. We dispose
of them properly by burning them on the ground.
*laughter*
Then, what could the output look like?
If you would do this, it'd be a great idea to separate the output in 100
ml jars and measure each separately, so that you can follow what happens.
And it could be like the first jar would be maybe 58%; maybe the 9th jar would be 35%,
because the higher the temperature gets the more water evaporates and so the
alcohol rate is lower.
Of those six glasses maybe the first six would be
usable, because the afterrun that has the stuff that evaporates at the higher
temperatures would taste bad. And if you wanted higher percentages, you could just
still it again and then you'd maybe get up to 78%. As Francisco already said, we
measure the output of the still - we would measure it - with the hydrometer.
And then 78% percent is nothing you ever drink, you only taste alcohol and nothing of the
fruit, so if you had a still output with 78%, you would dilute it with water to
get it to 40.
Now, this is illegal, so we don't do it, but there is another method
which is kind of interesting. It basically uses the same principle, just it's not
separate boiling points, but separate freezing points. And then, to use this,
you put alcohol -maybe red wine - into a plastic bottle, put it into your freezer,
let it freeze through, and then you turn it around, and the first stuff that will
drop out is alcohol. Kind of an interesting picture is this here, because
we have liquid dropping down, which is so cold that the condensation on the other
vessel freezes. So, we know the liquid is something with a freezing point well below
the freezing point of water. If you measure this, you'll see that the output
has something between 20% or 40% when starting with a red wine of 10%, so it
really works. And I found it kind of interesting, because - except some crazy
guy in Bavaria -, I don't know of anybody actually using that. And that guy uses it
to the create world's strongest beer with like 58% and it's still legally beer
because of German laws. *Laughter*
Here we see... That's the stuff that stayed in the bottle, after it unfroze.
And that's the stuff that dripped out below, so if you put a light behind it,
you see that's the one side is much darker, so apparently the pigment is
soluble in alcohol. It's just an interesting fact we saw, too. Well, that's
what we did. So in conclusion, it's totally possible to build a non-functional
model of a still with hardware-store parts. Running this... risks exist, but
are manageable. Watch out for proper cooling; with such a cooler, it's just...
make sure that there is water in it before you start it. Methanol poisoning can be
prevented by using a clean mash like mash you'd drink unstilled. And discarding the
first 15 ml. And if you had something like this and say you tried to still whisky,
you should look out for foaming, because if you try to run it too fast, maybe the
mash would foam up and clog your still and it'd be bad. So yeah, don't do that. In
conclusion, it's great fun... theoretically.
*Laughter* And yes, do not do this. It's illegal.
Thank you.
*Applause*
H: What a fabulous, practical introduction. So we have now five minutes
for Q and A... Everybody who wants to ask a question please go to the microphones,
and please stay in the room for this five minutes. If there are any... Keep in mind,
this time everybody has to go out on this side. So is there any question in the
room? Microphone 1 please.
Mic1: Yes, thank you for the talk. Thank
you for the ideas. Do you know how the legal aspects are in Switzerland?
*Restrained laughter*
Stefan (S): In Switzerland you guys are
actually quite well off, because you are allowed to have small stills until the
capacity of 5 litres. We have until the end of the 2070ies that 0.5 l, which is
basically useless. You can try it once, but for each run you get maybe a shot of
usable liquor. In Switzerland, you have 5 l and then you get at least some... yeah,
200 ml of usable spirits, and this is actually fun to tinker with. This is
something you and your fellows can, well, have a decent evening.
H: Microphone 5. Mic5: Yeah, so... When I saw the
electronics, that's usually not so safe to drink from lead and everything. So, do you
have any tips for how to solder, so it's safe for drinking?
W: Yeah, I forgot to mention it, we used lead free solder. That's a really great
comment of you. And I looked it up and solder, you can find it in the hardware
store next to the copper tubes that is lead-free. But check that to be sure.
You don't want lead into your spirits.
H: Microphone 1.
Mic1: Would you do the cooling per air flow instead of water?
W: I've seen online some people who did that with a construction that looked kind
of like a CPU cooler attached to something which had the vaporized alcohol run
through it. I mean, it'd be illegal to try, so I haven't and... But this guy
apparently has and it worked for him, so.. Yeah. But I don't know how you'd
construct the copper block which you attach to the CPU cooler, so there's that.
S: I've seen silver etchings in really, really old manuscripts that were using
just air to cool down, but... well, that's technology 500 years ago that says "Yeah,
use water."
H: Microphone 5.
Mic5: You showed the glass part still and you said this could not be purchased after
the 1st of January, right? But if you just purchase the single parts, because it's
standard lab equipment, is this also illegal?
S: Yes, I mean, you don't purchase a still per se, do you?
Mic5: Exactly, it's standard glass... S: I don't think this is gonna be a
problem, but, you know there's laboratory equipments and they sell you a still made
from glass for training distillation... And this costs some 250 euros and they
sell you the same exact part this still is made of for cheaper. So basically, order 3
or times...3 or 4 times different equipment parts, maybe from different...
And...I mean, this is ridiculous. Really, it is.
Mic5: Thanks.
H: Okay, Mikrophone 1.
Mic1: Yeah, hi. Thank you for your theoretical explanation. I have one
question but first I just wanted to mention, that you can build all this
without programming. You can buy a physical thing to measure the temperature,
so if anybody is afraid because of that part. And than yeah, my question is there
a reason why you don't use or just mentioned, turbo yeast, stuff like
that where you can reach 20 percents in two days. Is it not that tasty or stuff?
N: Yeah, I think actually we just used the first one, we got hands on, didn't we?
For the first experiments. I mean, you could try it but then you always have, it has
negative parts, so... maybe it's the taste, maybe it's something else.
But I mean, I wouldn't claim that you achieve high quality taste with
what we just showed.
S: I can answer one part for the
"Abfindungsbrennerei", you could use turbo yeast, but turbo yeast is something...
I'm not really sure about the translation. It is called "Hefenährsalze" which is salts,
that you need, to actually have an environment for this turbo yeast. And these
"Hefenährsalze" are unfortunely not allowed in "Abfindungsbrennerei".
So usally you don't...you don't use turbo yeast and you don't actually need it for
fruit spirits. It's okay, if you want to make grain spirits but you know the higher
the yeast ferments the less taste and scent remains in the destillate.
So we won't have taste otherwise we could just buy vodka in the store.
H: Okay, Mikrophone 5, please. Mic5: Thanks again for your talk.
Regarding the cooling. Is it necessary to cool it with room temperature water or why
not chuck in some ice cubes or crushed ice to keep the temperature lower or hinder
the rising of the temperature in the cooling vessel?
W: Well let's say we had run this hypothetical operation in our minds
multiple times. Maybe the first time we had tried it with ice cubes and then
started exchanging the water. Maybe we had a few times thought about running it and
using just tap water and exchanging the tap water multiple times. And then maybe
in our minds one time we forgot to change the water and it still would have worked,
so we made up all further operations just with a bucket of water and not changing
it, so yeah. Point is, that's the easiest way and it works.
M5: Excellent. H: And I saw there is some question from
the internet. Signal angel: Exactly. The internet wants
to know if there is a limit or a legal limit to the freeze destilation of the ice
rifing process? W: I tried to look it up, but I didn't
find anything about it. So, maybe there is a thing that if you...
Let's just stay with the beer guy from Bavaria. The customs actually have a page
about producing beer at home. You can do that legally in Germany and the first 100
liters are tax free, so you can just do that. So, yeah, then you have 100 liters
of beer and you start concentrating them and when you are done with that it gets
complicated. So, I guess that's the limit. And then that guy probably just taxes the
further beer and that's how he does it. N: But then you don't have to register
your freezer at the tax office so maybe people won't be that eager to check.
H: Ok then the last two questions, Microphone 1.
Mic1: Okay, so my question is about the freezing method as well. What is about the
methanol for the freezing method. Is there some way to get rid of this, or is it
really unnecessary? W: Well, as I said the stuff in the
pictures was red wine from Aldi because you don't experiment with expensive stuff.
And if I drink a whole bottle of Aldi red wine, nothing bad happens to me. So I
guess if I take any part of a bottle of red wine from Aldi, nothing bad will
happen, too. So there's that.
Mic1: So there shouldn't be methanol in the orginal stuff.
A: There probably will be but less enough so that it's not a problem.
H: Okay.
S:The thing about the methanol is, if I'm allowed to add, methanol comes from the
pectines. Pectines are basically the building substance of the cells.
But if you have juice or wine we already pressed it down and the pectins stay in the stuff
we throw away and so in the juice and in the wine that we cool down so there is
very little methanol in it. That is different if we make a mash and have all
the cell residue still in the mash, then we have the methanol in this mash.
And so we have it in the destillate.
H: Okay, the last question, microphone one please.
Mic1: Hi. Thanks for a great talk. My questions are around the head, hearts and tail,
the hacked distilling method that, I gather, you pretty much did
what you took for second third, fourth part of it, and you divided
it up like that. But in the craft distillery, how do you do to use it, but
controlling the temperature of the evaporation and the stilling liquid, or
do you also do it by breaking into segments? What's the technique you used to separate?
S: There's actually many roads that lead
to Rome. So you could basically use this fractioning method that there was
described here that you just take one liter and one liter and one liter and then you check it
by smelling and tasting, if it's okay, or if it's not. And then the other way is,
for example, temperature control. So if you buy a modern still from an experienced
copper smith, this is made with any types of sensors and that are telling you the
temperatures, the flow, the alcohol content. So you can basically program your
still to automatically cut the foreshots and the aftershots. So this is another
way. Then you could, for example, distill once or twice, and with the first
distillation, just take every alcohol that's coming out and then collect this
first run, and then redistill it, and then make your cuts for the heads and the
tails. And you can make it otherwise it can cut the head and tails in the first
run, and then just basically concentrate in the redistillation. So there's many
roads that lead to Rome and you're just gonna find out your way that suits you
best. But if you start, I would take the fracturing, the fracturing method. Yes.
Mic1: What was your run, your still on? What technique did you use for your
business, your still?
S: You mean my still at home? The craft still that I get on the...?
Yeah, this is experience.
So we know the first 1.5 liters is foreshots,
so we collect those and then we redistill them again. But. Yeah.
At some time my great-grandfather, most probably found out the way and he taught them
his son and his son. And I know that I didn't need to get rid of 1.5l of foreshots.
Mic1: Thank you. S: You are welcome.
H: Then at the end of this double feature, I expect a very big
warm applause for Franziska, Andreas, and Stefan
*Applause*
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