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Give a warm welcome to
Stephan Heininger
as the first part of the
double feature.
And
because this is a double feature,
I get asked to please
don't walk around while
just talk, please watch
all the too serious
and enjoy it.
So let's start with the first
part.
To my right, it's Stephanie
Heininger, you all know him from
the and our podcast,
so give him a warm welcome and
start with the show.
Lee graduated master distiller from
the Institute for Fermentation and
Biotechnology in Berlin.
I am also the fifth generation,
uh, distiller of our
family companies still.
So please don't this
all the commercial alcohol producers
persay because that's how I do
my living.
And we're going to talk today about,
uh, well, alcohol production,
uh, boost production, high, uh,
high strength quality
production, that is.
And distilling is only one
way of producing hard liquor.
Let me show you the other three types.
The first types are liqueurs that you
all know. Liqueurs are basically
not distilled.
They use.
Already made neutral
green spirits that come from large,
large alcohol refineries that
are usually not distilled and it's
perfectly legal to make liqueurs at home,
just buy yourself some vodka and flavor.
This vodka with whatever you fancy,
have got a nice liqueur recipe
for you later on.
So we have non distilled spirits.
Most of them are liqueur, some are in
some of vodka, and we have the field
of distilled spirits.
Most genes are distilled, most vodka
distilled. The basis is always
neutral, green spirits or spirits
made from grain.
They are flavored, they are distilled.
And the distillation itself here in
Germany is legal.
But you have to register
and license your still.
And then we have the third part
and the most well,
the most true to the fruit part.
That is where we do not actually buy
pre produced neutral green spirits,
but we make the alcohol ourselves
via fermentation with yeast.
So we produce the alcohol by
fermentation ourself.
We distilled it ourselves, but we
need a license for that.
Otherwise it's illegal.
But on the other hand, of course, the
right one is the most fun to do.
So how do we actually produce
alcohol? But alcohol is usually
or always produced by
taking sugar sugar as the basis
of the fuel for our biochemical reaction
we want to achieve.
And our little tiny helpers,
the yeast, yeast cells,
some kind of fungus, they
break down the sugar and
they transform it into alcohol
via alcoholic fermentation.
This, you know, all from your
chemistry or biological
biology classes.
And how do you make of this?
Well, we need this sugar, this sugar
somehow converted to alcohol.
Where do we get this sugar from?
The traditional German way is making
fruit spirits and fruit.
Spirits have the advantage that the
mesh that is basically
the the stuff where the
yeast makes the alcohol from already
contains sugar.
So sugar is what we need.
Usually it's a fruit juice or a smoothie
from apples and pears, plums,
cherries, you name it.
So we make fruit
juice or a smoothie out of it.
Why? Because the yeast works best in
a liquid environment.
It also has some other
pros. The mesh is easier
to pump and easier to measure
and.
You have to always take into
consideration that you use the best
routes available, only the best routes
give you the best taste
and sent and there I have to
add supermarket quality fruit
is not necessarily the best.
Best is usually baby food.
Great, but baby food, great
fruits you can't buy in the supermarket,
sadly.
So, so much about the quality of our food
in our supermarkets.
Then if you prepare such a mash, you
take the you take the fruits, you
make a smoothie out of it with a blender
or you press it to choose and then
you check your acidity because yeast
works best in an acidity of
a three to three point
four.
The other reason is that in such
an acidic environment, bacteria that
might consume our sugar and
do not ferment
into alcohol uh, doesn't,
uh, it's not active anymore.
OK, if we have a higher pitch,
we use just citric acid, food,
great acid to lower the acidity
of the mesh.
And then we take designated
distillers use that has some properties
that we need for the fermentation.
For example, this yeast
ferments up to a very high alcoholic
contact, usually above 10 percent.
Your normal bakers would stop at four
or five percent alcohol.
And then we let this ferment.
So we take our prepared mash out
of the up of the chooser, out of the
smoothie maker, and we put it in
fermentation tanks.
Fermentation tanks is basically stainless
steel, glass, plastics, whatever.
It's just a bucket, basically.
Then you get used to this bucket of
fermented spirits.
You try to control the temperature.
The yeast always has an optimal
temperature that, uh, it works best.
So usually it's 15 to 22
degrees. Sometimes
in late August when you've got your
fruits just in harvest times,
it's still too warm.
So you need another yeast that is more
active at, let's say, 25 to
27 degrees.
Then you need an airlock on this
fermentation because fermentation
generates CO2, CO2
and a lot of it.
And this needs to get out.
But oxygen should not get
into the yeast because then we can add
another type of fermentation that doesn't
produce alcohol.
So we need an analog.
And this airlock lets the carbon dioxide
get out, but no, uh,
oxygen back in.
So you check your airlocks.
And then you double check your logs,
because every distiller that says his
fermentation tank didn't blow up on him
once or twice is a liar.
This happens all the time.
And then we ferment this mess for about
two weeks. So we have the smoothie.
We at least the yeast does
its work. And then we have a smoothie
that contains around 10 percent alcohol.
After two weeks, the bubbles
is the CO2 that is evaporating
and we don't have any more bubbles
so that now fermentation is complete
and then we try to distill it
as soon as possible after fermentation
because a fully fermented mash
is not getting better with time.
And then we come to the part.
For example, a small
fermentation tank we see here, it's just
10 liters, we have this
tiny airlock where the CO2 can bubble out
via this water.
What, uh, filling, but
no oxygen can go back in.
So this is something you basically can do
everywhere at home.
And if you get this fermented mash,
you come to the distillation.
Distillation itself is just a physical
process, the physical means of separation
of liquids and solids and of
concentrating alcohol
in that matter or
taste in sand because
the boiling point of alcohol is lower
than the boiling point of water or
the solid stone.
Boil it all. So if we heat up this
mash, the alcohol
will start evaporating sooner than
the water.
And so we feel mentioned the civil
war heated up, and as soon as the seal
gets to around 70 degrees centigrade,
the alcoholic,
the alcohol starts to evaporate, rising
with it, the molecules
that make up the scent of the spirit that
we want to distill.
So it's basically essential or is
aldehydes asters some ketones?
Um, but yeah, uh,
stuff that evaporates and
then we cool it down again at
the condenser.
So the alcoholic vapor that we just
produced by heating up is
going to the condenser, then cool down.
So it liquefies again and it goes down
and basically we have our distilled
spirit, then
we can cut off heads
and tails and hearts.
This is basically three parts of
the distillate that we get.
The heads parts are the earliest
evaporating parts.
These are, uh, short
alcohols that are aldehydes
that we do not want.
For example, methanol is among them.
Those are slightly toxic.
I just say they're not actually that
toxic. They're just bad for your health.
And they taste like like, uh,
like solvent.
And the taste, the tales, they
start to, uh, smell and
taste like like Sellar foul of
a false flavor.
So we don't want those flavors in our
spirits. So we cut it into heads,
hearts and tails.
Those hearts, those fine tasting
at fine tasting alcoholic part.
We keep, we collect and then
we read is still these ones to
get even to get rid of even
more of the heads and the tail parts that
might still be in the first part
part. So this
is, uh, laboratory still this
still you could buy in an
online shop in any laboratory device,
shops, 500 milliliter.
It is still legal.
You can do this at home until the day
after tomorrow.
Then those get, uh,
then those get forbidden so you can't buy
them anymore.
So if you do want to have fun, go
to the local drug laboratory
dealer
can quickly demonstrate how this works.
So we've got the heater here.
It's just, uh, propylene gas
going up here.
We've got our mesh inside.
The alcohol evaporates, goes up,
goes into the condenser.
The condenser cools it down and the
distillate comes out here again.
It's just in a quick schematics,
but same principle,
and this is just stuff that you could
basically buy almost
everywhere with laboratory equipment is
sold asset until the day
after tomorrow.
From 2018 on, all home
sales in Germany will be illegal,
so you can buy one in the next three
days and you can still use it
in 2018, but you can't buy any more
of them from 1st of January or 2nd
of January.
So we have one exception.
You can buy stills of
up to two liters of Sias
if they're only used for the
production of essential oils or
distillation of water.
But the basic physical principle
stands.
But don't
buy the stuff online and don't buy
it anywhere where someone will register
your address because that's what they're
legally obliged to, obliged to do,
any vendor of Distills has
to register your name and address by
the tax office, which
gives us back to the hacking
aspect we're going to
see later on about building
stores, which is totally illegal, by the
way.
Don't do that,
but there is one exception, and this, I
have to say, will be leaving now the
part of the home distilling.
Unfortunately, we have to go semipro
if we want to continue distilling
Brandy's can go
craft distilling crafted ceiling, on the
other hand, is far more easy to do
from 2018 on than it used to be
until the day after tomorrow.
A lot of things change our precious
brand Stoya Gazette's is
basically gone out of business
because of the EU.
Thanks, Brussels.
But we get the new Alcoa, is
it? And Alcoa, because it's actually
quite nice for Kraft Distillers, because
if you fulfill the requirements
that this law states,
you are legally obliged to get this
distillation license until now.
You can apply for one.
But if you don't, if you don't get one of
those brand vyn
ractopamine rates of
this, well.
The right to distill at the moment,
well, you can start from 2018
on, you must get one if you apply
for one and if you fulfill the
requirements.
This is called up Phonons Brenin,
because it's basically
you compensate the state
for the tax of the alcohol
that you're going to produce.
Until now, the optional spending is only
in the southern parts of Germany.
So Bavaria converting Leuchtenburg parts
of Hesson. So not in the north.
Not in the east,
the background is
no. Now you can do it in
the whole of Germany.
So everywhere where you are, you can
apply for a optionsXpress enriched
backgrounders. If you are a farmer or
even a part time farmer, the
state allows you to distill this amount
of alcohol.
This is a usual craft.
Still, this is ours.
It's from the 70s.
It's not very high tech, but it gets the
job done and you can buy
or build something comparable to this.
This is the size of about 150
liters in the future.
The size and
the quantity of the cells is no longer
regulated. So you can basically buy any
still of any size that you want from 2018
on. So this final sprint,
right, allows you to
produce 300 liters of
pure alcohol per year.
That doesn't sound much, but actually it
is because it's liters pure
alcohol. Who of us consumes
the pure alcohol? We water it down and we
sell it entirely about us.
So if you divide it by
point four for the first 40 percent
for the for the brandy and
by point five because we only have
half a liter bottles, then we get 1500
bottles per year allowance,
you have to drink that.
Or you have to sell that
and then even another thing, we
get an allotment so we could produce
900 liters in one year if
we then don't produce any
more in the two following years.
That's only one, uh, small,
uh, cut.
You can only make fruit or green spirit
normalizes.
So no rum and no chank.
I'm sorry.
But as I said, you need to be a farmer
or a part time farmer.
Well, that's actually not so hard.
You need three hectares of
regular three orchards or
you need one point five hectares of
intensively farmed fruit or charge.
This is the one thing
that maybe will hold back
most of you guys thinking about opening
up an opening today, but there's
a tiny way around it cheat
code. You can rent or lease it
and you can rent or lease it any
time in the next 10 years.
And you have only to show it once
to your customers.
And when the custom guy then has checked
your your mark that you
owned or rented, or at least
then you're good to go forever.
So that's going to be some
some areas of free hectors that are going
to be at least for 365
days per year to three hundred and sixty
five guys.
The other exceptions, it has to be
mixed fruit trees or intensely farmed
fruit trees. Well, that's also a cheat
code because that's one fruit
or one bulb.
That you can grow, that is allowed
and that you don't see, and that is not
tree that you need to plant and wait for
five years. So this is the
Jerusalem artichoke or TOPI
Nambu, very well known in
Wittenburg.
This one can be planted anywhere and you
can just, you know, rent any
area of just three hectares like
like Rossland, like like a forest,
like a jungle.
And you say, yeah, tomorrow I'm going to
plant some Jerusalem artichoke.
And the customs agent has to say, yeah,
of course you do.
Then we have another requirement.
This might be a bit tricky for some
of us or for some of you, because
I have an opinion.
You have to have a clean sheet in
taxation. So if you cheated on your taxes
once, you're not going to get the
opinions but interest in the future,
the next year, you have to have an
economic interest in producing.
Well, but this is just this is just,
uh, what we say a paper tiger,
because if I have an economic interest
of a given country as a bottle
of liquor, then my economic interest is
fulfilled. So this is not
a requirement that, say,
um, the taxation rate,
this one liter of pure alcohol
that you're going to produce, you have to
pay the state a tax for it in
this tax is a reduced,
uh, one of 10 euros,
22 cents per liter, pure alcohol.
So if you have 300 liters
of pure alcohol, you know how much
tax you're going to pay for it.
And just as
an example, how much of apples,
Pearce or plums or so
you're going to need, there's
a list of this house Boite
sets. It's also a calculated
result from certain
Masche. And for apples,
we have three point six liters of pure
alcohol for 100 liters of Apple
so we can calculate how many apples you
have to buy or have to
use if you want to get your three hundred
liters.
Then
this is it. Maybe this is maybe not
the best for your privacy aware
guys out there, because if you own
a still and if you've got a license
expense, then the federal
customs agents are allowed to check
the still every day, every
night, whenever they choose fit.
The next is the food inspectors
have the right to check your store, but
they only come in business hours.
So that's a bit better.
And then you need to enter a professional
association called Brusqueness and Shaft,
either for the farming industry or for
the food service industry, because if you
blow yourself up while operating is
still, then you're at least in short.
Which brings us to the safety
issues of operating a still because,
well, accidents happen and
they happen all the time, usually once or
twice a year.
A person in southern Germany
blows him or herself up because he
or her didn't check the safety
regulations.
And the most important thing about
running A still is knowing that alcoholic
vapor is by itself explosive.
It's low grade. It's not dynamite, but it
is dangerous. So you always have to check
that you don't have a
huge amount of alcoholic vapor
just running around.
So the
legal stills will be checked
by the technical control
board, by the 240 crew, by the
brusqueness and craft and by customs
agents for different reasons.
But they are all going to check you still
until you get your license to produce.
And the first and foremost safety
mechanism is build something
that controls are the checks,
if your cooler is actually
running here, we have a cooler
and this cooler, as we said before,
condenses the alcoholic vapor back
to liquids.
If it's not working, we don't get
a liquid. Forget the vapors
straight out of the hole.
The vapor of alcohol is
heavier than air.
So it goes down on the surface
and then you just need some igniting
spark and you get blown up.
So the most important thing that the
brusqueness and shaft and the tooth is
going to check, do you have any reason
to check if your condenser is working or
not?
Second of all, have a good ventilation.
This is usually a quiet, but just having
it a ground floor and opening a big
door and then you have natural
ventilation. If there are alcoholic
vapors, uh,
not rising, but, uh,
existing that are going to just diffuse
outside in the air and fresh air.
And there's, uh, this danger
is then compensated.
And the third is if you use electrical
equipment within one meter of the steel,
make sure it's, uh, according to
the ATX, the anti
explosive, uh, whatever,
uh, certification
usually that's, uh,
usually we do this by using
only, uh, compressed air
valves, for example, because compressed
air does not ignite any sparks.
And so we don't we don't have
the the danger of exploding.
So, so much for safety
now about the economics, because,
as I said, you're a part time farmer now
and this doesn't come for free.
If you buy a new steel by one of the
established German coppersmiths,
this deal will cost between 25
and 45000 euros.
You need to sell a lot of those 1500
bottles per year to get this back.
The alternative is, of course, buy a new
buy a used steel.
Those are a lot cheaper.
You even get them refurbished like
Matchbox.
So they are actually
checked again by the by the producer.
And, uh, those is
a really, really good alternative.
You can also buy in forest.
I wouldn't recommend that.
Did that got the T-shirt.
Well, you could build one myself, but
please don't do this US style moonshine
stills that you see in the moonshiner
forums. So do one like this
where Andrea SanFrancisco
is telling you about later on.
The energy costs, if you heat up, are
still of a 150 liter, and
if you do this five or six times a day
as you can, you have about 100
euros of energy consumption,
100 euros, you need to get into energy
consumption per 100 liters
per still per day, which
equals around 15 euros per 100
liter mass tax is around
40 euros of alcohol tax per 100
mesh.
And if you calculate all this together
and divide it by 1500 bottles
and then you take it about eight years
old, which is what you say about this
is your usual, uh,
usual investment calculation
time, then you will need to charge
at least 20 euros per bottle
for a liquor from my
Spain and try to reach the break even.
So I see a lot of, uh,
a farmer's market spirits
that sell the booze for 10,
12, 14 euros.
There's a saying in our in,
uh, distillers
circles, if you do this, you could also
just, you know, take a five euro note and
put it on the head of the bottle because
you're cutting your own throat.
So if you want to start up
and explain and I.
First, don't panic.
This is something that's done for ages
and now you can do that to
check the online resources at the
customs office,
but I have to admit, some pages at the
customs office are, according to the
old law, some already to the new law.
So maybe check
again in a couple of months or
just call the customs agents.
I mean, it's their job to help you doing
this. They don't want to hinder you.
They want to help you, but don't try to
screw them over.
Those are people that are professionals
that are doing their job.
If you call them and if you meet
with them, then they're going to be
happy to help you.
Then check the details on what still you
want to build or to buy
always according and in coordination
with the customs agents or with
the guys at
the brusqueness and the Professionals
Association.
And then you can basically apply for this
afternoon plan.
As I said, if you fulfill the
regulations, they have to
give you this license.
Then, as I said, shaft
a way to talk and
then you might check in
with the local farmers club or Organic
Farmers Club or, for example, the
University of Hawaii and has really
good distiller's classes because it's
one thing of reading something in a book.
It's something totally different to
actually take part in a course,
such a course set to pick another three
400 euros.
But it's money well spent
because if you ruin a batch of 1000
kilos of apples, that's going to be more
expensive.
Yeah, and this is basically the end
of my talk is the model
that I wanted to show you, because if you
don't want to apply for an upfront
explanation and although it can
be done, it is quite a hassle, it is
easier just to dramatize, uh,
using, uh, neutral ground spirit.
So here's the recipe you take
across route. You take some coriander
seeds, some multi-tier leaves, you talc
take galangal root,
some cinnamon, some cardamom.
You just mix it with 200
milliliters of 50 percent vodka and
let it snow. Let it let it stand
for 10 days, filtered through
a filter. Then you have a martini,
liqueur, macerate, and this macerate
is basically concentrate.
You make your liqueur out of and
then mix it again with one point four
liters of vodka, have the water,
500 grams of sugar,
mix it, maybe, uh,
filter it again through the filter and
then you have your delicious Martha
liqueur.
And this is basically the end
of my talk. So thanks a lot.
Well, thanks for Stefaan panning
out for this double feature
start.