Whether you’re enjoying a neat martini at the local singles bar or you’re a 17th century pirate clinging to a bottle of rum on the high seas, your life has been subtly enriched by a centuries old process known as distillation. While not exclusively pertaining to alcoholic spirits, distillation is a method used to separate mixtures based on their volatility (or tendency to vaporize) in a boiling liquid mixture. For the purpose of adult beverages, distillation is applied to fermented grain, fruit or vegetables in an effort to produce drinkable liquids with a greater alcohol content.The distillation basics have more or less gone unchanged since the 8th century. One of the first distillation tactics put into use was “freeze distillation,” whereby a product is partially frozen, enabling the easy identification of higher alcohol concentrated areas, based on various degrees of freezing temperature, allowing for the removal or optimization of lower concentration zones. Freeze distillation was particularly common in Central Asia during the middle ages in what would be modern day Mongolia. More high tech improvements on the distillation process expounded as centuries passed. Fractional distillation came into practice during the 13th century. In fractional distillation, a mixture is heated, as opposed to frozen, to its boiling point, allowing for the separation of chemical compounds at differing temperatures.While the fundamentals of distillation remain practically the same to this day, the alcoholic beverage industry has provided increasingly strict guidelines for the distilling process, resulting in dramatic improvements in sanitation and product quality. In fact, in the United States, it is necessary for all distillers to be properly licensed. Unlicensed distilling, also known as moonshining, is illegal and has gone a drastic dip in popularity since its peak during the prohibition era, with professional distilleries readily available and licensed microdistilling licenses widely available.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 1:42 pm and is filed under history. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.