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. Read More »