Alcohol Distillation and Its Impact on Craft Cocktails

Alcohol distillation is one of the main distinctions that define spirits from other fermented (nondistilled) beverages like beer and wine. Distillation creates pure form ethyl alcohol known as grain alcohol or drinking alcohol that can then be further purified before used to craft spirits such as gin, vodka or whiskey.

Distillers typically start off their process of creating alcohol by starting with fermented materials such as fruit, grains or potatoes that have already undergone fermentation. They then use enzymes to break down long starch molecules into short sugar molecules so that yeast can consume them, then use either wild or brewer’s yeast strains, custom-cultured strains, or their own lab-created strain to ferment the material into alcohol.

Alcohol is produced using either a pot or column still. With a pot still, vapor mixture passes through several cuts before being discarded as the heads and tails contain volatile compounds with unpleasant or even toxic odours or tastes; heart (also called “hearts”) holds most of the ethanol which will then be put back into production batches.

Column stills follow a similar process to distilleries but are much more efficient, enabling large scale production of spirits like gin, vodka and whiskey with distinctive flavor profiles suitable for cocktail making.