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Ready to Geek Out? A Chemistry Lesson

from Ryan Kanto

What is the first step in making spirits?
We cook rye to make the starches water soluble.
Enzymes that are naturally in the rye malt break
down the sugars. We add yeast to it, and it eats
the sugars. One of the byproducts is ethanol.
What is the transitional product?
What we basically did there is make a beer. It’s
not necessarily beer you would drink, but there’s
alcohol in it, and there’s a lot of really good
flavors. It’s called a “wash.” It has 8 to 10 percent
alcohol after five to seven days.

What happens once you get a “wash?”
We put the wash in a distillation apparatus to
turn it into something much more pure. So we
boil off the alcohol. The alcohol boils at a lower
temperature than water. Because they have
different boiling temperatures, you can use a
distillation column to concentrate that alcohol.
What makes a good flavor or a bad flavor?
As the vapor goes up, it gets more concentrated.
When it gets to the top, it may be 60 to 80
percent alcohol. We run this process and
concentrate our alcohol, and that’s what Ryan Kanto at Quantum Spirits
/ Dustin Holbrook photo
separates the good flavors from the bad flavors.
delicate organics get broken down. Think about
How does it turn into vodka? a fresh sliced orange versus orange that’s been
From there, we proof it down. For vodka, we cooked. It’s a lot brighter when it’s fresh cut. The
take it up to 95 percent alcohol to remove the same sort of thing happens with distillation.
impurities, then dilute it and filter the product
before we bottle it at 40 percent alcohol. When you reduce the pressure, you also reduce
the temperature at which it will boil. Imagine all
What about gin? the little molecules in the air pushing down on
Gin is similar, except when we’re distilling, we add the surface of the liquid. If you remove some of
botanicals. Juniper berries are the big one, but that pressure, you’re not exerting as much force
we also add coriander or different types of herbs, on the surface of the liquid. More of them are
spice or citrus, depending on what we’re trying to likely to pop off and turn into vapor than they
achieve.
are to stay in the liquid. With vacuum distillation,
What makes your liquor unique? we can lower the temperature by 50 degrees or
One of the things we do that’s a little bit unique more, so we’re able to extract out these really
is vacuum distillation. Normally, we have to delicate organic compounds without potentially
heat it to around 190 degrees, and some of the destroying them or altering them.

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