Alcohol Distillation and Its Connection to Terpenes

Alcohol distillation has been practiced for millennia. Distillation involves taking liquid samples and extracting specific flavors while dispensing with others, using different boiling points of water and other components in the mix to achieve this task. Distillation can be performed on fruit juice, mash or any other substance; it’s most popularly employed when producing alcohol.

Most commonly, grains serve as the foundation material; however, other things like fruit or root vegetables may also be used as such. After mashing is created, yeast converts sugars into alcohol which eventually produces a liquid with 7-9 percent alcohol by volume.

Terpenes are produced during fermentation of spirits. Two commonly detected terpenes in spirits are DL-limonene (orange to piney scent) and ethyl-2-hydroxy propanoate (fruity, pineapple pear aroma) both present at 4.76 to 0.80 mg/L in all samples except grappa (7.01 mg/L).

Distillation uses a heated column to separate vapors. As they rise up the column and come into contact with various plates that make contact, each plate cools them progressively more than its predecessor; this allows heavier molecules to condense lower down while lighter ones move further up; these higher up moving molecules are known as “heart” of distillate or the ones with more flavor while any leftover “tail” fraction can either be discarded or combined with heart to produce an overall more refined product.