Alcohol Distillation and Its Cultural Evolution

Alcohol distillation is a complex and highly specialized process for creating high-grade ethanol fuel and other industrial products, using large equipment with potentially hazardous designs. Safety must be an issue when creating any small or large community or industrial fuel alcohol plants; also factoring in short and long-term availability of alternative energy sources is an important consideration.

Alcohol production by fermentation with yeast is one of the oldest organic processes known to humankind, often credited with beginning civilization as we know it. Hunter-gatherers were thought to have started farming crops out of curiosity or perhaps the desire for intoxicating beverages motivated them to settle down and cultivate crops as early as 10,000 BCE.

Fermentation occurs when yeast consumes all available sugars and converts them to ethanol alcohol, water and other by-products. For fermentation to occur successfully, alcohol content of 15-17% ABV or higher must be achieved; most alcoholic beverages are therefore produced to this strength.

Distillation of alcohol beverages is a highly skilled, complex and time-consuming process requiring special equipment, skills and knowledge in order to be carried out correctly. Distillation has been used for millennia across many cultures around the globe in making drinks such as rum, whiskey, vodka, beer gin and even aguardiente. Alcohol is an integral component of human life with influences stretching across art, music, religion and philosophy, politics as well as history itself – its history inextricably tied with our culture’s development.