How to Create Unique Flavors Through Distillation

Distillation is an increasingly popular method among craft spirits producers, used to separate liquid ingredients from solid and non-liquid components for creating unique flavors not available elsewhere. Furthermore, distillation allows producers to control how strong or weak a spirit is as well as the texture it has.

Distillation is not a new concept, but modern techniques have made it more useful than ever. There are various forms of distillation; the most widely practiced being simple distillation where ingredients are heated together before channeled through a condenser where any vapor that rises is collected and separated from liquid. Simple distillation works best when boiling points of two or more liquids differ significantly (typically 25 degreesC difference); additionally it can also be used to separate volatile compounds from non-volatile oils or solids that combine together in solution.

Other types of distillation are fractional distillation and destructive distillation; both involve collecting volatile ‘fractions’ at each step, while source materials are decomposed via heat to yield desired chemical compounds that can then be collected. Aside from these separation techniques, many other methods exist that can significantly change a spirit’s final profile during or post distillation – for instance using sonication to break open botanical cell walls to release their contents more rapidly into solvents than through heating alone.