Although water in a solution with ethanol will not freeze at 32℉, it will freeze long before the alcohol will. When barrels of cider were left outside in the winter, sometimes buried in the ground in cider holes, sub-0 degree temperatures would make water freeze (crystalize) out of the solution. Colloquially, New Englanders called the process jacking. Alcohol is simply a solution of water and alcohol. For New Englanders this meant the autumn’s fresh cider could be left outside over the winter to produce a fiery applejack by spring.įractional crystallization is a technical term in chemistry to describe a process by which crystals can be purified. While distillation uses fire to separate alcohol and water by boiling point, fractional crystallization uses cold to separate them based on freezing point. Early New Englanders were party to a tradition of farmers who used the cold to strengthen their drinks. This is the most efficient way to bolster alcohol content, but it is not the only way. Wine is theoretically the strongest tipple we can make through the process of fermentation.ĭistillation helps to increase the concentration of alcohol in a beverage by extracting alcohol from water by using the lower boiling point of the intoxicating liquid. Most yeast will die or become inactive in solutions with an alcohol content over 18-20% by volume. Yeast, however, limits the strength of the beverages that fermentation can produce. Before this era, we relied on fermentation alone to garner us with enough alcohol to get us through our days. Although doctors, chemists, and alchemists had been flirting with the idea of distillation since perhaps the early middle ages, it was not until the 16th century that the common man came into contact with distilled spirits, namely gin. Distillation came to human civilization rather recently.
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