Discussion - Spirits, Essential Oils, Vinegar

Would you like to exchange your experiences about spirits, essential oils and vinegar with other participiants? Please observe our forum rules (see Helpful tips for use).

June 2018:

It has now been an unbelievable 16 years (!) since the last major change to the website and forums. When you think that two to three years are an eternity for the Internet sector, that is really something. In any case, there has been so much going on in terms of technology that it has become urgently necessary to completely redesign not only the forums, but also the entire website, from scratch and bring the programming up to date. Naturally, along with this we also introduced various new features; for example it was high time we allowed pictures to be uploaded with a forum post too or enabled users to subscribe to the forums via RSS feeds. And of course we have subsequently included pictures that are saved on external websites and were then integrated here using an img tag, so that no valuable information is lost. In any case, we hope you continue to have fun swapping experiences and trying things out.

Juni 2002:

At this point, we would first like to extend a big thank-you to all the users of our specialist questions for their lively involvement. Without you, we could never have developed such an informative and high-quality reference guide in such a short time (the first post dates from April 8, 1999). The large number of posts and high numbers of visitors made it necessary for us to develop the specialist questions ourselves using PHP and MySQL (at last no more annoying advertising banners!). During the course of this, we have hopefully introduced several improvements.

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  • The three topic areas, i.e. distilling spirits, distilling essential oils/hydrosols and making vinegar, are divided into three different websites. Each website contains the two forums “Recipes” for all the topics concerning fruit and recipes, and “Discussion” for all the other topics related to distilling spirits, essential oils/hydrosols or making vinegar. If we find posts that are unintentionally in the wrong forum, we will move them to the right forum. These posts have not been deleted, just moved.
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So, that’s it. We hope you have a lot of fun swapping experiences, reading, posting and naturally also trying things out afterwards. Dr Malle & Dr Schmickl Dr. Malle & Dr. Schmickl

Alcohol measurement

Renigald am 30.04.2020 17:59:34 | Region: USA

I seem to be getting bad readings though for titrated vinegar. I titrate the vinegar to pH 7.0, put 0.5 ml into the test

tube with a boiling stone and two drops of anti-foam agent, and then boil it away into the distillation column and syringe. I keep getting 0% alcohol, in the last case I know it was wrong since I added enough alcohol the night before to push the mash alcohol concentration up to 5-6% and the vinegar concentration only increased 1% during the same time.

I am not touching the metal part of the refraktometer or doing anything else I remember from your instructions. Any ideas where I am making a mistake? Thanks!

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RE: Alcohol measurement

Helge am 30.04.2020 18:01:46 | Region: Austria
- buy vinegar (a cheap one is goog enough) and mix it with e.g. vodka or
wine, the acid content of the mixture should be between appr. 2 to 5% and the
alcohol content also between appr. 2 to 5%vol. Mix as accurate as possible, so
you’re are able to calculate both values of the mixture, according to the
values stated on the labels of the bought bottels. - And/or buy wine (colour and quality doesn’t matter), adding vinegar is
not necessary. Wine corresponds with appr. 0,5% acetic acid, the alcohol
content is stated on the label of the bottle.

Then do the analysis, the result should correspond with the calculated values. I can imagine, you’ve done the wrong calculation of the analysis, not considering the amount of NaOH-Solution you added. But this is just a guess.
The formula for calculation of a mixture of acetic acid and alcohol you find on page 7 of the description. Please write a short e-mail with the calculation and results of the whole process.
 
By the way, one drop of anti-foam is enough, but it’s not really a
problem if adding two.

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RE: Alcohol measurement

Reginald am 30.04.2020 18:02:56 | Region: USA
Thanks for the advice. I found my mistake: the molarity of the NaOH I am
using is too low (0.2 N) so the volume required for titration dilutes the
alcohol % to almost nothing. I will be using 1.0N once it comes in the mail and
this should allow me to factor the volume without over-dilution of the alcohol.
Thanks!
Reggie

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