Request for a voice of reason (who actually knows these things...)

[thanate]

So Brian was talking to his friend on the phone, and asked: "When we distill alcohol-- what's the difference between that and percolating?" (and later on: "This might be the best thing ever, or it might explode, I don't know.")

Does anybody know how a coffee percolator works? My pathetic websearch skills are not finding the answer to this. But it doesn't make sense to me that this would involve the same process at all-- I mean, to make coffee, you've got to drip water through coffee grounds, yes? So distilling would produce water that was less coffee-filled than filtration, right? And none of us (Brian, Carey or me) has any actual idea of how the percolator works, except that they have a glass bit on top where you can watch things steam. But if nothing else, if this were actually a viable option, surely one of us would have heard of it before, right?

Brian says he wishes to fight for the legal right to kill himself by distilling his own alcohol...

----

Ok, TR came in at about 3:15 or so and delivered an impassioned lecture on causing oneself blindness or death by distilling alcohol at uncontroled temperatures, explained the actual premise of distillation, and then gave Brian a phone number for a friend of his who actually makes various sorts of distilled alcohols (mead, and strong cider, and absynthe, which is actually what Brian has been trying to make for the past month or so and failing miserably.) Carey and I listened to them and laughed our heads off... I guess occasionally these people are worth keeping around for the entertainment value alone...

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_percolator

Aunt wiki knows almost as much as uncle google.

[rosnbery.livejournal.com]

God endowed us all with the inalienable rights to make ourselves blind with moonshine corn liquor.

[rosnbery.livejournal.com]

Distilling is also completely different than percolating.

[heuchera.livejournal.com]

Well, I believe that the majority of the water in the percolator does not achieve the gas state (I use a kettle and a cone filter, so this is not based on my personal experience). You heat the water up enough to bubble up from the reservoir and through the grounds, but you don't want to be making coffee from actual boiling hot water or vapor. Certainly you don't vaporize the water and then condense it again to make coffee with it. In distillation, you are taking advantage of (in the case of liquids) two different boiling points. Thus to distill your potential alcoholic beverage of choice, the lower boiling liquid (alcohol) can be mostly separated from the water by heating the mixture enough to boil the alchol off. Water and alcohol azeotrope, so you don't actually get pure alcohol that way, but it's purer than it started. The vapor condenses on the item cleverly called the condenser, which allows you to collect the pure(r) liquid.

I suppose you could boil your already made coffee for a long time, evaporating more water and thus producing a coffee concentrate, and maybe that would sort of count as distilling coffee. The water certainly has a lower boiling point than the oils or solid in the coffee -- there are probably volatiles present but I don't know what they are. The boiling would significantly degrade the taste of the coffee (for those of us who like it!) probably because some of the compounds are decomposing in some way, and isn't what a percolator does at any rate.

More than you wanted to know.... possibly more than I know. Paint is different than my rusty chem lab skills...

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Aw, you don't try to distil your paint to make it dry faster?

I have done a little with the concept of distillation, but it was a long time ago (high school science project), and failing the actual working knowledge of how the coffee thing worked, I couldn't exactly have explained the difference. And no, I didn't think distilling coffee sounded like a good idea to anyone-- although do you know how expresso works? Because I know it's more concentrated in some way, although the only time I've been within range of machine making it I was more interested in the phenomenon that the smell of it was making me dizzy than how it actually worked.

[heuchera.livejournal.com]

I don't really understand the espresso thing, though I will try to remember to ask my brother (whose current ambition is to become a coffee roaster). I think the beans are ground finer, which would give more surface area and thus possibly faster extraction of coffee-ness. Pressure may be involved in some way...

Attempting to distill waterbased paint would be extremely unrewarding. Extremely. As in, ew, gross.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

coffee roaster? Is this a cooking-related career, or mid-production, or what? (one of Steve's brothers (in northern CA) is a buyer of coffee beans, and travels all over the world talking to people who grow them-- that sounded kind of interesting. In theory, I could try to get contact info for him if Perry would appreciate it...)

Wikipedia has provided the following (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso), which is faintly, well, disturbing... a puck of ground coffee? ok, never mind. I just think you people are all terribly odd, anyway. (and I stand by my father's statement that anything about which you have to build rituals is obviously addictive and probably not terribly good for you...)

[heuchera.livejournal.com]

as far as I know, it is what happens between harvesting beans and grinding them. I'm not really up on what is entailed. He mentioned it in passing recently. We'll see what transpires.

I agree the puck of coffee does not sound very appealing. But, you don't eat that part, right? Mmm, mocha. mmmm.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Now, see, mocha is totally unrelated. It's the "you must serve this within 10 seconds of when it comes out of the machine, and if you don't drink it within 2 minutes it goes all nasty on you" that concerns me. I mean, this is starting to sound like alchemy or something...

Of course, what would I know? And I still have an unhealthy fascination with the concept of coffee, and all the syrups and creamers that you get to mix into it, it's just the beverage that lets me down when I succumb and try it, being all nasty and giving me stomach aches & everything. Sad. Although there was real creamer in the lab fridge this morning, and I filled up my 20 oz water bottle with a packet of hot chocolate mix, 2/3 very hot water, and the remaining third french vanilla creamer and it was very very good. (though I think I've used up my creamer rights all at one go until such time as I buy a container for the communal supply...)