Chinese liquor is one of the six distilled spirits in the world. The fermented distiller's grains contain about 5% ethanol and a large but small amount of flavor components, which need to be distilled to extract the ethanol and flavor components.
So-called distillation, is to use the mother liquid components in volatile, use the method of heating, evaporation and condensation, mother will be worse in the ethanol and the aroma components extracted, and the operation to eliminate harmful impurities, commonly known as: "grilled wine".
Steaming process
The main process of steaming wine is: in the retort steam rise, workers will hand into the retort gently bad, side SAIC, side loading, until the retort. Steam and retter-steamer in full contact, steam body and liquid for cold and hot exchange, ethanol and other aroma substances continue to vaporize, condensation, layer upon layer concentration, finally about 5% ethanol in the retter-steamer concentrated into 65-70%vol special style liquor.
Distillate law of various components
Since the volatilization performance of each component is different, and the volatilization performance is also affected by the concentration of ethanol, the distillation time of different components in the process of steaming wine is different. During the distillation process, the ethanol concentration changes constantly, and the ethanol degree of distillate decreases with the decrease of ethanol in distillate.
There are many esters, high alcohols, aldehydes, acids and methanol in the wine head, which make the wine head fragrant and spicy. Wine body is more coordinated; There is more acid, especially lactic acid, in the tail, which is sweet but miscellaneous. Therefore, when steaming wine, attention should be paid to removing the head and tail. The head and tail of wine should be stored separately, and sometimes can be used for mixing wine.
Sensory characteristics of different distilling stages and grades of raw wine
With a rising distillation temperature, the liquor flow time will gradually increase, and the alcohol concentration will gradually decrease from a high concentration. In this process, medium and high concentration of alcohol will be separated according to the quality requirements. This process is called wine picking. In the process of wine picking, the distillate of original wine is generally divided into wine head, front section, middle section, tail section, tail wine and tail water.
The traditional process is to "cut flowers" to pick wine. "Flower" here refers to the water, alcohol due to the role of surface tension and splash foam, usually called "splash", "hop" and so on. The foam produced by alcohol is easy to dissipate due to low tension. As the distillation temperature increases, the alcohol concentration gradually decreases, and the dissipation rate of the foam produced by alcohol (hop) slows down.
At this time, the amount of water dissolved in alcohol gradually increases, because the relative density of water is greater than that of alcohol, the tension is high, and the dissipation rate of water foam (splash) is slow. Now the improvement of the process, usually when the wine starts to flow, the wine head is appropriately picked, according to the quality of the wine "quality segmentation".
