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Use of deaerated water in the distilling industry

richard
edited June 28 in General

In the distilling industry, is anyone using / blending with deaerated water.

Deaerated water will have small amounts of absorbed CO2 from the deaeration process.

In the brewing industry it is a must have.

Typical usages:

  • Chasing packaging lines prior and post packaging
  • Yeast propagation plant
  • Blending beer / product
  • Carbonation plant
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Comments

  • grim
    edited June 29

    Haven't really heard/seen. Though, for oxygen sensitive spirits like gin, I could see it being beneficial for shelf-life and flavor stability.

    You can scrub with nitrogen instead of co2, it's more expensive, but you don't need to deal with the pH impacts of the dissolved co2 (which could be detrimental to flavor in some cases). Or, deaerate using vacuum, in which case you'd remove all the dissolved gasses (more realistic in the proofing scenario).

  • richard

    Thanks. My thoughts for "distilling" for cold water deaeration are then for the use of vacuum. But, my other cold water deaeration plant is still being proposed with that of CO2 for reasons as mentioned below.

    I have an inhouse project which is taking excessive time which is for the build of a fairly automated can filler. Very far into this but is costing a fair amount of cash.

    Can filler because I wish to do RTD drinks with produced alcohol which encompass medium to highly carbonated units.

    I reckon that this is where the money lies.

  • SingleMaltYinzer

    For canning it's pretty important, but for standard bottled spirits I don't see how it's practical. You would need to protect the spirit from the moment you start distilling for a whiskey/rum or even earlier in the process if you're macerating botanicals like in a gin. Then moving the product around, proofing, and bottling processes would need to be protected. Then once someone opens a bottle there's o2 getting in there and sitting for however long that bottle is around, and the o2 increase every time it's opened until it matches the local environment.

    Water can be deaerated but a spirit? I don't know. It would be helpful in canning to keep the dissolved o2 down.

  • richard

    Agreed on the canning, thanks

  • jacksonbrown

    DAW has a flavour. I wouldn't use it for spirits.
    If DO was an issue (like it is for beer/wine), people would be finishing bottles in a day or 2 but that's not the case

  • grim
    edited September 21

    Why not test the opposite condition?

    Take two bottles off the line, keep one sealed.

    Pop the second one, bubble in oxygen for a few days. This would represent the absolute worst case scenario, accelerating months/years of oxygen exposure in just a couple of days.

    Run a double blind comparing the two bottles. If it's not clearly detrimental, we know there isn't any benefit to it.

    Also keep in mind, for barrel aged spirits, there is massive oxygen contact. Not only in the splash filling, the headspace, but also the permeability of oxygen through wood. Of oxygen were entirely detrimental, we wouldn't have very old spirits...

    I'd argue there is far more benefit to extracted/macerated spirits like gin, where you have far less stable flavor compounds. I'm sure there is plenty of research on this..

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  • jacksonbrown

    It will strip heaps flavour doing that but not due to oxidation. More from a huge increases in evaporation.
    We did something similar with dark sprits and it was horrid oak juice but as you mention oxidation per se is not an issue with barrel aged products.

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