What do whiskey and other alcoholic beverages make of?

The production and consumption of alcohol is a part of human culture, overgrown in the long history of its existence by all sorts of traditions, rituals, rules, etc. At the same time, with the passage of time, the technological process of producing hot drinks was also improved. In this article, we will try to figure out what whiskey, beer and other alcohol are made of.

Whatever the composition of alcoholic beverages, it necessarily includes ethyl alcohol. The traditional way to get it is alcoholic fermentation of organic products - this is how alcohol has been made for thousands of years. With the help of yeast and natural enzymes carbohydrates, which are part of the plant raw materials, are converted into ethanol and carbon dioxide. The brew produced during fermentation contains no more than 15% alcohol. After cleaning, you can get a new wine or beer.

By the way, the latter is one of the oldest drinks invented by people. Even in Ancient Egypt barley malt was prepared, which, however, differed from the usual beer for us, since it was not used for making hops. This low-alcohol beverage was a strained and lightly fermented bread mass.

As for modern brewing, the situation with how and how beer is made looks as follows. For starters barley malt is mixed with hot filtered water. Later, a congestion from other cereals is added to it. Further during the filtration of the grain, a must is obtained, which in turn is cooked with hop, which gives beer bitterness. After expressing the hop, the wort is cooled, yeast is added to it and the resulting mixture is left to ferment. Finally, the young beer is allowed to ripen within a few weeks, saturated with carbon dioxide, filtered again, after which the drink is ready for use.

To obtain alcoholic beverages of greater strength, distillation is necessary. Its discovery is attributed to the Chinese, then the Egyptians, then the Indians, but Europeans to the technology of distilling the berg, strange as it may seem, the Arabs introduced.

Getting to know the distillation process helps to understand what whiskey, cognac, moonshine, etc. are made of. Since water, as well as products formed during fermentation, have a different boiling point than alcohol, heating a low-alcoholic liquid, it is possible to separate separate fractions, which are collected and cooled, once again becoming liquid. In the production of high-quality alcohol, including whiskey, as a rule, double distillation in distillation cubes is used, when directly drinking alcohol is cleaned of various toxic impurities.

To understand what the whiskey makes of, you should take into account the country of its manufacture. The fact is that this alcoholic beverage, which has a unique aroma, shades from pale yellow to brown, and also a strength of 40-50% (although it can reach up to 60%), varies in terms of raw materials, depending on the region of production.

Countries that contested each other's right to be considered the homeland of whiskey are Ireland and Scotland. In the latter, in the production of this type of alcohol, barley and barley malt are used as raw materials. The result is a drink called Scotch. In Ireland, rye is added to the malt (Irish whiskey). In North America - Canada and the USA - corn, wheat or rye are used as raw materials for whiskey. In Japan, where the production of this alcohol began relatively recently, use millet, corn, adding in limited quantities rice and other grains.

The taste characteristics of the drink, along with what makes whiskey, affects a variety of other factors - from the quality of water and grain to the methods of addition and filtration, the characteristics of the barrel, the duration of aging, etc. But in general, in the production of this alcohol, there are two main approaches - "Irish" and "Scottish". In the latter, when drying the malt, peat is applied, as a result of which the drink acquires a specific smoky taste. The "Irish" direction is characterized by drying in furnaces and triple distillation, giving whiskey special softness.

As you can see, the production of alcohol today is a well-developed industry, which has a rich history and traditions and has developed many technological subtleties and tricks for obtaining truly high-quality products.