Freeze Distillation

Lets start with the warning: Be very careful what alcohol you use this process for if you are actually planning on drinking it. If you use a nice store bought wine, it should be fine. Doing it with Pruno might kill you. In between is your roll of the dice.

Distilling alcohol is a complex process that you will need to learn, and prepare for long before any type of SHTF event. For our purposes however there is a easy alternative.

Water freezes at a much lower temperature than alcohol, so all we have to do is freeze our ferment and scoop out any ice that forms.

Once you have your fermented liquid, all you have to do is freeze it, and remove the ice crystals.

ABV (Alcohol by volume) converts 5% ABV to 4% acidity.
Vinigar is usually 5-8% by volume.
We need to shoot for 5% acidity for our preserving purposes.



All alcohols are started the same way. Yeast eats sugar and poops out alcohol. With wine and beer, that's the whole process.

For hard liquors (Whiskey, they take this fermented liquid and heat it until it starts to evaporate. Since methanol evaporates first, it is captured and discarded. Next ethanol evaporates and we capture that to drink. We are finally left with just water, which we can also discarded.