My brother just got back from Austria, and he misses a lot of things. He mentions skiing, and the dry European humour. But there is one thing here that is not geographically bound to snowy Austrian mountaintops, and yet impossible to find in the great United States of America. As you have probably figured out, it is schnapps.
Now, he assures me that there are no schnapps in America. So I say, "impossible, it's in any supermarket with a liquor license". "Well, that's not real schnapps". Real schnapps, he explains, is dry and high in alcohol. It's not a disgusting fruit syrup, like an adult version of Hershey's Strawberry Syrup. It's distilled, it's got a hint of pear, apple or peach. And it can be disgusting unless it's not made right.
So, we were going to make it right, for sure. He looked up making a still, written by some guy who was also upset about schnapps deficiency, but in New Zealand. I made four and a half gallons of Pear Wine in a storage tub. Being an underage college student, this was not the most difficult thing in the world for me to figure out. I'd made cranberry, grape, and ginger wine before in my dorm. Making hooch with a bag of pears and a potato masher wasn't much different.
It did look a bit absurd, a five-gallon storage tub, caulked around the lid, with an airlock cork stuck in the top where we drilled a hole. We kept it in my parents' dining room for a week or two.
My grandpa just died. Actually, we all called him Pop. But I never took to calling him Pop until after he died. That's because nobody else really called him Pop either. But now we had to differentiate him from our other dead grandpa. So, Pop it was, or, is.
My grandmother (I don't know if we're going to start calling her Nan soon to differentiate from the other dead grandmother) is now in one of those homes for people who can't function in old age. She's been diagnosed with dementia, which has been rough on everyone. But. She's left everything in her old house, where my dad spent his entire life. In this house was one item we needed for our pressure cooker. I mean, our still. Well, it was a pressure cooker. Shucks. Pop would have been proud, he was a chemist.
The idea is to stick the copper tubing over the steam/pressure release doohicky on the pressure cooker lid. Thus, and steam that builds up inside the pot evaporates slowly up the tube. Because different substances evaporate at different temperatures, we can use different heat levels to separate liquid.
Thus, since ethanol (drinking alcohol, or rather, the alcohol that you're supposed to drink, yes) evaporates at a lower temperature than water (which anyone who has ever been in a chemistry lab knows, takes forever to evaporate), we could draw the ethanol out by matching the heat level to its boiling point. In order to do this, we ran a charcoal grill thermometer into another safety valve on the top of the pressure cooker. We then created an airtight seal around both the thermometer and copper tubing using some silicon caulk that can withstand head up to 450° Fahrenheit. It smells like white vinegar. What could possible need to withstand that kind of heat? It was being advertised for sealing fireplaces up and stuff. I know that they really made it for making stills, but I guess they can't advertise it that way.
By the way, distilling hard alcohol is illegal in the United States. You probably know that but I forgot to mention it before.
We coiled the copper tubing around the inside of a five gallon pail. The idea is to fill the pail with water, because that tubing gets pretty hot from all the boiling liquid going through it. That cools it down, makes sure it's a liquid, and gives us some form of alcohol we can drink.
Ethanol has a lower boiling point that water, but methanol has a lower boiling point yet. That's the kind of stuff that makes you go blind, or dead, in very small quantities. Think 1/2 a cup. That's not usually a problem with wine, but in concentrated amounts it is. So we tried to keep the temperature low at first, and then discarded whatever we thought was going to be poison. It was all very imprecise.
From a half gallon of pear wine, we got about 8 ounces of schnapps. But that was the hardest alcohol I've ever tasted. It tastes more like gasoline. I put a bunch of water in it, but it's still fucking batshit crazy. Now it's sitting in the alcohol cabinet at my parents' house waiting to be thrown out, or consumed by some crazy kids during a party, or be applied to a wound, or used to dissolve latex paint off my combat boots. I guess in that sense it's pretty useful, but in no way economical.
At least now, I have four and a half gallons of pear wine.