Fake gin flavoring for non-alch gin & tonics? (1 Viewer)

[PhillJones]

I'm not a chemist but I always thought what evaporates isn't related to what's disolved in what, it's because the temperatures at which the different components evaporate are quite close together. So if you evaporate the alcahol off slowly at a lower temperature, less of the less volatile components will go with it. I bet if you try it with any drink, you'll get similar results.

I once attended a talk by John McDougal, formerly of the springbank distillery where he described the distillation process in terms of moving down progressive 'layers' of volatility until you hit the sweet spot with the right fraction of the various alcohols. Whatever else happens to be evaporating at the time has an impact on how the Whisky will taste.

 

[JeremyErwin]

It's been a long time since I was in a chemistry lab. So, in a sense, I'm relearning as I go along.
Consider this:

Studies on Flavor Components of Whisky : (XI) Behavior of the Components during the Manufacturing Process : (Part II) Distillation Process

Boiling Points:
Water 100 C
ethyl alcohol 78.3 C
Benzene 80.1 C
n-decyl alcohol 233 C

If distillation were as simple as you propose, the n-decyl-alcohol would never get in to the distillate.

You have to consider azeotropes:
For instance,
95% EtOH + 5% Water 78.15C
74% benzene + 18.5% EtOH + 7.5% water 64.9 C

So, it's a lot more complex that removing pure alcohol from pure water.

 

[PhillJones]

I'm sorry I didn't mean to imply that all of a component vanishes as soon as you hit boiling point and none of it leave before. At a certain temperature, a give liquid will evaporate at a certain weight. In statistical thermodynamics you can work it out using the fluids molecular energy distribution. The hotter the liquid the higher the percentage of molecules above the critical momentum and the faster it evaporates. The liquid is constantly replenishing the high portions of the distribution by thermalization. I didn't say this at first because I figured it'd be getting a bit heavy.

The upshot is that the amount of product of your various components is a complicated function of temperature, time, and pressure. The only point that I was trying to make is that I don't know of any mechanism causes one substance to take another along for the ride when it evaporates.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Formation of complexes, perhaps? R·N H2O?

 

[PhillJones]

I dunno, maybe. Certainly formation of Complexes is a step beyond solvation, so to speak. In a solvate, the molecules aren't actually physically connected they're kind of evenly distributed. For example, the salt in brine isn't chemically bonded to the water, so merely being soluble isn't sufficient. Does the alcohol form complexes with the botanicals or are they merely dissolved? If it's the former, then you might be onto something, if it's the latter than it's back to the simplest explanation; the botanicals evaporated all on their own with no help.