To make spirits, you need to distill and ferment grains. Distillation is not only used to produce spirits. It is one of the favorite production processes of any chemical engineer and is very suitable for separating various components from each other.
What happens during distillation
When you distill a mixture of two liquids (for simplicity, we keep it as two liquids)) heat the mixture to evaporate one of them. You can then capture the evaporated components in another part of the device (condenser). In other words, you can use the difference in boiling point to separate them from each other. However, you will almost never be completely separated like that easily. Usually, you need several steps, and even so, you cannot separate them completely (this is the case with water and alcohol).
A mixture of alcohol and water
Alcohol (ethanol) and water. The boiling point of water is 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), while the boiling point of alcohol is only around 100 degrees Celsius. 78 degrees Celsius (172 degrees Fahrenheit). Because alcohol has a lower boiling point, it evaporates more easily. Therefore, Raoult’s law tells you that the gas above the mixture contains a higher percentage of alcohol than the liquid mixture. In the distillation process, we use this phenomenon to separate our two liquids.
Heating alcohol and water
During the distillation process, you heat the liquid mixture (water + alcohol). As a result, part of the liquid will evaporate. This gas is a mixture of two components, but will contain more of the component with the lowest boiling point (in our case alcohol).
This gas then moves to another area, the condenser. This area is colder, so the gas returns to the liquid. This new liquid now contains more alcohol than the original liquid. This is the simplest one-step distillation process.
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