 And let me introduce it's Sir Wombat and Nero Lapis Luzis. So give them the welcome when everybody is interested in how to get the stuff done. We are going to present our juice press, which is this gorgeous instrument you can see over there. And then we will talk about the fermentation vessel you will need if you want to build one yourself. And we will explain shortly again how you can create alcohol out of the yeast and the fruit juice. And afterwards we will present the model of a seal which you can see over there on the desk. Yeah, by model we mean it doesn't actually work. Yeah. It only looks like it. Yeah. So it's a kind of a hypothetical operations of a miniature still. And yeah, afterwards you will get to know an alternative method of kind of getting high percent alcohol, but just the ice riving. Yeah, this is that. So who are we? I'm Nero and I'm kind of a professional viking. So why am I presenting this talk? I was studying abroad in Norway and I was brought by the beer. So I had to find some solutions and I started making the wine. And so one of our there is an electrical engineer and he's just trying building stuff since forever. Yeah, let's start with the juice press. And I don't know, do we have the camera or are we doing it without? Yeah, I can just hold it up and maybe you see it. Yeah, so basically what we have is you have the wooden frame and then there's a card jack attached to it and with that we press this kind of wooden block down. And then we have on the right hand side. It's like this wood part which has the special shape so the juice can run off. This is on the lower side and there's the fruit between it. And with the card jack you get lots of pressure. Actually you can also if you boil the mash you can just use the kitchen towel. And but it's it's a lot of work. So this is actually kind of nice. Yeah, you can do it with whole apples. You can cut them beforehand. You can put them in the oven for a little while and it makes it actually a lot easier. So I don't know. I think it's easier if you kind of boil them or put them in the oven beforehand and cut them and you get a little bit more juice because what you see when you try this is that you have a lot of work and a lot of fruit for actually very little juice. It's a lot of work. Yeah, I mean the thing is the fruit juice what is useful for the alcohol. It's basically just the sugar water. So you can cheat which is actually not allowed but in theory you might cheat and add sugar to your fruit juice and then the yeast has more kind of foods and more basics to produce the alcohol form. So you can add molasses to the fruit juice and by that increase the alcohol outcome of your of your molasses. Yeah, so this is in basics the process we just talked about. You have the sugar water and the yeast and the yeast is working in the sugar water and by that creating alcohol and CO2. That's why you need the fermentation vessel which we will talk about in the next part. You can basically just use a normal yeast from the supermarket. You could also use some yeast cultures which are on the fruits. There are some kind of hippie wine producers which just use the apples like they are and use the cultures which already are on them. But it's better to use the specialized yeast because you have optimal alcohol outcome and lower risk that there are other bacteria evolving. What you don't want is that there's oxygen coming into your fermentation process because then what you get isn't alcohol but vinegar which is a kind of taste that's disgusting and it's not what you make it for. So that's why we are building the fermentation vessel. It's basically just a mechanism to keep the air away. Yeah, this is kind of ingredients what you need to do for it on the left hand side. This is was my first experiment on the right hand side. It's Servombatz. So he has this special thing that he puts a pen in the kind of peanut butter jar beforehand so the hose will stick better. You don't really need to do that if your hose is kind of thick enough. So I had this gasoline hose and it worked just kind of fine. So you have to fix the hose in your fermentation vessel and in this kind of jar which is filled with water and you can just use glue for that but it needs to be air proof. And what's happening is the CO2 which comes from the fermentation process can leave the vessel through the hose and so it just goes into the glass of water and the water the effect is just that no oxygen can come in and go the other way around. So it's really simple. It's useful to have a fermentation starter. So for that you start with activating the dry yeast and the thing with that is that you give the yeast which you want to kind of have a good life in there. A head start ahead of all other bacteria all kinds of microbes which would want to evolve in there. So yeah it's not that important that you keep the air out because you don't keep it for that long. So what you do is just you take the yeast you want you put sugar in there and you put the molasses in there and you just give it a head start with a lot of sugar and you keep it in there for kind of about 12 hours and then you keep it then you put it in the fermentation vessel and you add the rest of the molasses. So it's not really in there for that long and because of that it doesn't it's not that important to keep the air out. It doesn't have that much contact. So here you can see the fermentation process. This is kind of the which was in yeah it's kind of a peanut butter jar and there's the air coming out and the CO2 and it looks like that. When the fermentation is running at high it can get a lot of faster but during most of the time it's yeah it's also nice blubbing sound if you keep it in your room you will have it at night. So how will you know when your fermentation ends and some of the yeast will die? You will notice this at the bottom of the fermentation vessel it will just float down. And you also will notice that the fermentation process is getting a lot slower. So why does this happen? Either you have already too much alcohol for the yeast to survive. This depends a bit on the kind of yeast you're using but mostly it's about yeah 15% you can get or maybe there's just no sugar left. You don't really want that to happen because then it doesn't really taste that good but basically it's also a possibility if you just want the alcohol. Just remember that you shouldn't bottle it before it's totally finished because there's as long as there's still some fermentation going on there's also CO2 coming out and your you know bottle might explode if you don't want that. But if you continue with distilling the whole thing it doesn't really matter because yeah you work with it and you don't bottle it. And so what do we do now? We have like the finished wine in the fermentation vessel and you have the dead yeast on the ground. So yeah you should be careful when you fill it in bottles or fill it in another vessel because the dead yeast tastes kind of nasty. So you should siphon it off or you can also pour it but then you should take a lot of time and be very careful with it. Yes to measure the alcohol content which will be as I explained earlier about 15% in the mesh. There's some different tools so for the mesh we have the vinometer and for the if you want to measure it in the steel output you have the hydrometer. And yeah this is when I give a lot to my friend. Yeah sugar is a problem in measuring actually because it kind of confuses the instrument both of them so you should consider this. And actually it's it's not really that fancy so you can get both of them for like 10 euros. It's useful to have. Yes we had that already. The results you get with the fruit wine is normally between 6% and 13%. 13 is already kind of high so if you just use the process like I explained it it's yeah probably a bit less. So that's actually why you would want to steal it afterwards. Yeah so now we're talking what would happen if you'd want to build a steel and we're not talking about an actual steel. We're talking about a model that looks like it could work but doesn't because as we said we wouldn't break any rules and Stefan said it's not allowed it's not legal to do so. So yeah the thing to build such a model such a home-sized model not a semi-professional one you don't need all the like 5000 euros the cheapest professional one we talked about. So yeah for such a tiny model you could get away with 75 euro if you're really resourceful like using an old pressure cooker from a GDR. Those are finally the cheapest ones you find on eBay. This size is like 10 euros so it's a nice thing. Yeah some copper pipes you can get in your hardware store. That type of copper pipe is used to connect fridges like for that freshwater and ice cube feature fridges have. Yeah the cooling system is just an old canister and yeah some electronics I'll talk about later. So yeah let's just get back to the slides. Back to the slides please. Thanks. Yeah the temperature sensing can we talk later but then that's it. So yeah you just connect the copper pipes like this in a T-form with a cork on top and the screw thing on the bottom to connect it to the lid of the pressure cooker. Yeah that's the point you use like an end cap for the copper pipe drill a hole into it and connect the thinner copper pipe to it that will go onto the pressure cooker like this. Then you need to do some soldering. Most of you probably know how to solder. This is another kind of soldering. Yeah it's the same thing you use tin you use copper and some flux to make it flow easier and yeah not a soldering iron but a blow torch but that's all the difference there is and then you just drill a hole into your cut open canister push it on there and use lots of glue to make it waterproof. It's no rocket science. Yeah then the temperature measurement we want to have that because in theory you need a very precise measurement and in practice it didn't seem like we couldn't live without it but it's very interesting and it's helpful. How do we do that? Just use one of those cheap integrated digital temperature sensors a raspberry pi a real-time clock to date the measurement protocols. It's just nice to have here a bit of python script that's yeah mine's ugly so it's not published but everybody can do it it's like a day of work that will output a small website that shows the current temperature graph. Yeah you can you can click on this link and download the current temperature like all the measurements as an excel file and you can even download former measurements that's why we need a real-time clock so that we don't start a chaos. Yeah that's all there is if you have Wi-Fi it's nice because you can leave the room while it's running but yeah then you see something is not going well and then you rush back so you'll probably stay with it anyway. Yeah now this is how a hypothetical run through would look like tablet in the background showing the temperatures the Wi-Fi router. Yeah now yeah it's a really great guide that he yeah puts up with this so yeah well you open the lid you put in your mesh remember this is only a model then like if your pressure cooker has a broken locking mechanism you use some chains and a screw to keep the lid closed it's it's not as critical as actual pressure cooker operation yeah it's it's not as critical as actual pressure cooker operation because there will be no pressure if pressure builds up you made some big mistake like plugging up the cooling pipe um yeah if you thought the chain was funny then come around and show the safety wealth it's like yeah as I said it's all cheap and made up but it works no it doesn't crap it it could work so yeah then as I said you put the mesh in close the lid turn on the gas stove it's a gas stove because um yeah with no other kind of stuff you could can regulate the power as fast maybe with an induction heater but that doesn't work with a gdr pressure cooker um yeah then you started heating at some point evaporation will start it will go up here past the thermometer so that we can see the gas temperature and then the gas will run in here in the cooler and there it hopefully condensates so that we don't blow up the operation yeah we put some great effort into our non-functional model we even painted it to look chocked there's another thermometer in here so that we see that the cooling system is as cold as it's supposed to be and yeah then if it would work the alcohol would drop out here and run over the last temperature sensor so we can see um how how um how warm it is because yeah if it gets too warm it will be vapor and that's bad and just for the fun of it there's a um additional temperature sensor on the connector board um that's this one here um yeah that's just to measure the room temperature so yeah now we come to a totally made up graph of an operation uh the the red line is the the gas temperature that is um always the most important one because at the current gas temperature you can see uh what uh or you can at least uh guess what uh chemical is currently running evaporating uh the big plateau you can see at the top that is um where the alcohol would be assuming that for a long time there would be alcohol coming out of the mesh that turns into a plateau the orange temperature is the the air temperature the the green line is what the output temperature would be at the beginning it's something like the room temperature yeah and then at the point where um actual product starts dripping out it cools down to the product to the cooling water temperature and then running through it at some point it will start separating because the cooling can't keep up because um we don't have a run through cooler we just have water in there and that will start to heat up uh the ticks at the end where the temperature suddenly drops um yeah that could be caused by um having too high temperature and uh too much alcohol running through the cooler so then you turn down the heat a bit and it would um start to drop and then you turn it back up and starts rising again and at the end of the um run through when you when you open the lid again and the cold air comes there all the temperatures drop again and you're done with it so as I said it's all hypothetical um and the hypothetical results could be something like uh yeah stop um there was this this methamethanil thing so with a still of this size you won't get any dangerous amounts of methamethanil yeah we just to be to be safe we drop the first 15 milliliters we dispose of them properly by burning them on the ground yeah then what would could the output look like um if you would do this it'd be a great idea to separate the output in 100 100 millilitre jars and measure each separately so that you can follow what happens and it could be like the first jar would be maybe 58 percent maybe the ninth jar would be 35 percent because the higher the temperature gets the more water evaporates and so the alcohol rate is lower um yeah of those six glasses maybe the first six would be usable because the after-run that has the the stuff that evaporates at the higher temperatures would taste bad yeah and if you wanted higher percentages you could just still it again and then you maybe get up to 78 percent uh yeah as francesca already said we measured the um output of the still we would measure it with the hydrometer yeah and then 78 percent is nothing you ever drink you only taste alcohol and nothing of the fruit so if you had an still output with 78 percent you would dilute it with water to get it to 40 yeah now this is illegal so we don't do it but there's another method which is kind of interesting it basically uses the same principle just it's not the separate boiling points but the separate freezing points and then to use this you put alcohol maybe red wine into a plastic bottle put it into your freezer let it freeze through and then you turn it around and the first stuff that will drop out is alcohol kind of an interesting picture is this here because um yeah we have liquid dropping down which is so cold that the condensation on the on the other vessel freezes so we know the liquid is something with a freezing point well below the freezing point of water if you measure this you'll see that the output has something between 20 or 40 percent when starting with a red wine of 10 percent so it's it really works and I find found it kind of interesting because except some crazy guy in Bavaria I don't know of anybody actually using that and that guy uses it to create the world's strongest beer with like 58 percent and it's still legally beer because of germ loss um yeah here we see um that's the stuff that stayed in the bottle and um yeah until after it unfroze and that's the stuff that dripped out um below so um yeah if you put the light behind it you see that the one side is much darker so apparently uh the pigment is solvable in alcohol it's just an interesting um fact we saw too and yeah that's what we did so in conclusion it's totally possible to build um a non-functional model of a still with hardware store parts um running this uh risk exists but are manageable watch out for proper cooling with such a cooler it's just make sure that there's water in it before you start it um yeah um methanol poisoning can be prevented by using a clean mesh like mesh you'd drink unstill and discarding the first 50 millilitre and if you had something like this and say you tried to um still whiskey you should look out for um forming because if you tried to run it too fast maybe uh the mesh would form up and uh clock your still and that'd be bad so yeah don't do that um in conclusion it's great fun theoretically and yes do not do this it's illegal thank you what a fabulous practical introduction so we have now five minutes for q and a so everybody who wants to ask a question please go to the microphones uh and please stay in the room for this five minutes is there any and keep in mind this time everybody has to go out on this side so is there any question in the room microphone one please yes uh thank you for the talk uh thank you for the ideas uh do you know how the legal aspects are in Switzerland Switzerland you guys are actually quite well off because you're allowed to have small stills until the capacity of five liters we have until the end of two thousand seventies then zero point five liters which is basically useless you can try it once but for each run you get maybe a shot of usable liquor in Switzerland you have five liters and then you get at least some yeah 200 milliliters of usable spirits and this is actually fun to tinker with this is something you and your fellas can well have a decent evening microphone five yeah so uh when i saw them electronics that's usually not so safe to drink from um you know lead and everything uh so do you have any tips for how to solder uh so um it's safe for drinking um yeah uh i forgot to mention it um we used lead free solder um yeah that's a that's a really great comment of you and um i looked it up and solder you can buy in a hardware store next to the copper tubes that is lead free but yeah check that to be sure you don't want lead into your spirits um microphone one could you do the cooling uh by airflow instead of water i've seen i've seen online some people who did that with construction that looked kind of like a cpu cooler attached to something which had vaporous alcohol run through it um yeah i mean it'd be illegal to try so i haven't and i but this guy apparently hasn't it worked for him so yeah but i don't know how you'd how you'd construct the copper block which um you attach to the cpu cooler so there's that i've seen silver etchings in really really old manuscripts that were uh using uh just air to cool down but uh well that's technology from 500 years ago that says yeah use water microphone five parts still um and you said this could not be purchased uh until after the first of january right yeah but if you just purchase the single parts because it's standard lab equipment is this also illegal i mean you don't purchase a still per se exactly exactly it's i don't think this is gonna be a problem but you know there's laboratory equipments and they sell you a still made from glass for for uh training distillation or so and it costs some 250 euros and they sell you the same exact parts this still is made off for cheaper so you basically order three or times three or four times different equipment parts for maybe from different vendors yes i mean this is ridiculous really it is thanks okay microphone one yeah hi um thank you for your theoretical explanation and i have one question but first i just wanted to mention that you can build all this without uh programming you can buy a physical thing to to um measure the temperature so if anybody's afraid because of that part and um yeah then my question is um is there a reason why you don't um use or just um mentioned um turbo gist or stuff like that where you can reach 20 in two days is it not that tasty or stuff um yeah i i think actually we just used the first one we got hands on then we for the first experiments i mean you could try that but then you always have yes it has negative parts so maybe it's the taste maybe it's something else but i mean i wouldn't claim that you achieve high quality taste with what we just showed i can uh answer one part for the upfunding sprinnerei uh you could use turbo yeast but turbo yeast is something i'm not really sure about the translation that is called hefe nea salze which is salts that you need to actually have an environment for this turbo yeast and this hefe nea salze are unfortunately not allowed in upfinungsprinnerei so usually you don't take do you don't use turbo use and you don't actually need it for fruit spirits it's okay if you want to make grain spirits but they know the higher the yeast ferments the less as i said the less taste and scent remains in the distillate so we want to have taste so otherwise we could just buy vodka in the store okay microphone five please thanks again for your talk regarding the cooling is it necessary to cool it with room temperature water or why not chuck in some ice cubes or crushed ice to keep the temperature lower or hinder the the rising of the temperature in the cooling vessel well let's say we had run this hypothetical operation in our minds multiple times maybe the first time we had tried it with ice cubes and then started exchanging the water maybe we had a few times thought about running it and using just tap water and exchanging the tap water multiple times and then maybe in our minds one time we forgot to change the water and it still would have worked so we made up all further operations just with a bucket of water and not changing it so yeah point is that's the easiest way and it works thanks and i saw that there is some question from the internet exactly internet wants to know if there is a limit or a legal limit to the freeze destination as they call it the ice ripening process um i tried to look it up but i didn't find anything about that so um maybe there's the thing that if you're or yeah let's just stay with the beer guy from Bavaria um the customs actually have a page about um producing beer at home you can do that legally in Germany um and the first 100 liters are tax free so you can just do that so yeah then you have 100 liters of beer and you start concentrating them and once you're done with that it gets complicated so i guess that's the limit and then that guy probably just taxes the further beer and that's how he does it but then you don't have to register your freezer at the tax office so maybe people won't be that eager to check okay then the last two questions microphone one okay so my question is about the freezing method as well uh what is about the methanol for the freezing method is there some way to get rid of this or is it really unnecessary um well as i said um the stuff in the pictures was uh red wine from aldi because you don't experiment with expensive stuff and if i drink a whole bottle of aldi red wine nothing bad happens to me so i guess if i take any part of a bottle of red wine from aldi nothing bad will happen to so there's that there probably will be but um less enough so that it's not a problem okay the the thing about the methanol is if i want if i'm allowed to add it methanol comes from the pectins pectins are basically the the building substance of the cells but if you have juice or wine we already pressed it down and the pectins stay in the stuff we throw away and so in the juice and in the wine that we cool down so there is very little methanol in it this is different if it make if it make a mash and have the aldi cell residue still in the mash then we have the methanol in this mash and so we have it in the distillate okay the last question microphone one please hi um thanks for a great talk uh my questions are around the head hearts and tail um the the hacked distilling method you i gathered you pretty much did it and what you took for a second third fourth out of it and you divided it up like that but in the in the in the craft distillery um how do you do it to use it by controlling the temperature of the the the evaporation and the distilling liquid or you'd also do it by breaking it into segments what's the technique you use to separate um there's actually many erodes uh that lead to roam so you could basically use this fractioning method that there was uh described here that it just take always one liter and one liter and one liter and then you check it by smelling and tasting if it's okay or if it's not and then the other way is for example contra uh temperature control so if you buy a modern still from an experienced copper smith this is made with any types of sensors and that are telling you the the temperatures the flow the alcohol content so you can basically program your still to automatically cut the four shots and the and the after shots so this is another way then you could for example uh distill once or twice and with the first distillation just take every alcohol that's coming out and then collect this first run and then redistill it and then make your cuts for the heads and the tails and you can make it otherwise you can cut the head and tails in the first run and then just basically uh concentrate uh in the redistillation so there's many uh roads that lead to roam and you're just gonna find out your way that suits you best but if you start i would take the the fracturing uh fracturing method yes you're still hard what do you run your still on sorry what technique is for your your business you're still uh you know you mean my still at home the craft still that i get on the yeah uh this is experience so we know the first one and a half liters is four shots so we collect those and then we redistill them again but uh yeah at some time my great grandfather most probably has found out the way and he taught him his son and his son and now i know it that i didn't need to get rid of 1.5 liters of four shots you're welcome yeah then at the end of this double feature i expect a very big round of applause