Food: Alcohol: Wine
Continuous winemaking   (0)  [vote for, against]
Automatically removing the alcohol from the wine

Once the wine reaches 17% alcohol the yeast dies, from its own produce. So here's the deal:

CO2 sent to plants that during light hours turn it into wood.

Alcohol constantly measured and once reaching above certain measure, some percentage is removed from the canisters and distilled. The original grape-juice/wine is returned and the yeast grows back into it until almost all the grapes have been consumed and turned into alcohol.
-- pashute, Dec 20 2016

Fermented http://nzic.org.nz/...ocesses/food/6A.pdf
Continuous Fermenters introduced by Morton Coutts of Dominion Breweries in the 1950's [pashute, Dec 21 2016]

Continuous process fermenters for alcohol production are Baked.
-- 8th of 7, Dec 20 2016


OK (see link). Still it's a novel idea, I didn't know about it, and if it hadn't been thought of till now, I would have been the first to think of it today. :-(
-- pashute, Dec 21 2016


//almost all the grapes have been consumed and turned into alcohol// aka "dry wine"
-- pocmloc, Dec 21 2016


dry wine is the max possible with non-continuous fermenting, i.e. 17% and then it stops, leaving much of the grapes unconsumed - which adds to the taste of the wine. But I want to turn as much as possible of the material into alcohol.

Good for fuel, and, perhaps, some new kind of wine, or more wine from the same amount of grapes.
-- pashute, Dec 22 2016


I would have thought dry consumes all the sugars?
-- pocmloc, Dec 22 2016


" The original grape-juice/wine is returned "

This material is referred to as dunder.

[pocmloc] is correct in that most or all of the fermentable sugars get consumed - there may remain non-fermentable sugars, or traces of fermentables. You will not be impressed by the flavors.
-- normzone, Dec 22 2016


When brewing for maximum alcohol yield, you use a relatively precise sugar concentration, and a specialised yeast. Some can get all the way up into low-20% range, especially if the temperature of the wort is managed well.

Not very sure about wine itself, but it'd be quite the fluke if the natural sugar concentration in the grape juice was exactly enough for fermentation until yeast die-off. Is the grape juice watered down at all for fermentation?

Of course, in brewing wine, you're aiming for a flavour set, not maximum alcohol (because grapes are a poor choice if all you want is alcohol). If you're just aiming for alcohol output, you're better off fermenting various grain types, sugar cane, beets, corn, etc. Grapes are expensive, delicate, and can make more money off with wine.
-- Custardguts, Dec 22 2016


I am sure the continuous fermenters must use vacuum distillation, not heat.
-- bungston, Dec 23 2016


//Still it's a novel idea, I didn't know about it, and if it hadn't been thought of till now, I would have been the first to think of it today.//

Depending on what your concept actually is - it seems to me to be at least two different things at the same time.

8th is responding to the title. A single pass through continuous (as opposed to batch) extraction process is baked as the obvious way to do it industrially.
But then in the idea body you're talking about trying to remove alcohol and then re-ferment, which as others have pointed out isn't going to work in the absence of sugar.
Of course you could add more sugar, but why were we doing this again?
If what you want is high alcohol, why not just add alcohol? (n.b. this is sometimes done and the result is a fortified wine, or ... well, a cocktail).

Also, how are you removing the alcohol? This can be done in different ways - for example by distillation (called brandy when the feedstock was grapes).

//CO2 sent to plants that during light hours turn it into wood.//

I've no idea what you're trying to say here. Although I don't know of any drinkable alcohols produced from _fermented wood_, they may exist. If not, it's half an idea. The whisky guys like the flavour of wood steeped from the wooden containers, so it might be good in that sense. To be honest, though, people have been trying to make alcohol from pretty much everything since evolving to cope with the product, so I'm sure it will at least have been attempted. Tree sap, for instance, is an easier starting material and has been done.
-- Loris, Dec 30 2016



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