Abstract
Distillation is a process that achieves chemical separation by taking advantage of phase change. In the case of spirits, we are removing ethanol from water by leveraging ethanol’s preference, relative to water, for the vapor phase.
All us civilised people date our civilisation from the discovery of the principle of distillation. – William Faulkner, 1959 [259]
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Notes
- 1.
pK a = −log10 K a where K a is the acid disocciation constant. For acid AH, K a = [A−][H+]∕[AH].
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Miller, G.H. (2019). Distillation Theory. In: Whisky Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13732-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13732-8_7
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