We Try a 200yr Old Bootlegger’s Trick to JACK-UP Whiskey Proof (freeze distilling)

With an undisputed reputation as the world's foremost whiskey scientist verbally intact... I'm so sorry. I recently watched this video from our friends at Clawhammer Supply about freeze distilling apple cider. Specifically they got into the legalities of apple jack. It's an old bootleggers trick to jack up proof and concentrate flavor. It's been done with wine, with beer, it's been around for hundreds of years. But we want to know is it possible to jack up a whiskey? This is exactly what we want. But here's the thing. Your freezer won't work. We need extreme cold and most freezers can't get there. Easy. You just need some isopropyl alcohol. Dry ice. Talking freeze distilling, it doesn't get simpler than that. Holy crap, man. Oh my... This is perfect. We're set up for a flawless victory. Unless it gets weird. Oh, I see it. It looks moldy. It does. And frustrating. It's not where we want it. God! And very confusing. Whoa, what the hell? Holy sh... We're dealing with extreme cold. So we got to do a special kind of glass. Borosilicate. Ideally you want to be able to insulate the bowl to keep the temperature variation from, you know, the coldness trying to fight with the outside ambient temperature. We were going to try and do it without insulation so you can see. Right in there, a little bath. That plastic may crack in this cold dry ice. Let's see if we can get this whiskey cold enough. Oh, it's vibrating. 99% isopropyl alcohol. Should probably be doing goggles. All right, that is carbon dioxide coming off of there. So we don't want to be huffing that. Oh, it smells really good though. No, it doesn't smell good. It makes you want to get in there, doesn't it? Hopefully we can get this down to a cold enough temperature. If this doesn't work, we're gonna have to get something. You can't see through what you kind of suck. We're gonna have to insulate it. We really got to get it as cold as possible. If we're going to be able to pull ice out of whiskey. Let's see if we can get that proof higher. So when we go on the dry ice itself, it says low. Put up the product and see what's the lowest temperature it will get to. Because then we will know it's at least lower than that temperature. Negative 58 degrees Fahrenheit, negative 50 Celsius. The glass, just holding your hands out here, you can feel how much cold is just being dumped off the side of this thing. I definitely agree with you, but do you think we have enough to just run it in this to just see what happens? One whiskey always wishes a little bit higher proof. What if we crank the proof on an Isla? 43 percent. Come on, Isla, we can do better than that. Well, this is very cold. We had this in just a regular freezer, the kind of freezer that you would have at home. And you can see there's no ice. Oh, funny little thing we came across in our research, by the way. There's a lot of people on forums, blogs, comment sections. They'll be like, oh, I put my whiskey in the freezer and I totally get like this slushy thing. Do you have children? Are there children in the house? Because what usually is happening is the kids have been getting into that whiskey, pouring some for themselves, replacing it with water. And then you have a whiskey that's low enough proof that a residential freezer can actually turn that water into a whiskey slush. Let's see how cold we can get this red breast. This should be. Oh, perfect. I'm going to put some more around the sides. Touch it. There we go. Very cold. It's right at the edge of the lid. You see those little bits there? There's a little tiny bit starting to form. I'm so ready. It's been about a half hour. It looks fluffy, like it's wearing a sweater. Yeah, like check this out. Frost on the side here. Oh, and it just melts immediately on the spoon. Yeah. I see a band of white. Is this okay to touch? Yeah, look at this. Dude, look at this. Holy crap, man. Oh my, wait, powers? Oh my, it's a solid block of ice. All right, let's fish this out. That's freaking nuts, dude. This is actually a little bit more aggressive than I... Put a girl on. Put a glove on. Dude, that looks crazy. Why is it all circle-y? It looks like popcorn. We should open it. Should I open it? Of course we should open. Uh-oh. Did it freeze shut? We know there still is whiskey in there. I mean, liquid whiskey, because that amber, that is just a brick. We went too far. I was concerned about whether or not we're going to be able to get any kind of result. This is too extreme of a result. We went too far. What you want to be able to do, like with apple jacking, traditional apple jacking. I've been doing this for hundreds of years. Your ancestors are probably doing this. Cereal? Cinnamon is the winamon? They would take cider. They would take cider, and they would put it outside during the winter, and then the water in the cider would freeze, and it would leave the alcoholic stuff unfrozen, just more concentrated. So you're upping the proof just leaving your cider outside in the winter. That was apple jack. We're jacking up a whiskey instead of winter, which does not get cold enough. I'm going to poke it. Oh, it's a slush. It's smushy. It is a slush, perfect. This is great. This is exactly what we want. Oh, hell yeah. What happened to you? Is that really cold? Are you going to die? Were we allowed to do that? Is that good? All right, there's Irish in there. There's Irish in there. A whiskey slushie. Okay, we're going to see if we can get the proof out. We got to separate it. What's your idea on a setup here? That's the idea. Do we need another container? Yes. Get it in there. Is this our version of Cuts for freeze distillation? I guess. Oh, there's drops. There's drops. We got a drop in there. Oh, it's going. We've given this a minute to warm up to a temperature that we think we should be able to get a reading. We're beating, what was the proof? 86.4. Can we beat 86.4 proof? That's what we started with with the powers. Here we go. That's lush, man. Look at that. That's just for you. That's for later. That's the world's best snow cone right there. Put this back. We're trying to beat 86.4 proof. All right, just let it give it a second. This is too cold. I think it's literally too cold. It's too cold. All right. Let's see. 76.27. We lost proof. We went too far. Just didn't work. Hello. How do we fix it? As this freezes, it freezes from the top down. Yeah, and we gave it a full 30 minutes without any interaction. Yeah. And that's probably the biggest mistake is I think we kind of have to baby this a little bit. Start snatching out that ice crust. And everything that's left is just going to be gradually higher proof. Let's do some fresh good for this. Yeah, I got you. Okay, there we go. Round two. We're going to just be taking that crust of ice off the top periodically. It's almost done. You know what? The whole damn thing. Okay. We're going all in on this. Dude, we have a lot this time. The hammer of justice. I'm so sorry. Well, you should have seen the lady at the grocery store. They handle this stuff with reckless abandon. We're going to be checking on this periodically, taking off the crust, hopefully. Because if this doesn't work... Yep. That lid wasn't meant for that, right? Nothing of this was meant for any of this. We're checking into five minutes. I'm noticing an issue. We didn't give it that head start like we did the first time by putting this in the freezer. This is putting in so much warmth. It's killing our dry ice. More dry ice. Here we go. Because freezing alcohol is kind of an extreme... There's potential. There's promise. But we ain't there yet. We got to figure out a process. But we need a drinkable result. A drinkable... Of course. Not necessarily legal if you're at home, but... But we have a license. Yeah, somewhat. Checking in at 10 minutes-ish. Do we have any crust yet? We're starting to get the beginning of frost. If I tilt it... Oh yeah, there we go. We can see it. Yeah, so we got some crystals going. Let's go another five. You know what else is super cold? When Wild Grain sends you their fine products, they send them with a freeze pack, which keeps them perfect for your freezer. This episode is sponsored... Sorry. This episode is sponsored by Wild Grain! Wild Grain. So this is an empty box. Why is this an empty box, Brianna? Because I love Wild Grain so much. The key to my heart is pasta and bread. So Wild Grain is the first bake-from-frozen subscription box. They're partnering with small bakers, artisanal people that do artisanal things. Yeah, all over the country. You got your sourdoughs, you got your artisanal pastries, you got your pastas, and they're bringing it to you, to your door. So the most recent thing that I got, these little mini cherry pies. They're so good. So is there sourdough? Oh, and the sourdough, it's slow fermented sourdough, which it helps you not get those blood sugar spikes. It's easier on your gut, that whole situation. Every item is going to bake in less than 25 minutes. Sometimes, you know, a lot less. You want to check this out. You want to go to wildgrain.com slash whiskey. It's going to get $30 off your first box. And, you ready? Yes, tell them! Free croissants. Croissants for life! Sorry, I couldn't wait. Free croissants for life. Are you insane? Why would they do that? Okay. So we had the gleamings of some progress earlier. Let's see if... Oh my god. That was the tipping point there. This is perfect. You see that? Dang. That is awesome. That is chunk nation. Look at the smoke coming off the bottom. This is promising. I am suddenly very excited. Let's see if we can fish this ice out. Oh god. Don't do this to me. Oh. You can fish out the slush jar right there. Slush collection jar. Spoon and a sieve, however. Okay. We're going to be sacrificing some alcohol here no matter what. Yeah. Just on the edge. I should not be touching it with my bare hands. This is as cold as dry ice. Perfect. Look at this. Oh my gosh. This is exactly what we wanted here. You seeing that? So you want to fish out as much of that as possible. And then strain the rest through the sieve. Oh god. I should not touch this with my hands. It's so freaking cold. Look at that. Now, we're going to let that ice melt. We're going to taste that melted ice to see how much of the whiskey flavor was just locked up in that water ice. Is it still freezing? I think it may still be freezing. It looks like there's more than there was a minute ago. Yeah. I think it's just... It is. It's continuing to freeze over. I can just go like this. Tip it. We've pulled up so much at this point. Do you just strain out what might be the most pure alcohol? Okay. Yeah. Okay. This is clean. That's just washed. That's like a syrup. Are you kidding me? That's like a freaking syrup right there. We got something here. We got to figure out what's the exact time, what's the exact moment. Okay. Let's test the proof. Is this enough to test the proof? Okay. Even the stuff that we pulled out and put in a non-frozen jar. Temperature. Even this is freezing. I don't like that it's going in phases of freezing. Yeah. Because that makes it so much harder for you to know what you're pulling out of it. Gosh, how do we separate this out? Way trickier than I was expecting it to be. Like if we could get it to work at all, then beautiful. We just remove the water ice from the whiskey. This was also what people said was much easier, by the way. Well... A lot of people told us, oh, why don't you just do this? Look, that salting out process. After we finished shooting, we came back after the weekend. Look how much more clear that got. It's changed every day as well. Yeah. Every day. Even the freaking fireball with all of that sugary goop. Also, another top comment. We saw it all over the place. Molecular sieves. We've done this. It's an old ass episode. There's a reason why you don't see freeze distilling whiskey. We can get the temperatures cold enough. Now we got to figure out what's that separation process look like. With lower proof things like cider and beer, it's a much slower process. This is just boom all at once because this isopropyl and dry ice bath is so intensely cold. Yeah, that is so cold. Let's test the proof on that as soon as it gets close to room temperature, and we'll see what we got. All right, all right, all right. Let's test it. I don't know if this is going to work. I want this to work. It's not where we want it. God! We're at like 85. But it just is so much so quickly. Roughly exactly equal to where it started. Yeah. We're so close. Damn it. Nothing. That's so cold. Now what I will say is, if you don't want to add rocks to your glass. There's easier ways. Put it in the freezer. But you have 15 pounds of dry ice and 99% ISO. That's an option for chilling. This was the one I'm really hoping for, the Lafroig 10. If we can get a higher proof scotch out of this deal, that would be beautiful. That smokiness is just kicking your ass. I don't know why it would be different. But this is the one I'm the most hopeful for. Ice. You know the drill. Dude, we have suspended ice balls in here. Orbs. What the hell? There's freaking ice orbs. That is kind of amazing. So this is the moment where it kicks off. This is starting to get cold enough to freeze. Yeah, you're starting to get that slush on the top. How do we get those out? You tell me. They're growing. They're still growing. This is still really cold. And then the slush on the top is starting to form. Oh, I see it. That's moldy. It does. Would it be worth it to just strain it out now? Then put it back in? If we can get 5% higher, I'd be happy with the proof result. Because then we have a proof of concept. Oh, I get it. Proof of concept. I'm going to understand that one next week. Okay, here we go. Is it doing it? Oh my god, it's doing it. It's doing it. So I'm going to pour it out here. Oh, wow. Let's let that warm up and measure it. Yeah. It's just so quick. It's so finicky. The moment I saw those orb things in there, like this isn't what we hoped for. No. But it's still really freaking cool. Yeah. Whiskey in a way that I've never seen it before. Ice purple alcohol. Dry ice. We have the temperature. Now we've got to figure out the exact... Let's do one more strain. Yeah. Seeing that mush there? I smell the mush and the peat. Oh, you can't smell the peat. You know what we did? We made Isla Ice. Dude, Isla Ice. You drop a cube of that in your Macallan, and you've created something. Somebody give me a Glencairn. I'm going to have a LaFroigtin slushie, because why the hell not? Did you give me the most narrow glass in the room? All right, there we go. Maybe the result is we added a rock to your whiskey without changing the proof. Whiskey on the rocks without it getting watered down? At all. Oh, that's a chunk, all right. Hell yeah. It looks kind of gross. Like an egg cracked in there. It tastes amazing. That's egg yolk. That's Isla yolk. Dude, that smells so strong. It smells so good! Holy ----, that's cold. Whoa, what the hell? That's freaking nuts, dude. This is delightful, but it's not what we want. Where do we go next? All right, so we got the first part of the process done. We got the freezing of the whiskey down. We got to figure out what the next step is, because apparently there's a lot of science nerds and chemists in the comments. Holy hell. If you do have frozen whiskey, how do you separate the water from the ethanol? Because clearly it can be done if you're using the salting out process, and it can be done when you're doing beer and you're doing cider. These are the things that traditionally you're doing freeze distilling to concentrate it. It's not happening here, though. We can get the temperature. We can't control the temperature that much because this is just brute force. Drop it as quickly and as low as possible. What are you thinking? Hey, this coming Wednesday, the 23rd, Crowded Barrel Alchemy. This is our coffee and cocktail bar. We're not serving coffee yet. It's going to be like in a week or two, but that's finally opening after county regulations and the infrastructure and all that. It's done. It's ready. Come hang out the 23rd. We're having a grand opening.