Hi, new poster here. I apologize if this question is in the wrong place, or not allowed for some reason.
I’ve brewed beer from kits before. We bottled the fermented result and added sugar to ferment in the bottle. That’s the extent of my experience, and I note there was no step involved that heated the fermented product to “boil off” any harmful chemicals, like ethanol.
I’m thinking about trying some recipe experiments and maybe make some things from rice, like rice beer or sake, and maybe some other wines too. However, I’m concerned about safety and especially ethanol and other harmful chemicals. I’ve recently read about distilling spirits to make bourbon, and how the first 5% (foreshots) contains ethanol and is discarded. Also the next 30% has other harmful chemicals and should be discarded. So does that mean that beer or wine contains these chemicals too, or is it just certain types of grains or yeast that produce them (like corn)? Is there a list of ingredients I should avoid? Thanks.
First of all, ethanol is the alcohol in beer. It is produced by the yeast metabolizing wort sugar. Although, it can be harmful in large doses (i.e. get you really drunk or poison you in really excessive amounts) it is in all beers except the non-alcoholic ones and is in wine and mead as well. Yeast mainly produces ethanol although if fermentation temperatures are too high can produce fusel alcohol that won’t hurt you because of it’s low levels but might give you a headache
Martin Brungard can correct me if I am wrong here since his chemistry knowledge is more up to date than mine.
When distilling, especially moonshining, you want the ethanol as your product. The “head” or foreshorts as you put it is the lighter alcohols like methanol that can blind you. The “tail” is the higher weight alcohols that can also poison you. So you throw away the head and the tail and keep the middle as the old moonshiners say.
We likely need more information on what you are trying to do that makes you worried about harmful chemicals. Making beer/wine/mead doesn’t produce any large amounts of “harmful” by-products, except hangovers. 8^)
The boil employed during wort production achieves a few things.
Breaks up some larger sugars into more fermentable ones.
drives off DMS so your beer doesn’t taste like butter.
sterilizes your wort so you get rid of any spoilage critters.
Extracts hops flavors, aromas and bitterness (not in that order)
promotes coagulation of proteins so they settle out and help make your beer clearer
As goose said, distilling is whole-nother ball game with completely different rules and in the USA, at least, a host of legal issues to be aware of. Doing it will concentrate what is already there but it doesn’t produce any additional chemicals.
I believe the fermentation of beers and wines for distillation are often optimized for efficiency and speed with relatively little care given to avoiding methanol and fusel alcohols since those are easily removed by distillation. Beers and wines for direct consumption are fermented in a way to prevent the production of methanol and fusels. For instance, there are yeasts marketed for distillers (presumably high efficiency), which are not marketed for brewing.
Beer and wine contain ethanol.
Goose’s description of heads and tails is correct.
Yep. Sorry I mixed up ethanol and methanol. Glad you understood what I meant.
If it’s the type of yeast that matters as far as producing harmful chemicals, then that’s great. I can experiment with fermenting different things, like rice and corn, and not have to worry about harmful chemicals so long as I use brewer’s yeast instead of distiller’s yeast. I suppose there’s a reason no one makes rice beer or corn beer though. At least as far as I know.
I don’t know of any straight corn beer that is marketed today. The Aztecs used to make beer out of maize (a.k.a. corn) but I don’t recall the name of that right now. I’ve always thought beer made of corn only would be a flavor I’m unlikely to enjoy, but that’s just me.
No offense meant but you have your wires crossed here, and I have distilled and brewed professionally for years. Ethanol is what you want to collect when distilling (and it is produced by yeast during fermentation of beer as well.) METHANOL is what is produced in the foreshots and in distilling it should be discarded. However during fermentation all beer will have some amount of methanol present but not enough to be harmful as long as you drink in moderation. All wine and beer will have trace amounts of METHANOL and, of course, every alcoholic beverage will have ethanol.