Recipe 2: Sack Mead Liquor (cont. 2) - Upscaling

So time to upscale my earlier attempt to make mead liquor by fractional freezing. This time I used just under 800 ml of my Sack Mead so I should end up with about 350 ml give and take, if I can repeat the yield.

I could use a bigger stirring magnet but I just used the small one I have and turned up the rotation to full. I started the stirrer at noon, and at 19 pm about 1/3 of the beaker was full of ice. I took it out of the freezer and stirred it a bit - only nice small  crystals. Super!

I put my sieve in the freezer too to keep it as cold as possible. I was a little surprised when I measured the temperature of the beaker: -10C (with an IR temp device). Measuring the inside surface of the freezer it was -22C, so the liquid was still much warmer than the freezer after 6 hours?


I decided to take off the ice anyway, so that I was rid of some of the water, so I poured the entire beaker through the sieve and collected the liquid in a bowl. Shaking the sieve and letting some of the water melt and drip into the bowl, I guess I could not do much more to minimize the loss of ethanol. Then I poured the content of the bowl into the beaker again, and put it back into the freezer still stirring. I also left the sieve in the freezer to keep the ice from melting when I pour the content of the beaker through the sieve next time. After an hour I did a temperature check: -11.4C. I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow to do the second separation.

I collected the ice in a second bowl, let it melt and collected it in a 0.5 L clean plastic bottle. Just want to see how much ethanol I loose during this process.