Make your own wine

So a few weeks back, I prepared instructions on how to make your own wine and I've decided to share those instructions with you guys. This probably would have gone better with my posts on alcohol, but better late than never. There's a set with images as well at the bottom. Just follow the link. Currently blogger wont allow me to post in the images. I have to upload them directly and I no longer have them saved as individual images anywhere. Enjoy!

How to Make Wine

So you’re interested in making your own wine? Wine has been made for thousands of years and is really quite simple and easy to make. Wine is the simply result of allowing the fermentation of fruit sugars by yeast over an extended time period. It relies on very simple principles of chemical engineering and chemistry: the first being batch reactors, that is a tank or any other reactor that you add all of your components to and close until the reaction has completed, and second, desorption, whereby something is dissolved in something else. Here, we will be dissolving sugar and carbon dioxide into water.  Now wine making takes some time, so you’ll need to be prepared to wait at least one month before your wine is done and make sure you have a cool, dark place to place it while it ferments. Now let’s get started. First you’ll need a few things.

Materials:

Gallon jug of water

Air lock (balloon)

Tooth pick

Frozen fruit juice concentrate (pick a flavor)

Sugar (at least 2 cups)

Yeast – ¼ oz - (Brewers is ideal, but bakers’ or rapid rise yeast works too).

Pot that can hold half a gallon of water.

Stove or hot plate

Funnel

Sharpie or other permanent marker

Rubber band

Warnings:

Be careful pouring hot liquid.

Wipe down any spills with soap and water. The sugar water will harden and can crystalize if not cleaned up.

Instructions:

1.       Empty half of the gallon jug of water into the pot. Pour out an additional four cups of water and dispose of this.

2.       Heat the water to just shy of boiling, where the first bubbles are starting to form.

3.       Add 2-4 cups of sugar to the pot. If you are using a very sour juice concentrate (grapefruit or lime) use more sugar (3-4 cups). If you are using a sweet concentrate (strawberry, apple, etc.) use less (2-3). Varying the sugar amount also determines the dryness of the wine. More sugar = sweeter wine (moscato, Riesling). Less sugar = dryer wine (Beardoiux, Cabernet). This will take some fine tuning to find your preference. Start with less. You can add more after the fermentation process has completed.

4.       Keep heating the water-sugar mixture over medium heat until the sugar dissolves, stirring continuously. The liquid should be completely clear.

5.       Once the sugar has dissolved, use the funnel and oven mitts to pour half of the hot water back into the gallon jug. Be careful not to spill.

6.       Pour the frozen juice concentrate into the funnel, using the remaining hot water to melt any large frozen chunks.

7.       Use remaining hot sugar-water to bring water level up to two to three inches below the top of the jug.

8.       Let water cool for five minutes. You want it to be warm, but not outright hot. Aim for 80-110 degrees Fahrenheit but it doesn’t have to be exact. Yeast likes warm water, not hot water.

9.       Pour out a small glass of the mixture and taste it. If it is unbearably sweet, you will probably want to start over. If it tastes close to fruit juice but just a little bit sweeter, you’re right on track for a nice slightly sweet wine. If it is extremely bitter or sour and you don’t want a very dry wine, dissolve some more sugar in hot water and add to the batch. This is why we don’t fill the jug all the way on the first try.

10.   Add one packet of yeast. Cap and shake to mix.

11.   Stab the toothpick through both sides of the balloon. You now have your airlock. The fermentation process produces carbon dioxide gas and this gas builds up inside and could cause the system to explode if it was unable to vent and thus it must be allowed to escape. We also don’t want to allow other gases or bacteria to get inside and spoil the batch and so the balloon can expand and the pressure of the carbon dioxide on the inside will prevent exterior gases from entering and the small holes will keep the internal pressure from getting too high.

12.   Stretch the balloon over the mouth of the jug, using the rubber band to secure it in place.

13.   Write the date and the name of your wine on the side of the jug. Store in a cool, dry place like under the sink or in a cabinet. Keep the cap with the jug. We’re going to need it eventually.

14.   Wait at least one month. Longer waiting times makes for dryer and stronger wine. You should be able to see the balloon inflate and slowly deflate over weeks. This is good. The yeast are busy turning the sugar into alcohol. You can also sample the wine and put it back to keep fermenting. You can add more sugar if you want it sweeter.

15.   After your chosen time period has passed. Open your wine. Throw away the balloon and rubber band. Pour out a glass and sample your wine. If it’s good, great! If not, just try again. Wine making is a process. The first time I tried, I made several batches at once to figure out what worked best and you may want to do the same. It only costs about two to three dollars per gallon of wine so don’t worry if one batch fails. Experiment and see what works for you!

(Optional) There will be some cloudy liquid at the bottom of your wine. These are called leets and are basically the dead yeasts leftover in the wine. They are safe to drink, but some people don’t like their appearance. To remove them, filter your wine through several layers of paper towels 4-5 times and allow the liquid to settle after each filtration. You can also just decant the clear liquid off the top with a syringe if you would like to avoid filtering but still want clear wine.

Congratulations you made your first homemade wine!  Now that you’ve finished one, try other flavors. One of the best wines I’ve made was from passionfruit concentrate and it tasted like a dry sherry. You can add fruit, nuts and herbs to your wines before fermentation to add some unique notes to your final product. You can also add flavors after the wine has finished fermenting like lemon extract or some red food coloring to give your wine a darker, fuller color.  Really just have fun, try some new things, and enjoy! 

And here's the link if you want to see the images too: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6zFeNnwhshdb0tyLUppdEprTm8/view?usp=sharing

Materials Science

So today's post is going to take a slightly different route. Instead of discussing another element or example of chemical engineering, I'm going to discuss a related field that many chemical engineers often find work in - materials science and materials engineering. This topic is particularly interesting to me because I am considering pursuing a graduate study in materials engineering. Basically, materials science and materials engineering is based on the ideas of how things are made and what they're made of. A car engine and a spoon may both be made with metals but the types of metals used have quite a few differences. Even the same metals can have different properties when used for different application. A cold metal behaves differently from a hot one and a thick piece metal is different from a thin one. 

Materials science goes back thousands of years even if the field was not technically called materials science. Historically, materials science would probably be more traditionally known as blacksmithing or metallurgy and the science behind these fields was not entirely understood for most their history. Even without knowing the little details about making alloys, blacksmiths and metallurgists for millennia have known that if you heat iron to extreme temperatures in the presence of coke (carbon, not the soda) that you can get steel. Carbon-steel has been one of (if not the) most important discoveries in history and it is still extremely important in almost all fields today. If you look around yourself, you can probably find several things made of or made with carbon steel. This could be the screws in the chair you’re sitting in, your nail clippers, or the body of your lamp. It’s everywhere and that’s because carbon-steel does two things very well. It is very strong, but is also fairly malleable – that is, it won’t crack and shatter. It’s slightly flexible and thus is great for building things out of. Those massive cables that run over the Golden Gate Bridge are an excellent example of these two traits. Carbon steel cables can be bent and wound together in a braid to make an even stronger and larger cable similar to how you might braid together smaller ropes to make a bigger one. Unlike, rope though, steel cables are extremely strong and yet they can still bend slightly. High winds can cause the bridge to distort small amounts, changes in heat can cause compression and expansion. Carbon-steel cables can absorb this kind of movement without breaking and that’s why it’s so important. If we were to build those cables with something less malleable like hard ceramics, the cables would still be very strong, but they wouldn’t be able to bend and absorb shock. They would just shatter. 

Modern materials science research is heavily focused on the idea of nano and lower-dimensional materials as well super lightweight materials. You may have heard of Graphene, “the miracle material that can do everything but leave the lab”. Now Graphene is just one example of a nano-material. Graphene is basically an extremely thin sheet of carbon, so thin in-fact that it’s only one atom thick. It’s basically a sheet of atoms. Now what scientists have found with this is that this sheet of carbon atoms behaves very differently from other forms of carbon. It is quite strong, it can be used to conduct electricity, and it’s extremely lightweight. It’s so thin, we can almost call one dimensional. Graphene isn’t the only really cool material that modern scientists are working on though. There’s also carbon nanotubes, which, like graphene are one atom thick but they are tubes of carbon rather than sheets. These tubes have been proposed for thousands of different uses but their development is still quite young and thus many of their uses are not fully mapped out at this point. They could eventually be used for drug delivery, nanobots, microscopic surgeries and a myriad of other things. Even with all these scientists focusing on really small materials, other scientists are focusing on slightly bigger things that weigh very little. One great example of this is Aereogel. It’s a super lightweight material – that is a block the size of a car would weigh less than a pound and yet it is still quite strong. Again, this is a very young development but research programs like NASA are investigating the material for potential use in space applications. Lightweight materials are very important in space travel as most of the fuel used in space travel is used in getting out of earth’s atmosphere and thus saving any weight at all reduces the amount of fuel needed.

So these are just some basic examples of materials science and engineering. It’s the science of making and understanding the things that make up everything and there’s a good chance almost every item you use in your day to day life has probably at one point been worked on by a materials scientists or engineer. It’s an extremely important field and one where many chemical engineers often find themselves. I, myself am certainly considering such a field.

Gasoline

So if you've seen the new documentary, Mad Max: Fury Road or the originals, you'll know that even if the world ended today, gasoline (or guzzoline) would still be very important to society. While the world still hasn't ended, if you'll just look around you can probably spot a car or two without trying that hard. Gas and oil-products are everywhere and this post will specifically focus on the production of gasoline from raw crude oil, a process known as cracking. Cracking is based in the chemical engineering process of chemical separation, specifically the process of cracking is a modified form of distillation. Now I'm going to have to go into some of the basics of organic chemistry for this to make sense but basically crude oil is a mixture of various lengths of chain made of carbon atoms surrounded by hydogren as seen below.
 
Basically crude oil starts with mostly longer chains of carbon and then through cracking (which can be heat based or catalytic), the chains break into smaller chains. Generally crude oil is comprised of very long chains (50-100 carbons long) and the cracking process is useful for breaking these into smaller, more sought-after chain lengths. Steam heating is generally the most common where super-heated steam is used to provide heat to trays inside of a distillation column. By setting the temperature of the rising trays to be slightly lower than each one below them, the cracked components can filter out at each stage. Basically, the shorter carbon chains are lighter and will float higher in the column, Think about how liquid water will sit in a pot while steam from it will rise up. Something very similar is happening here except instead of just water molecules, the molecules have different lengths here. As the feed is cracked in the column, various outlets are used to collect varying components. You'll see things like heating oil or diesel on lower levels of the tower and near the top, you'll get some of the lighter components like gasoline (octane) or natural gas (a mixture of methane, ethane, and propane).


You may have noticed that when you buy gas at the station, there's usually three buttons with different numbers for the octane rating. Octane is a chain of eight carbon molecules and additives such as branched or cyclic alkanes are added to the processed fuel to prevent the octane chains from bonding up with other chains again. The reason that the higher octane fuel costs more is because it is more expensive to separate fuel into purer concentrations of octane. Simply cracking and distilling may not be enough to create pure enough feeds for high octane fuels. To get purer fuels, further separation may required where desiccants may be used to absorb undesirables or a membrane filter may be used to further remove any larger molecules than the octane. As you approach 100% octane, it gets harder and harder to remove the other components and thus it makes sense that 95% octane fuel would costs more than 85% octane fuel. Though the actual octane number you see on a gas pump isn't actually a percentage, it is a metric used to define the performance of the fuel for gasoline engines, but the higher number still generally refers to higher concentrations of octane.

And that's basically how you get gasoline. You start with thick crude oil, heat it, or break it up with a catalyst, and you get smaller and smaller chains of carbon. If you want carbon chains that are eight carbons long, then you want to extract the octane. If you want lighter fuel still like propane or methane, then you will need more separations trays to get lighter and lighter outlet components. The more trays you have, the more separated the higher components will be from the lower ones. It's arguably one of the most important chemical processes in the world today and many chemical engineers find themselves working on process design and management in the oil industry where they'll oversee the cracking process and the distillation columns it occurs in.



Image sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/21c/materials_choices/crude_oil_usesrev2.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/aqa_pre_2011/rocks/fuelsrev3.shtml