alcohol freeze distillation and wine in soup

[Topminator]

it's a thing irl.

the distillation setup takes ages as it is now and to make a meaningful amount of aqua vitae you need like 5 of them at least. it's just not competitive compared

to speed up the process i suggest to have the option to instead have wine freezing into brandy.

how it could work is you put wine into a barrel outside when it's very cold (like -10c and only outside a room, so if you don't want brandy it stays as wine in your cellar) and it takes like 12 or 24 hours of continuous freezing cold so it's an advantage exclusive to colder regions (or a high enough mountain).

 

and maybe you can melt and put the leftover wine ice in soup. Because soup's only use is for when you're short on meat, otherwise you have no reason to make it. it's bad because only 3 ingredients and meat and veggie stew do what soup does but better).

you could break the block into ice cubes/chunks by hand (no hammer or chisel because the ice is porous), you heat it in a pot until it melts into low-grade wine then

[Topminator]

oops, ctrl-enter posts the post, let me complete it here.

aqua vitae bandages are not competitive to honey-sulfur unless you have no bees, and even then traders can sell honey.

you can use the melted wine cubes in soup for like 25-50 fruit saturation/L maybe? so it has an upside over stews and put regular wine in soup too because why not.

[PoisonedPawn777]

Would be nice to have a simple option available, particularly early game. Assuming of course we can account for the lower quality of the alcohol, otherwise the current distillation process would be rendered fairly useless.

[Topminator]

49 minutes ago, PoisonedPawn777 said:

Would be nice to have a simple option available, particularly early game. Assuming of course we can account for the lower quality of the alcohol, otherwise the current distillation process would be rendered fairly useless.

but that's the thing, if you make it exclusive to cold regions then the current distillation still makes sense if you live in a hot zone or if your wine is about to go bad in summer! besides the distiller is still needed for aqua vitae so it wouldn't become obsolete.

you can account for the alcohol left trapped in the ice and make it give out a bit less than you would get in the distiller on every alcohol, so 10:1 alcohol leaves 4L instead of 5L for a full barrel and 20:1 alcohol leaves 2L instead of 2.5L for a full barrel. this way you're trading a bucket of the stuff for an easier time.

it also gives a different process for the first stage instead of boil twice, so it's more fun in my opinion.

[PoisonedPawn777]

I love the idea of having a new way to process all the extra berries I collect. Wonder if it would be able to be implemented in a realistic fashion that would have you separate the alcohol during the freezing/thawing process, or if that would make it too complex. Would certainly require it to be a bit more hands on. Hopefully our seraphs are immune to methanol!

[Topminator]

6 hours ago, PoisonedPawn777 said:

I love the idea of having a new way to process all the extra berries I collect. Wonder if it would be able to be implemented in a realistic fashion that would have you separate the alcohol during the freezing/thawing process, or if that would make it too complex. Would certainly require it to be a bit more hands on. Hopefully our seraphs are immune to methanol!

It being hands off (and thus easily scaleable) is the point of having it though, just put the barrel(s) outside in the cold and wait. Not only that, ice floats on water too, so it being hands off makes sense.

Maybe you could hammer and chisel the ice into chunks/cubes like you do with stone quarry's stone slabs.

Or you could put a piece of flax twine in the barrel to raise the ice block with, to get it back you need to break/melt the ice

For methanol you don't throw away the first batch on the regular distiller, so it's safe to say seraphs are immune.