Follow along: IG @birectifier
I am in phase 3 of 4 for my Portugal project and my wife has given me 5 months notice for moving. This means it is last call to purchase a birectifier or clevenger apparatus [e-commerce link]. It may take significant time to restart production and the price will certainly increase for the American market.
I picked up a bottle of Adega Páscoa Medronho on my last trip to Portugal at a shop in Monchique. This was produced by Esmeraldo Tomás Páscoa who has been making Medronho for thirty years. I would easily call Páscoa a top five producer of Medrohno (in my big informal survey to personally acquaint myself!) and it clearly rivals the pleasure of drinking the finest agave spirits. You know you have something special on your hands. I could be content spending many years of my life drinking this stuff.
Páscoa is part of a group of exemplary producers that have a marketing cooperative called Casa Do Medronho. They also have a physical museum tourists can visit. I’m itching to do more work with them in the future.
I have to confess to messing up this case study, but we can learn from that. This spirit is bottled at 51.81% ABV so to achieve 100 ml of absolute alcohol, I needed 193 ml of sample. I measured that and added it to my 250 ml volumetric flask but then forgot to top that with the difference in water which would be 57 ml.
So what happens? When you collection 200 ml in fractions (8*25 ml), you are left with roughly 50 ml of stillage, but often less because a small volume, roughly 10ml, stays in the lowest ball of the inner rectifier above the vapor trap. My mistake means I could not collect all 8 fractions. You still have 100 ml of absolute alcohol so the fractions continue to align until the last fractions where you run out of liquid to collect and even steam to drive your inner rectifier. I could not collect all of fraction 7 or any of fraction 8. Did this bias my results? I cannot say for sure, but my wager is that I may have driven a small additional percentage of volatile acidity to fraction 6. All of the other fractions appeared normal. What this illustrates is that you can make a mistake without burning all of your results. I did not have enough sample left to start again.
I was extremely impressed by this Medronho and can’t wait to track down another bottle.
Ethyl acetate was concentrated, but not overly, giving this spirit a nice fullness in its unaged state. Fusel oil was below average for what is likely a budding yeast, implying a long gentle ferment. The fifth fraction was exuberant, even visually louched, with concentrated floral esters which upon days of sitting in a nosing glass reveal more varietal character that I’d like to call cedary. To me, that is a particularly noble aroma.
The sixth fraction was covered in droplets implying a heavy full spirit. Medronho distillers often look for visual queues, such as the legs or beads on their nosing glass, implying surface tension related to longer chain molecules; the old rum distillers had their version of this. Droplets on the surface of this fraction may be a different visual queues that correlates with what these distillers are looking for.
Fraction 1: Concentrated to the point of non-culinary aromas. Possibly an extra aroma.
Fraction 2: Diminutive version of fraction 1 as expected.
Fraction 3: Neutral as expected. Slightest hint of fusel oil.
Fraction 4: Fusel oil inline with a slowly fermented fruit eau-de-vie. Hint of fraction 5 aroma.
Fraction 5: Thinly louched and covered in oil droplets. Stunning floral estery character. Powerful but not obnoxiously so. After a few days, varietal medronho character becomes easier to discern; I want to say cedary.
Fraction 6: Detectable gustatory acidity inline with a pot distilled spirit. Covered in oil droplets.
Fraction 7: I tasted this partial fraction undiluted and there was gustatory acidity inline with a pot distilled spirit. Pleasant weighty character that is hard to pin down.
Fraction 8: Did not collection this fraction due to error.