Spirits are distilled from beers and (alcoholic) wines at an Alembic, which requires the Distillation skill to build and operate. Distilled spirits are used in the Festival of Ra as well as alchemy.
Materials required for an Alembic:
- Small Construction Site (1 canvas, 4 rope)
- 30 glass jars
- 10 copper sheeting
- 50 gold wire
- 2 thermometers
Alembics run on petroleum, slowly using up fuel as they run.
Operating an Alembic
Using an Alembic mainly involves using the + and - buttons to increase and decrease the temperature. Temperature is always either increasing or decreasing: to maintain the Alembic at a steady temperature, you must alternate + and - every other tick.
At any time, you can add a bottle of wine or a barrel of beer to the Alembic to begin boiling off spirits; the higher the alcohol content, the larger the quantity of spirits that will be available. Spirits begin in the "pot" and boil off into the "sink". (There is also a theoretical "pipe" through which spirits move from the pot to the sink; see below.) At any point during distillation, you can choose to dump all of the spirits that have collected in the sink thus far.
Alternatively, you can choose at any point to bottle the spirits in the sink; this option shuts off the Alembic and adds the spirits to your inventory. Once you bottle a batch of spirits, all of the undistilled spirits are thrown out. Thus, you can only keep a single batch of spirits from any one beer or wine. You can dump and re-distill spirits as many times as you like until you have the amount and type of spirits you want, or until the pot runs out of alcohol.
You can add more beer or wine to an Alembic even if there is alcohol in it already: the new alcohol will simply be added to that already in the pot.
As the Alembic runs, the distillation window will show a circle; this is an indicator of the purity of the spirits in the pipe and the sink. The circle will get darker as purity decreases, and the description in the circle will change from Air to Fire, Water, Earth, and eventually Grey. Maintaining a constant Alembic temperature is key to keeping spirit purity high.
Spirits
Except for Grey Spirits, every spirit has two descriptors: a type and a purity (e.g. "Grain Spirits of Water"):
- Spirit types (from lowest to highest boiling point):
- Rock, Wood, Worm, Grain, Grass, Fruit, Vegetable, Mineral, Fish
- Spirit purity levels (from most to least pure)
- Ra, Life, Air, Fire, Water, Earth
Extremely impure spirits are referred to simply as "Grey Spirits". They can be bottled, but are worthless.
In alchemy, producing a basic tincture in an Assimilation Bath requires 7 Grain Spirits of Water or better -- this means Grain Spirits of Water, Fire, Air, Life, or Ra may be used.
The Festival of Ra requires 5 spirits of a random type, though in practice only Mineral, Fruit, Grain, and Wood Spirits seem to be asked for.
The following information was revealed when the informational technology Distillation Experiments was unlocked at the UThought in Seven Lakes:
After much research we concluded there are in fact 9 different chemical components that make up Spirits. Each has a different boiling point, and due to the valve mechanism on an Alembic, it is possible to boil off just those spirits with a boiling point equal to the solution temperature (Rather then those equal or above).
The nine types of Spirits from lowest boiling point to high are: Rock, Wood, Worm, Grain, Grass, Fruit, Vegetable, Mineral, Fish. Spirits are then further categorized by purity level, with the most pure referred to as Spirits of Ra, followed by Spirits of Life, Air, Water, Fire, Earth. The term Grey Spirits indicates that the spirit is either less pure then Earth Spirits *or* contains compounds with an average boiling point above Fish Spirits.
Not all distillable materials contain all spirit types. Beer, for example, contains Wood, Worm, Grain, and Grass Spirits. Beers with "Dry" flavor also contain small amounts of Fish and Vegetable Spirits. Potent Beers contain 25% more spirits total then normal beers. Very Potent Beer contains 50% more.
Wine also contains Wood, Worm, Grain and Grass spirits in quantities proportional to the wine's Alcohol level. Tanic wines also contain Vegetal, Mineral, and Fish Spirits in a quantity proportional to the Tanin level.
Since the spirit type is based on an average of components, it is theoretically possible to distill intermediate types of spirits by distilling a high boiling point such as Vegetable, and a bit of a low boiling point like Grass. When this is done, the result would be Fruit Spirits. It is unknown if these can be made with enough purity to prevent classification as Grey Spirits.
NOTE: The above Distillation Experiments message was either reported incorrectly, or was incorrect to begin with. It describes Spirits of Water as being of higher purity than those of Fire, when in fact the reverse is true. Spirit purities, in order from most pure to least, are: Ra, Life, Air, Fire, Water, Earth.
Thanks to Chichis we have the following graphic showing the temperatures at which spirits boil out:
NOTE: the Fruit Spirit range is unconfirmed; Chichis entered it there as it was the only remaining slot. So far as is known, it is not possible to directly distill Fruit or Rock Spirits.
System Channel update: 07-24-2004-02:28:00 Scientists at the Great Universities of Thought announce that they made a small mistake in their "Distillation Experiments" research. Dry beers contain small amounts of Fruit Spirits, not Fish spirits as they previously indicated. (This means that the text of Distillation experiments was wrong, not the code for making spirits.)
The best early information was available in this thread on .net: HowTo: The Science Of Distilling, from which we have LastRaven's excellent description of the distillation process:
When one spirit enters the pipe, a value appears on the left bar indicating its weight, and then from then on the weight measured there is an average of all spirits in the pipe and sink.
When two spirits are in the pipe, the standard deviation of the spirits in the sink is calculated. This is converted on some scale to give the suffix value. This value is not displayed except as the 'darkness' of the circle.
When four spirits are in the pipe, it is full. The next time a spirit boils off, one will move into the sink. It appears that this is a FIFO queue, where the first spirit in the pipe is also the first to go into the sink, though this is hard to say for certain.
When one spirit enters the sink, the standard deviation of the spirits in the pipe and sink is calculated, relative to the weight average in the pipe and sink. This is converted on some scale to give the suffix value, which is then displayed in the middle of the circle.
Notice that dumping the distillate when there is one point in the sink removes four points from the pot. The 'pipe' alcohols are counted in the pot even though they don't behave like it. Sometimes I see stuff moving back from the sink into the pot, though its impossible for me to tell if this is just lag or something meaningful.
(See also: Alchemy, Festival of Ra)