Spirit of Wine and Spirit of VinegarAlcohol and acetic acid are very commonly used in alchemy, alcohol moreso than acetic acid. You will need a constant supply of both for your work.

The first and easiest way to go about procuring alcohol and acetic acid is to buy it. Everclear is available at beer stores in the US, but not so readily available in Canada (a Canadian needs a license to buy it). This is 95% alcohol. If you can't get Everclear you can buy a bottle of brandy or cognac (any alcohol made from red wine is best, white wine is second best, other hard liquors being acceptable but inferior because of the missing Solar element in them), and distill your alcohol from that.

For the acetic acid, lab grade acetic acid is available, but is alchemically dead, having been produced by purely chemical means with no life energy present. The next best thing is to buy a few gallons of red wine vinegar and purify that into acetic acid, but again that can quickly become expensive depeneding on where you shop, and sometimes manufacturers augment the vinegar with white vinegar, which is not what we want.

I prefer to make my own red wine and vinegar, which I find much more satisfying and fulfilling. The equipment for it costs about one hundred dollars, consists of a primary fermenter, carboy, siphon hose, fermenting trap, and spatula. A heating belt also helps in winter. You can use this same equipment for both the alcohol and vinegar. Next come the wine kits. The ones I get cost about seventy dollars and come with two batches of grape juice concentrate (to make 23 liters), yeast supplement, yeast, and extra stuff like stop ferment and oak flavouring (which I don't use because I won't be drinking it).

Making the wine is a lot of fun and a hobby in itself. For our purposes, though, we don't need to focus so much on flavour. Be sure to thoroughly clean your equipment before and after each use with a chlorine solution, available at the same store you purchased the equipment from. For most kits you start with the primary fermenter - a big 23-liter plastic pale with a lid - and pour into it the concentrated grape juice. Pour in the proper amount of water, mix in the yeast supplement, let the temperature adjust to between 22 - 27C (room temperature), sprinkle on the yeast, close the lid and attach the fermenting trap. Use a heating belt during the winter. Most of the fermenting will occur during the first week. To this day the bubbling of the fermenting trap still makes me giddy, don't as me why, I just really enjoy it.

After a week, transfer the wine to the carboy using the siphon hose, leaving the sediment behind (which is a good source of natural cream of tartar), and reattach the fermenting trap. Allow to ferment for another 2 - 3 weeks. At this point you can bottle the wine (I just use old 4-liter water bottles) for later distilling or use the wine to convert to vinegar.

To make vinegar, take at least four liters (15 is preferable) of your wine, and put it back into the primary fermenter, ensuring that all carbonation is out by shaking the wine carboy back and forth a few times before pouring. Calculate what a third of your wine is in volume, and add that much in water. In other words, if you have fifteen liters of wine, add five liters of water to it. Throw in a piece of rye or sour dough bread, then cover the top with a loosely woven cloth, so that air can circulate but bugs can't get in. Originally I used cheesecloth, but I quickly found that fruit flies can easily push their way through it and get into the vinegar. That was not a pleasant experience.

After ten weeks the vinegar should be done. Test it by smell and taste. At this point you can bottle it all or take away a liter of the vinegar and add a liter of fresh wine for a constant source of vinegar. You can also use the Mother of Vinegar (the layer of slime that forms on top of the wine which converts the alcohol into vinegar) to start new batches of vinegar. Keep it alive by feeding it fresh wine every so often.

To purify alcohol, do the following: Extract in batches of one liter of wine at a time all the alcohol that will distill over at 97C. Then do at least six more distillations using a water bath at between 85 - 95C. Do not let the liquid go over 100C or water will distill over as well. After the seventh distillation your alcohol will be roughly 94 - 95%. This is suitable for most alchemical operations. It is impossible to go beyond 96% as at this concentration the alcohol forms an azeotrope with the water, so when you distill the liquid both will come over.

Various alchemical operations require that you use absolute alcohol, that is, alcohol devoid of water. Regular distilling will not produce this, so we need to use something to hold the water behind while the alcohol is being distilled over. When we make oil of tartar, we expose potassium carbonate to the air, and gradually moisture is pulled from the atmosphere and into the carbonate. We can use this property to do the same thing with the alcohol, as the alcohol will not dissolve the carbonate, only water will. In other words, because alcohol and potassium carbonate are completely opposite in their natures, both chemically and alchemically (Salt and Mercury cannot combine because they are opposite to each other - they need the presence of Sulfur to join together), they will not mix. Only the water present in the alcohol will dissolve the carboante. See the instructions on making absolute alcohol for further details.

To purify vinegar there is a trick. Rather than distilling it, we can freeze the vinegar, then let it drip into another bottle - what drips over first is the acetic acid plus the colouring of the wine, while the water stays behind as a plug of ice. To do this is really easy. In a bottle of at least two liters, fill it halfway with the vinegar, then put it on its side in the freezer, making sure that the opening isn't blocked. After it freezes, place it upside down so that it will drip into another bottle, propping it up in some way and perhaps using a funnel to make sure it drips into the bottle. Leave this for a few hours. After that time, most of the acetic

acid and the colouring will have dripped into the lower bottle, while a slightly pink plug of ice is left in the upper bottle. Throw away the latter, and repeat the process with the now darker liquid. You'll most likely need to do all this in batches. Eventually you'll get to a point where the vinegar will be very dark and smell very strongly.

At this point you can proceed with the distillations, or, if you live in the northern climate, wait until winter when it gets to be about -25C at night, which will further concentrate your acetic acid.

Using a thermometer that can read up to 150C, boil the vinegar at 100C. Throw away everything that distills over, as it is water. Then slowly raise your temperature to 105C. What distills over is a mild solution of acetic acid and water, perhaps at a pH of 3.5, and looks very slightly yellowish. You may find that the rest of your vinegar distills off at this temperature, which is ok because we will do several distillations of this acid. If your liquid stops dripping, increase your heat so that it continues to distill, and until you get to the point where that left behind in the boiling flask starts to eithr spit around violently or looks like a thin honey. Stop the distillation, let everything cool, wash your boiling flask with bleach, then dish soap, and then purify your acetic acid further by boiling off the water at progressively higher temperatures. Eventually your acetic acid will have a nice golden colour to it and have a pH of around 2 or less.

James Collins