How to Adapt Traditional Distillation Methods

Distilleries often evoke images of massive metal stills in an industrial setting, but all spirits begin as fermented mixtures of grain, fruit or root vegetables containing sugar-containing materials, blended with yeast for fermentation. Once fermented, this material is then combined with alcohol-rich vapors which are captured and condensed into liquid spirit; depending on its desired style it may then be blended or aged further to enhance its taste.

Distillation is an integral component of this process and its main goal is to isolate all the volatile components responsible for creating aroma perception 1. These include aldehydes, ketones, carboxylic acids and esters produced from raw material sources, fermentation methods and distillation equipment 2.

The specific cut-offs between “head,” “heart,” and “tail” fractions are determined on an empirical sensory basis depending on the skills and experience of the operator, creating a wide variety of quality and flavor profiles; more neutral spirits like vodka or gin tend not to be aged while whiskeys and other highly flavorful drinks may be aged to add complexity and depth of taste.

Knowledge distillation involves using a complex large network called the teacher to extract sample-level category similarity knowledge (classification probability P) from its training targets and pass it along to students (simple networks). This eases student network training as they can be more easily optimized with less constraints.