Melville transforms the shaggy minutiae of life and its
myriad characters (whether Hawthorne, Malcolm, a
besieged wife or a shipmate) into an alembic of wishes,
conflicts and disappointments that, taken together, reflect
him, a mysterious, roiling, poignant writer alive, painfully
alive, in every phrase he wrote." Brenda Wineapple, Melville
at Sea, The Nation (New York), May 20, 2002.

I think the passage quoted using alembic is not well written. An alembic was a flask with a neck
that bent a bit more than ninety degree, used to separate components of a liquid mixture according to their boiling points. Turning characters into an alembic full of abstractions seem a goofy metaphor to me.

I wondered if alembic shares a root with lambic, the Belgian beer. Anyone know?

alembic has been much used figuratively, in the sense of a distillery(?).

1790 Burke Fr. Rev. 135 The hot spirit drawn out of the alembick of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling. 1789 G. White Selborne (1853) II. xxix. 243 In heavy fogs+trees are perfect alembics. 1814 Scott Wav. I. ii. 17 The cool and procrastinating alembic of Dyer's Weekly Letter. 1856 G. Brimley Ess. 229 Passed through the alembic of a great poet's imagination.

If alembic is viewed as a distillation, then what kind of distillation do we have here from tswum's paste:

The cool and procrastinating alembic of Dyer's Weekly Letter. ??

A cool distillation seems heady and controlled, but procrastinating? To or for whom? Was Dyer's letter of such interest and so highly distilled that it caused readers to procrastinate their ordinary duties while reading Dyer instead?

Hating to miss the obvious,
WW

I still think the use quoted by wordsmith is pretentiously overwritten balderdash.

but you can distill by freezing.. that how apple jack was made. ferment cider, and slowly freeze it.. the water freezes, the alcohol remains liquid.. but you have to go it slowly.. slow, distilling.. waiting for the alcohol to seperate its self out..

If the writer meant a "brew" of wishes, etc. the use of the word would be apt. Maybe she meant "lambic."
: )