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Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

Frankly I don't understand why grocery stores don't just sell undenatured purified food-grade ethanol. There's plenty of supply, and if people could be taught how to use it, there would be tonnes of demand. This isn't the 19th century, we all have running water to mix our ethanol with if we want "straight" vodka.

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I do not know how it looks like in States, but in my home country (Poland) it's quite easy to buy rectified spirit (90%+ ) in a normal grocery store for cooking or so. But nobody uses it to produce vodka by mixing with tap water, expect teens 20 years ago.

Never seen it in Spain though and definitely not in Finland, when I live now and it's impossible to buy a wine after 8pm.

I guess it should come as no surprise that the birthplace of directly-marketed neutral grain spirits sells it to the public. Unfortunately it seems that it's illegal in many U.S. states, all of Norway. Here in Ontario I've heard they used to sell the equivalent through the LCBO (the monopoly state retailer of spirits, recently no longer the monopoly on wine and beer), but the product pages linked from forums talking about it are dead, and the manufacturer no longer lists it on their site. I hear Everclear (major American grain ethanol brand) can be bought in Alberta.

> nobody uses it to produce vodka by mixing with tap water

Why not?

When you mix ethanol with water it gets heated up : https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d859/b2900e6d66cf71d79601dd...

Russian saying "The worst thing after drinking hot vodka is to have sex with sweaty woman".

Yet, it was Dmitry Mendeleev (inventor of Periodic Table of Element) who discovered that 40% mixture of ethanol and water is the best combination. It is quite hard to achieve precise mixture ratio by hand.

Yet in USSR you could buy pure drinkable spirit, here is a label of the bottle: http://incolorprint.ru/d/701905/d/1959_Спирт_Питьевой.jpg

Used in cases when volume matters.

I love how even famous Russian scientists live up to the stereotypes.

I wouldn't say it is a stereotype, it has practical reasons - 40% mixture is the max that body can consume right away. More than that and spirit stays in blood so it just enough to drink pure water next day and you are drunk again. Tried couple of times - not that pleasing effect.

It's an often told story but I have not seen actual sources. Vodka had been made to "polugar" ("полугар",literally "half-burn") measure long before Mendeleev has been born. "Polugar" was a spirit, which could be burned down to half of the volume (when heated almost to boiling, of course) and it's about 38% ABV. More plausible theory is that when the better methods of measuring alcohol contents became available the standard had been set up to the "round" 40%.

> When you mix ethanol with water it gets heated up

I don't exactly know how to read this paper into real power-per-volume or temperature differential. Does a crude mixture produce an unsafe or inconvenient amount of heat? Does a mixture of chilled ethanol and water (not really part of this experiment) heat enough for the ethanol (or the water!) to evaporate?

> It is quite hard to achieve precise mixture ratio by hand.

Is there a place where measuring cups or at least five normal cups of similar volume to eachother are not commonly found in households?

> Russian saying "The worst thing after drinking hot vodka is to have sex with sweaty woman"

These are the worst things in Russian life? Call me a degenerate, but both seem still pretty pleasurable.

I mean, drinking the sweat of a sweaty woman and having sex with warm vodka are definite hard-no's in my book.

>Yet, it was Dmitry Mendeleev (inventor of Periodic Table of Element) who discovered that 40% mixture of ethanol and water is the best combination

Wikipedia disagrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Mendeleev#Vodka_myth

Marketing. People want notionally imperial Russian vodkas like Smirnoff and frou-frou pseudo-French brands like Grey Goose, not Costco "undenatured purified food-grade alcohol".

Dave Arnold has a spiel about how the best vodka he’s had was diluted potable lab ethanol.

Making drinks from lab grade ethanol seems to be an popular past-time activity for almost any vaguely natural science Ph.D. student I ever known. Usually it also involves fractional destilation of lab grade denatured ethanol (often "specially denatured ethanol" which is somewhat simpler to "dedenaturate") into potable ethanol. It is somewhat notable that physics people tend to end up with simple physical processes for that (pour ethanol on baking tray and bake in baking oven for X amount of time, light it on fire, if flame is not visible you have potable ethanol) while people coming from chemical sciences tend to build incredible complex contraptions from lab glassware (I've seen such contraption which converted normal denatured alcohol into gin or jaegemester-like liquor depending on its software configuration as a continuous process, it was built by obviously bored pharmaceutics Ph.D. students, filled two lab benches and involved two Sun Ultra 5s for computer control)

Reagent-grade 95% ethanol isn't denatured. Because then it wouldn't be reagent-grade. What we had in biochem labs had tax-exempt labels.

At my old job we used 200 proof, undenatured ethanol by the gallon. A bunch of forms had be signed as it was untaxed (~$10/gal, $50/gal with tax).

I did try tasting it and it was awful. Pure ethanol is near odorless, but gains a smell from the oxidation of ethanol to acetaldehyde. The lab grade stuff had a very strong smell.

You don't want to drink that stuff. It contains traces of benzene. Benzene blocks the 95% ethanol/5% water azeotrope, which has a lower boiling point than ethanol.

Would it contain those traces if it were produced with molecular sieves rather than benzene?

Probably not. But distillation is still the norm, isn't it?

I don't know, but I do know there are facilities producing food and pharmaceutical grade 200 proof spirits using molecular sieves for the last 3-5% of water (I'm guessing followed by another distillation to remove the sieve particulate).

Very cool. My knowledge is obviously dated. I recall adding molecular sieves to absolute ethanol to keep it dry. Bu I didn't know that had gone commercial.

This was actually 200 proof USP (US Pharmacopendia) ethanol. Fit for use in products for human consumption.

I never would have drank it otherwise. If it's not made specifically for human consumption, even really pure ethanol can have super nasty trace toxins in it.

I wonder how they make it? Maybe add a drying agent to 95% ethanol?

Edit: Yes. Using molecular sieves, I gather.

> I did try tasting it and it was awful. Pure ethanol is near odorless, but gains a smell from the oxidation of ethanol to acetaldehyde. The lab grade stuff had a very strong smell.

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend putting an undiluted form of almost anything in your mouth. Nobody puts pure acetic acid on their french fries, nor does anyone drink pure citric acid, so I don't see why anyone would think pure ethanol would be much better.

Citric acid is a solid at room temperature, which makes drinking it difficult. You can buy it as a food grade seasoning and some people do eat small quantities of it pure.

I didn't drink the stuff straight! I did a taste test of a drop of the full 200 proof. It did burn as expected, not pleasant at all.

The real taste test was a 50% dilution. Tasted like really cheap vodka.

It's apparently quite expensive[0]. Once you get maximum purity that distillation allows, it's not worth the cost to process further just for recreational use.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Where-can-you-buy-ethanol

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