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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"unfortunately CO2-based ethanol cannot be legally sold as a beverage"

Why not?

Edit: A little searching here seems to say that synthetic ethanol can be used as a food ingredient and must be accurately labeled. The policy doesn't say that it can't be used in beverages. However, I assume that it's use in many beverages are defacto banned as synthetic alcohol is not part of the tradition grain bill. I don't see why it can't be used in the liquors or a new type of beverage.

https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...

Another edit: it appears that FDA lists ethanol as GRAS for general food product use, and that TTB approves the use of GRAS ingredients. If you use synthetic flavors, it looks like that affects the labeling. I assume you would just have to label the alcohol consistent with it's source.

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Ethanol produced via non fermentation methods tends to have impurities like methanol or the separation process to purify the ethanol requires other not good compounds to bust the azeotropes. Everclear is 95% alcohol because that is the best you can do with distillation. You can 100% ethanol, but it has a trace amount of benzene so it can not be sold/consumed as food.

Ethanol produced by fermentation also contains impurities and methanol. The FDA/ATF say in the link that the majority of vinegar and alcohol used in food cone from synthetic sources.

I haven't read the link yet, but did not expect synthetic alcohol to be used for food and beverages.

I was surprised at how widespread it is.

Ethanol produced via fermentation tends to have methanol as well though. IIRC wine has a fair bit in it.

I am not an expert in traditional fermentation but I believe presence of contaminants depends on the crop, the strain of yeast present during the process, and conditions. So basically it can vary a lot.

Methanol and other byproducts do vary based on strains, conditions, etc. Generally, methanol is not an issue in things like wine because it's not produced in large enough quantities, even when conditions are poor. A treatment for methanol poisoning is actually ethanol (and likely some NAC). Only when distilling is methanol concentrated enough to cause problems. When done correctly, the distillation process separates the methanol from the other distillates at specific temperatures. Usually the heads and tails of a distillation run are thrown away. I believe it's the head that has the lions share of methanol.

This ethanol is produced via fermentation, though. Just not fermentation of plant matter. The OP uses the word "fermentation" several times.

We don't normally think of the containers where wine or sour mash are fermented as bioreactors, but they are.

Right, but the source product is sugar a C6 compound, and the fermentation pathwasy removes carbon atoms. This process is building up from C1 so methanol is a possible side product. Or at least I bet that is the concern

Current regulations (in Europe, and I believe the US is the same) is that only ethanol produced using yeast-based fermentation of crops can be sold for human consumption.

I edited my comment after doing a search. FDA does permit synthetic alcohol in food and food chemical production. It doesn't say that it can't be part of a beverage, which is food. Although there could be other regulations that supercede this.

Very interesting! I did not know that, thank you for sharing.

This explains how Air Company is selling their ethanol as vodka.

Very interested, I didn't know there was a real world example.

It doesn't really matter, since beverages overall require very little CO2. So even if it were fully legal and practical, it wouldn't make much of a difference.

This thread is about using the alcohol synthesized from CO2 to create alcoholic beverages, not using the CO2 to carbonate beverages.

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