Friends gave me a bottle of Remy Martin yesterday and I realized I like the smell more than the taste. Can I get drunk off the fumes? Is it more or less efficient than drinking it? Any hazards?
Alcohol has a pretty low boiling point (which is why it’s fairly easy to distill), and I can confirm that standing over a boiling pan of wine (I made soup where the main ingredient was 3 liters of white wine once) you will start to feel slightly funny after a while.
Technically, I guess you can get really drunk off the fumes of warm/hot booze, provided you keep the temperature below 100C. Probably not that dangerous health-wise, unless you trap the fumes in some way - trapping the fumes will concentrate the alcohol, probably turning most of it back into liquid form - and that is dangerous, not just because you’re now drinking very strong booze, but you’re handling highly flammable liquids and gasses and you’re doing it near a heat source (which is why distilling is still dangerous).
Oh, and I was talking about beer & wine. I would advice against heating any strong (say, 20/30%+) booze at all, unless your plans include flames all over the place.
Thanks for this info.
The cognac is 40% alcohol. I don’t heat it. I just pour it in the glass and sniff it. I don’t know if it’s a placebo effect compounding with fatigue or if I’m really starting to get drunk but I’m feeling something.
For science!
Maybe the heating effect from your hands comes into play (you’re supposed to warm cognac, by cupping the glass, right?), but on room temperature, you won’t really lose much alcohol to the air so there shouldn’t be too much to get drunk on. If there was, a bottle of vodka would drain notably if left open for a day [well, it would in my house, but not to the air].
I suspect that even in my wine-soup scenario, the effect was mostly in my head. Our sense of smell is pretty acute and can easily detect substances of many kinds way before they have any real effect on the rest of our body. That’s pretty much what it’s for. Doesn’t seem strange to me that just having that smell in your nose for half an hour starts messing with your senses (that is, without having any noticeable effect on your blood/alcohol level). On the third hand, there are quite a few substances that have much stronger and more direct effect on your mental state when smelled/snorted/inhaled than when ingested.
Don’t know if this is technically the same as “smelling” fumes, but one of my sons insisted you can get high inhaling it.
He worked at a pizza place once that made it’s own dough in this huge vat. When the dough was completely risen and tight with air, they would poke a hole into it with a large, wide straw and inhale the air. The air was allegedly fermented and they’d get drunk as hell from it.
I have no idea if this was true or just the ramblings of a teenage bullshit artist!
Yeast working in dough does produce some alcohol (and it definitely smells “beery”) but AFAIK the overwhelming majority of the “air” produced is plain old CO2.
That’s what I was thinking.
But then again a real beer is 95% water and one can get intoxicated by drinking enough of that.
It’s never worked for me, I can tell you that.
Absolutely, and there was even a fad a few years ago for alcohol inhalation “bars.” Never went to one, never really even heard of one close by, and I don’t know if it’s still legal or if any such places are still in business.
Another anecdote, FWIW.
Years ago, I worked in a warehouse that supplied duty free goods, including liquor - we used to load ocean containers with cases of spirits and wines for export, and to maximise the value of the shipping volume, we would de-palletise the cases and stack them in solid walls into the container.
On one occasion, we had stacked about three or four walls of cases into the front of the container and for some reason, the truck hauling it had to be moved (I don’t remember the cricumstances - it could have been to enable a ramp to be lifted, or because he was on the wrong dock or something) - as he pulled forward, the stacks inside the container all fell down, smashing hundreds of bottles of gin, brandy and whisky, which then cascaded out of the back doors like a waterfall.
I was one of the team of half a dozen people assigned to the job of cleaning up, which comprised carefully transferring each crushed, sodden case into its own plastic bucket. We were in there for a couple of hours, and it was a hot summer day - so it was an alcohol sauna. We all felt quite drunk afterward, but it only lasted about an hour.
I’m not sure how much of the effect is due to absorbed alcohol (there must be some making it into the blood in circumstances like these), and how much of it was just the effect of trying to breathe in a stifling, weird atmosphere for hours.
That’s bizaar. I didn’t think that would work. I was going to give an anecdote of me attempting this in my wild undergraduate days. I tried to make a cloud chamber with Everclear. Actually, I was fairly successful with the cloud chamber, but inhaling said cloud was a complete bust. Every muscle in my diaphragm contracted spontaneously to immediately expel the toxin. It was like I had inhaled fire.
I guess these bars must use a considerably lower concentration of alcohol. I’d love to try it, just to compare with my own results.
I can confirm this is true. We would just take the cover off the can and push down on the dough and it would sink to the bottom of the can. If you stuck your head in the can and took a deep breath, you’d stagger around for a few minutes completely wasted. Then it would go away.
It smelled and tasted like vaporized beer.
And a couple hundred years ago, there was a ‘fad’ in Ireland of bars offering hits of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) as a substitute for alcoholic drinks.
But that was largely a revolutionary action, to protest against paying money to the British tyrants who had a large tax on alcohol.
Also had a nice side effect – leave the bar and in about a dozen steps you were ‘sober’ again, thus couldn’t be arrested for public intoxication. I sometimes wonder if that might be a useful option today – it would certainly seem likely to reduce some of the problems of drunk driving. Possibly there are long-term bad effects on your health from inhaling laughing gas? But then, there are certainly bad health effects from drinking alcohol, but that hasn’t stopped the practice.
Yeah, I remember him saying it didn’t last all that long.
That suggests to me that the effect is not frOm alcohol.
I, myself, don’t claim it is. In fact, I always thought my son was full of shit, to tell you the truth.
But… intoxicating vapors that are inhaled can have a short effect before leaving the human body.
“Poppers” (amyl or, butyl nitrite) is one thing that comes to mind.
The reality is that alcohol doesn’t evaporate fast enough to get drunk off of it. Think about it, your glass of cognac will still be there and still be alcoholic in the morning. At most, 30% of one drink is going to evaporate. Even if you breathe that all in and it all gets to your blood stream, it isn’t enough to get you drunk.
On the other hand, if you are breathing in an oxygen deprived gas, that will get you screwed up pretty quick.
Don’t have the link at the moment, but there was a SD column once about the effect of alcohol, and they described an interesting test: two groups of people had been given cocktails (so the taste of actual alcohol was covered), one group with real alcohol the other without, and the ones who got no alcohol but believed that they were getting vodka, wine etc., acted and felt drunken. So the placebo effect regarding alcohol is rather strong.
I call bullshit on getting drunk off of pizza vapours. For one thing, I put myself through Engineering school by working at a pizza place full-time, and more times than I can count I was in charge of preparing all the dough for the day - massive amounts. I never encountered anything strange even when I was leaning over a huge bowl punching the dough down with a metal rod and inhaling fumes for a long time. Nor did anyone else. Yes it smells very strongly like beer, but so what? That doesn’t mean it has alcohol in it, it means it has yeast and grain and sugar in it.
Furthermore, even if there is a trace amount of vaporized alcohol (a very, very small amount - the yeast simply does not have that much time to act - think of how homebrewing works and takes 3-4 days to get 4-5% alcohol by volume) gas has a density less than 1/1,000 of liquid. Can you imagine how many cubic feet of very trace amounts of alcohol mixed with air you’d have to inhale to get even a tiny amount of alcohol? Assuming it even all absorbed at 100% efficiency? And to somehow have it effect someone immediately?
Placebo effect is powerful, especially when it involves youth and alcohol. I see a money-making opportunity here, in fact. I should hang out around high schools selling pizza mix out of my car. “I’ve got 20 pounds of pure snow! Snow-white Pillsbury flour, that is…”
Think about how breathalyzers work.
There is an “excess” of alcohol in your blood. The reason that the alcohol is getting into your lungs/breath is that there is no alcohol vapour in the air you breathed in. The reason it is going in THAT direction is that there is a gradient. Lots here, none there, its going to move from the high side to the low side.
Put a bunch of alcohol in the air, and have none in your body and the alcohol is going to go the other direction.
The only possible problem I see is this. First, how much alcohol vapor can you have in the air you breath till breathing it becomes too unpleasant? Second, how fast can your liver process/remove the alcohol in your system?
If the answer to the first is low and the answer to the second is fast, then not very drunk. If answer to the first is high and the answer to the second is low, then pretty damn drunk.
So, my guess is that its possible, and the big question is to what degree can you get drunk?
Oh, and I once accidently breathed a bunch of ether vapor. Made me sorta high, very sleepy, and gave one hell of a hangover. Seems obvious to me the same thing could occur at some level with plain old booze vapor.