It’s legal in Virginia also.
Arjuna34
But is it tasty?
I’m in Wisconsin, the drunkest state in the union! Most bars per capita and most booze drank per capita than any of the remaining “sober 49” (as we cheeseheads call them). There just aint no alcohol that’s illegal here.
The cheapest beer I’ve ever bough here in the past 5 years was Grain Belt ($4.99/case of 24 cans in 1998) but I haven’t seen it here since. Who is buying beer for $2.99 a case? Do you realize a case=24 cans or bottles NOT 12?
When I first turned leagal drinking age (18 years old in 1978) a case of Kingsburry returnables was $1.66! Beat that!
[QUOTE
But is it tasty? **[/QUOTE]
Uh, I don’t think you’re supposed to drink it straight. Its used to spike drinks, as far as I know.
Maybe they need a third vial with some carbonation.
We Southern Californians have to cross the border into Tijuana to get our Everclear ™ equivalent.
In Tijuana they sell these bottles labeled “Alcohol” with a “~” over the second “o”! It’s listed as 95% alcohol. My friends and I always wondered what the other 5% consisted of and… quite frankly, what’s the point? Hell, you’ve got 95% pure alcohol, what’s another 5% gonna do?!
The packaging of this product was particularly scary because: a) it’s from Tijuana, for chrissakes! and b) it had a plastic cap that didn’t screw on, snap on, or was held in place with any means–it just fit on over the lip of the bottle.
We’re still alive, though.
The other 5% is pretty much water. Actually…it’s damn near impossible to get a higher % of alcohol, because the liquid will tend to reabsorb surrounding water in the air
[Chemical Engineer Hat on]
-
Yep, pure grain alcohol (ethanol) is legal to make and sell in the United States. That doesn’t mean you can buy it in a liquor store, of course. But I believe that they’ll let pretty much anyone order it from Pharmco or Sigma of Fisher or any one of a dozen other companies that sell alcohol.
-
Standard “pure” ethanol is 95%, or 190 proof. The other five percent is water and maybe some small traces, but not likely. They distill it pretty well to just ethanol and water. The reason it’s not pure ethanol is that water and ethanol form what is called an azeotrope.
What the hell is an azeotrope, you ask?
[WARNING: highly technical discussion follows]
In a normal mixture of two pure liquids (say methanol and water), the component with the lower boiling point will boil off first during distilling. But that’s not the long and short of it. The vapor produced by boiling 50% methanol/50% water will be around 80% methanol, 20% water. As more methanol boils off, the concentration of methanol in the vapor drops, and the concentration of water increases.
This is the reason fractional distillers are used. That 80/20 mixture boils up to the next plate in the distilling tower, is cooled to a liquid there, and vapor produced from that… which vapor will be about 90% methanol. On the next plate, the liquid will be 90% methanol and the vapor 95% or so. (These numbers are derived from the boiling curve for methanol and water, which you may view here). At the very top of the distillation tower, you’ll get pure methanol, and after you’ve boiled off all the methanol, you’ll have water left over.
Ethanol’s different, though. Difficult, in fact. An azeotrope could also be called an equal-boiling mixture. What happens is that the vapor from a 95% ethanol/5% water mixture is also 95%/5%. So no matter how much larger a distillation column you build, you’ll never separate out all of the water.
In order to get pure, 200 proof ethanol, you must introduce an azeotrope breaker into the mixture. The one usually used in this process is pentane. Adding the pentane creates a much more complex mixture (and you no longer have as simple a boiling curve; I won’t try to describe what’s needed, as I barely remember myself). The pentane destroys the equilibrium at that 95%, and the ethanol is free to boil out the top of the column effectively pure.
I say “effectively” because there will always be small traces of both water and pentane.
[End technical discussion]
[Chemical Engineer hat off]
As to drinking pure or 95% alcohol–I wouldn’t do it, personally, even if I did drink. One could theoretically add it to “beer flavoring,” but I suspect it would taste as much like beer as carbonated grape juice spiked with ethanol would taste like wine. (I use the subjunctive because I don’t drink and can’t vouch for the taste of any of these things).
As to cost–a gallon of pure ethanol costs us about $4.00 here. Beer is 5% or so ethanol. So, ethanol adds about 20 cents per gallon to the cost of making the beer. That’s prices in extreme bulk, through a contract, though.
Hell, bottled water sells for more than that 
And one last note on legality: I just looked in my Sigma catalog. It notes that an ATF license is not required to purchase 100% alcohol from them. Excise taxes are included, though. And if you’re not buying bulk, it’ll run you quite a bit more than $4 a gallon.
OK. Everything you ever wanted to know about alcohol but were afraid to ask. There ya go.
(FWIW, EverClear is legal in Iowa, too. Doesn’t taste like much of anything, really. Just has that burn going down. It can be fatal if consumed in large enough quantities–which aren’t that large, from what I’ve heard. Six ounces, or so, IIRC.)
The per case cost of the beer is said to be between $6.00 to $9.60 a case, however, you have to frequently buy co2 cartridges that raise the cost from $9-$12 per case. I can already buy beer in the store that cost less than that!
However…the Beer Machine does work as advertised, and if you want to try a simple method of home brewing I’d strongly recommend it!