The US now produces a lot of ethanol-mostly for blending with gasoline. Is this alcohol of high enough quality to make a good vodka? Is there any evidence that it is being diverted to use an alternative booze?
I have never heard of it being used as an alcoholic beverage on any significant scale although it should be safe to drink in theory. However, lab grade ethanol is similar as long as it isn’t the denatured variety. You can dilute it and drink it as vodka and it tastes just like any other vodka does. Undiluted, it is basically the same thing as Everclear. I doubt the quality control is as good for fuel alcohol as it is for either drinking or lab grade ethanol so I would be hesitant to try it. It is bad news if you drink something contaminated with other forms of alcohol like methanol.
I can’t say for sure exactly how the process works for producing and transporting ethanol meant to be combinined with gasoline and sold at the pump, but I know that when a racing series says “100% fuel-grade ethanol” (like IndyCar ran for a few years), the “fuel-grade” – in contrast to “food-grade” or “lab grade,” I assume – part means “denatured”. So it was something like 98% ethanol, 2% gasoline, making it undrinkable. I believe this is legally required – perhaps if you don’t denature it, you have to pay taxes on it as liquor or handle it differently or whatever.
This small amount of added gasoline, by the way, had a side benefit of making the flames somewhat visible during a fuel fire – pure ethanol flames are invisible or very hard to see, making it a challenge for safety teams.
I’d be worried about low-level contaminants, which would be no big deal for your engine but a nasty poison inside your body. PPM or even PPB concentrations of some elements and compounds are pretty nasty for your health. For comparison, old leaded gasoline was only about one part per thousand Tetraethyl Lead to gasoline, and surely you wouldn’t want to be drinking even that much lead!
I can’t find anything saying so, but I wouldn’t be surprised if fuel grade ethanol was contaminated with a small percentage of methanol. For fuel uses, this wouldn’t matter - ethanol and methanol have very nearly identical properties when it comes to burning them (the Indy 500 made a switch from methanol to ethanol for political reasons, with very little adjustment.) Moonshiners have to be careful to keep methanol out of their product (usually by discarding the initial part of the batch) - every so often you hear of people getting poisoned by carelessly distilled homemade whiskey containing methanol. There’s also some cases of unscrupulous moonshiners deliberately adding wood alcohol to their product, but it can happen accidently as well.
It’s been done before; when the Allies reclaimed Europe they also confiscated large amounts of V2 rocket fuel, ethanol made from potatoes, essentially potato everclear. They immediately set about getting massively drunk on it for a few weeks until commanding officers ordered it destroyed, after which they only got quietly drunk on what they still had hidden. I wouldn’t want to risk it myself, though. Ethanol can be made from a variety of sources, including petroleum and natural gas, and even before being intentionally denatured it can contain nasty things like benzyne, methanol and 2-propanol if it’s not being made with human consumption in mind. If that’s the case it could get one blind drunk or dead drunk, emphasis on blind and dead.
Also, in WWII US sailors drank the 180 proof ethanol torpedo fuel, which the navy eventually denatured in various ways. One method which backfired was to denature it with methanol, and add a warning dye. Unfortunately, the sailors filtered the stuff, which DID remove the warning dye but not the methanol, and made them mistakenly think it was now safe. Later, they used croton oil, which wouldn’t kill them but gave them violent cramps and diarrhea to dissuade them from drinking the stuff.
First quarter chemistry students were warned about lab ethanol. According to one TA, the last remaining traces of water in the ethanol are removed with benzene, and there’s enough benzene in the “pure” stuff to mess you up.
~VOW
Ethanol used for fuel is denatured with gasoline during production, so human consumption is strictly a no-no.
Back when I was working for Big Agriculture a bunch of people I worked with (not I) toured a brand new ethanol plant and the manager let them take a sip of the stuff before it was denatured. They unanimously agreed that raw ethanol makes an absolutely TERRIBLE cocktail, either straight or with a mixer. Remember, the stuff is made in steel tanks, it only ages for 60-80 hours and, as** pravnik** said, they may add a little benzene to help evaporate more water out of the distillate.
I remember a poster here (who was an aspiring distiller) saying that a lot of vodka is made by purchasing industrial grain ethanol and then running it through a smaller still to tweak / refine / add “X-times distilled” fluff to the label.
I toured an ethanol plant a few years ago. The 5% water left in it after double distillation was removed with huge filter tanks filled with clay filter pellets that adsorbed the water. They wouldn’t let us sample the ethanol and stated that it was denatured with gasoline as it left the filter tanks.
Even if it hasn’t been deliberately adulterated with methanol or gasoline or the like, ultra-pure ethanol is still not safe to drink. To get the last of the water out of ethanol, it is mixed with benzene and re-distilled – that forms a trinary ethanol-benzene-water azeotrope to counteract the effect of the binary azeotrope of ethanol-water. Look up azeotrpe to understand better. Anyway, a few ppm benzene remains in the ethanol. Not enough to ruin scientific applications, but if you make a habit of drinking it, a very specific type of liver damage will occur.
This is nearly true for the the facilities I have experience with. In most cases the 200 proof product is safe to drink (and I have) as it is not denatured until the alcohol reaches a final staging area just before loading into rail cars or tanker trucks.
It tastes similar to Everclear, though a bit smoother. All open taps are tightly controlled to prevent unauthorized access by employees.
Interestingly, the exact denaturing agent is held as a secret. I can say that it was not gasoline at any plant I’ve worked in.
Indeed, but I was led to believe this is not done with the HPLC-grade stuff. We certainly got through a good few litres of that in our second-year house at university, and my liver is fine (so far…)
Lab grade ethanol is almost always not separated past the azeotrope. The liquid-liquid toluene or benzene stage adds too much to the cost. While the 5% water by weight left in your lab grade ethanol won’t hurt you and might actually help, it’s not so great for your fuel. Still, lab grade ethanol has traces of methanol and other nasty stuff in it so too much is liable to make you go blind. The only fuel grade ethanol that’s “safe” to drink is pressure-swing distilled. Right now pressure-swing distillation is more expensive than liquid-liquid extraction, so it’d be hard to find.
I recall reading the book by the Soviet pilot who stole a MIG-25 and flew it to Japan. He mentioned that brake fluid for most fighter jets then was pure ethanol, and the crew put it to good use when it was not stopping planes.
The stuff we “acquired” through a lab technician we knew was pretty expensive (something like £50-£60 for a winchester I think) and was quoted as 99.8% ethanol.
This would have been the stuff.
No mention of benzene on there, but I guess there could be some in the ≤0.2% that isn’t ethanol.
Weirdly on this page it looks like the 99.5% stuff is more expensive than the 99.8% HPLC grade stuff.