Liquid alcohol is dangerous for kids, see? We know that to be true. But this is powdered alcohol–not the same thing. So we can market it to kids like Pop Rocks and they can eat/guzzle it by the kilo and no harm will come to them.
OK, neat parlour trick getting alcohol to keep in a powdered form. Convenient that this form eludes taxation and minimum age laws. But just because it’s legal, should it be done anyway? When the end result will be more legislation to include the powder in the liquid laws? Not to mention the potential for disaster in letting some 12 year old OD himself before he’s had a chance to develop some kind of sense!
Um, this strikes me as urban legend, seeing as it it (as far as I know) physically impossible. Alcohol is a liquid (ethanol, anyway, the stuff we drink). You can’t “dehydrate” it to form a powder - even without water it’s a liquid. Anything I can think of that might break down into ethanol when immersed in water is also a liquid. There’s no such thing as “powdered” ethanol.
That link claims you can buy the stuff online, but I was unable to find a link that sold it. Of course, being that I don’t speak Dutch or German hampered my shopping efforts.
Re. the “urban legend” bit, yes I have only ever heard of this once when it was a newspaper over here doing an April Fool thing about some crafty Japanese company inventing powdered whisky. -oh, worry now for Scottish exports, etc.
I don’t see how it can really be done either, but me and clever science never did get on well.
It could be a nice lightweight way to carry important refreshment on a journey, though.
I wish they would come up with it, since they don’t allow bottles or cans into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Especially since the local breweries stopped selling bags of beer.
Heck, selling beer in bags sounds an odd concept to start with. A bit messy, I’d think, but then again with a bit of practice, I’m sure one learns how to cope.
I’m not a chemist by even the broadest stretch of one’s imagination or definition but I was told that ether is the dehydrated form of ethanol. I’m willing to accept that I might be some kind of idiot. I’m asking those who know to check this out and let me know if this is true. I found something on wikipedia that mentions dehydrating alcohols into ether. Link
Aha! Yeah, after I hit submit, I recalled A) my brother’s confusion on meeting milk sold in plastic bags on a camping trip up north, and B) that I thought I had also seen the milk-in-bags thing mentioned here on the Dope before. Damn clever, these Canadians.
I suppose, on reflection, it works fine if that is what you are expecting and you have a useful sized jug or something to pour it into, but I can tell you it confused the hell out of my little brother and his friends who were on a cycling trip and not exactly carrying much in the way of kitchen equipment, being non-domesticated 13-year old boys.
This is in the sense of an actual chemical conversion, not the removal of water that exists in the form of H20. This is something else entirely. However, since ether is volatile too even this wouldn’t get you anywhere (unless you want to snort ether).
That’s a chemical process that combines two alcohol molecules by removing an -OH from one and a -H from the -OH group of another, forming water which can be seperated out. You’d need another reaction to reverse the process and it wouldn’t be just adding water.
Don’t know, but during the Prohibition era* there actually was a company that sold “wine bricks”; the instructions on the product basically told you not to add water to it and do one or two other procedures, because then you’d be making wine which would be illegal**.
Read in an old Time Life book, part of a series on the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
** I’ve heard and read different accounts on whether you were allowed to make wine or not. I think the federal law allowed you to manufacture wine for your own use, but some states and localities probably banned that. It would seem in some places it would be legal to make your own wine anyway.
Thanks for the info. I should never listen to a priest in recovery (Father Joseph Martin). He used it to talk about the similiarity of effects between alcohol and ether. I’m a subtance abuse counselor and this is in one of the videos that many of my co-workers show. I think maybe he was painting with a broad brush.
