Melting of ice in gin vs. vodka

Factual Questions
1

Greetings all;

Forgive me if there’s already a thread on this that I failed to locate. I just registered for this forum after receiving a reply from TSD.com advising that it might be the best way (if at all) for me to receive any sort of an answer. So if I’ve wasted your time by not finding whatever may already have been posted on this topic in an existing thread, please accept my apologies. That said, below is the full text of the initial message of inquiry that I sent to The Straight Dope recently.
To: Cecil Adams
The Straight Dope

Dear Cecil;

Today I was in the office during lunchtime, and I happened upon a hallway discussion in which a colleague (O.K, he’s actually my bosses bosses boss, and they were all a party to the conversation,) was publicly mulling over a problem that, he assured us, had kept him in a state of perplexity for some time. After listening to the proposition, I became sufficiently intrigued, and immediately began racking my brain for the one person of such superior intellect, experience, and generally droll insight that, I was certain,
would enable us to shed our burden of ignorance and once and for all disclose the true nature of this phenomena. (Besides, if you come up with the answer for me, I’ll be a big hero, and it will surely give my career that last little nudge it needs to achieve blazing professional and thus,
financial success, which will in turn enable me to retire early, buy an island in the Mediterranian, a chalet in Vail, educate my 9 month old son, and basically, go ahead and pay cash for all the toys I need to get on with my midlife crisis already.)

Since I couldn’t initially remember just who it was I needed for this consultation, but dimly recalled bookmarking his rather peculiar, esoteric website some months ago, I had to go look it up. ("come on, just what was that stinking URL now… thedummy.com ? justcantcope.com ?
thestraightskinny.com ? justsaynope.com ? Ah yes:
http://www.straightdope.com/ ! Eureka! I knew I had it bookmarked, and there it was…in precisely the spot where I filed it in my bookmarks file…right between http://www.howstuffworks.com/index.htm, and
http://www.beyond2000.com/.)

So here it is, and I suspect that I speak for us all in saying that we’ll be awaiting your response with baited breath:

Experiment:

Take two identical tumblers and fill them with identical amounts of gin in one and vodka in the other. Alternatively you could conduct the experiment with mixes such as half gin & half water in one tumbler, and half vodka & half water in the other; so long as each mix is identical. The only thing is that the tumblers, the gin, the vodka and the water must all be the same temperature, which must be as close to the ambient air temperature as possible. (Parallel experiments where the various ingredients and vessels are of warmer or colder, albeit still uniform temperatures may also be of
interest, though I can’t imagine why.)

Now, deposit three ice cubes – that is, frozen fresh water, not necessarily distilled, – fresh from the freezer into each tumbler (all of the cubes should be as close to a uniform size as possible) and immediately begin timing with a stopwatch to ascertain the amount of time needed for the ice cubes in each tumbler to completely melt.

Observe the tumblers (without consuming any of their contents, which would obviously queer the results,) and record the time(s) at which the ice cubes in each tumbler are as close to being completely melted as observation with
the naked eye will permit – mass spectroanalysis will not be necessary for this experiment. My colleague claims that he has compiled sufficient empirical evidence to state with some certainty that the ice in the tumbler of gin will melt before the ice in the tumbler of vodka. (He presumably
pours considerable quantities of both gin and vodka down the sink in the prosecution of these experiments, since his interest is obviously of a scientific bent.)

Which brings me to the raison d’être of this message:

If indeed the ice melts faster in gin than in vodka, WHY IS THIS SO?

Please answer this conundrum with all possible haste, as my real estate agent in Vail is holding onto a phat property for me, and he needs this sale since he’s obviously got his own payments to make on his mistresses BMW…so make it snappy, any delay will create a drag on the economy.

Sincerely,
Hennon Gilbert, Jr.
hennongilbertjr@excite.com
hennon.gilbert@nokia.com

2

Hennon, welcome to SDMB.

As for your question you’ll find that the straight dopers are a pretty critical bunch. We don’t accept that ice melts faster in gin than vodka merely on heresay. Experiments, under controlled conditions need to be performed. Of course the dopers are not a wasteful bunch so we’d never commit the crime of throwing it down the sink when finished. Remember the proverb: I complained I had watered down gin until I met a man that had no gin at all.

I’ll throw out a conjecture that the original experiment may not have used gin and vodka with similar proof. Alcohol evaporates more quickly than water so if the vokda is higher proof than the gin it may stay a bit cooler from evaporative cooling.

For future reference you don’t need to be so formal in your posts.

3

Also, Vodka, god bless the stuff, is known for its temperate qualities, in that it it freezes at a much lower temperature than other elixirs. Therefore alowing it to become easily transported throughout frigid lands and making it a household drink in that part of the world. That said, I realize that I cannot sufficiently expain the reason for this, but I do recall reading about it in a book called Classic Vodka, the authors of which I also can’t remember. So sorry to be of so little help, perhaps Padye was on to something in the previous reply. I think it has something to do with the freezing temperatures differing explaining the different speed at which the ice melts.

4

Classic Vodka by Nicholas Faith and Ian Wisniewski, 1997, ISBN #1853752347. Now out of print.

5

High proof is all it takes to prevent freezing as ethanol has an extremely low freeze point. That’s why spirit themometers are used at temps colder than -40° where mercury freezes. Watered whiskey freezing and bursing the bottles was mentioned in Huckleberry Finn IIRC.