I’ve seen some bars where the well liquors are actually dispensed from the gun. Are they using a “keg” of vodka to dispense these with?
Nope. Directly pipeline from Russia.
In Soviet Russia, Vodka pipes you.
Shagnasty, I really hope you’re not serious! I have to caution those considering your advice that most lab grade ethanol is “denatured,” which means it has been adulterated by adding toxic chemicals like methanol, hydrocarbons, benzene, etc. (The reason they do this is to avoid the heavy taxes that our government mandates on all alcohol which can be consumed.) It definitely is NOT safe for human consumption. If you really have served this at parties, I hope that you were using 100% pure ethanol. It’s probably still less expensive to just buy real vodka, than going for the pricey, unadulterated 200-proof lab-grade ethanol.
Biggest I’ve seen was at Warsaw airport duty-free in the pre-EU days. 4 litre glass bottle with a handle moulded into the neck so you could take your entire spirits allowance on the plane in one convenient package.
Also available for whisky and gin. Seeing an entire shop stacked full of those was impressive, I tell you. I could hear my liver whimpering as I looked at them.
I was serious in a kidding sense. I worked in neuroscience labs that had cases of huge jugs of 90% ETOH and 95% ETOH. It was not denatured. I verified that carefully with other graduate students. Dentaturing would have screwed with our delicate experiments and that’s why there is lab ethonal that isn’t denatured.
I just thought of those when a question about “largest size” of an alcohol jug came up. 95% ETOH that is not dentaured is basically just a big jug of Everclear that you can turn into vodka just by mixng it with water.
I wouldn’t recommend that approach for your daily drink straight ETOH is straight ETOH no matter how it comes boxed.
They do this for another reason, as well. It is chemically impossible to make 100% ethanol using standard fractional distilling. That is because a 96% ethanol/water forms an azeotrope – the boiling point is less than either water or ethanol as the two molecules break up the others’ hydrogen bonding. One adds benzene, usually, to break the azeotrope and allow distillation greater than 96%.
So you are faced with a dilemma. Use 96% ethanol (usually with a green cap around here) and hope that it hasn’t been denatured (to the best of my knowledge nothing is added to 96% ethanol), or use 100% ethanol (usually with the blue cap around here) which is supposed to be a pure reagent but probably does contain some benzene as well.
100% ethanol is kind of a waste, though, because it is hygroscopic and at least around here in the land of Gulf Coast humidity, it sucks water out of the air until it is an unknown percentage of water. So when precipitating nanomole amounts of DNA, it is always better to go with the known quantity and use 96% non-hygroscopic ethanol and adjust your mix accordingly.
This gizmo would let you get several 1L bottles and keep them cold without using freezer space. It does claim that using anything other than Jaegermeister will void the warranty and possibly cause the machine to malfunction, but I think thats a load of malarky.