Does it have to do with the freezing point of alcohol? Do any other liquors freeze? How about wine and beer?
Vodka will freeze, if you get it cold enough. The freezing point of ethanol is -114 C (-173 F). There are complicated formulas to determine the freezing points of solutions made up of two different liquids, but I can’t find them right now. I am pretty sure beer will freeze at normal freezer temperatures, but most distilled liquors won’t
As I know all too well beer does freeze. You know the situation. You buy a crate but can’t wait for them to cool down in the fridge so you put them in the freezer and forget about a few of them only to find them the next day either exploded or not. When you defrost the ones that havn’t exploded they taste horrible.
Absolute Vodka doesn’t freeze, in a standard freezer, though I have heard that Smirnoff Red does.
Eighty proof alcohol will freeze at -30 C. 100 proof solidifies at -38 C, at least according to the CRC table of freezing point depression.
So the jist is it is possible to make wine popsicles in my freezer, but vodka ice cubes are beyond its capacity.
What if I add a lot of water to the vodka? Would that change the freezing point of the mixture or do you have to chemically change the liquid?
At the risk of hijacking, my sister has a houseboat on the Mississippi N of St. Louis. Part of their winterizing routine is to make sure the pipes don’t freeze. As I understand it, instead of draining down the system, they simply pour in a couple of bottles of the cheapest vodka they can buy.
Nope, just add water. Chemically changing the alcohol would work too, but then you wouldn’t have alcohol anymore, which would sort of defeat the purpose.
I think it would be far cheaper for her to buy a product called “Plumbers Anti-freeze”. That’s what its made for. Its only a few bucks a gallon.
I think you might want to be careful with getting it too cold. Maybe it was an urban legend but some Outward Bound instructors told me of a trapper that too a shot of supercool alcohol that froze his throat immediately upon ingestion. Just a thought.
We used to make Slush a lot, which was basically a gallon’s worth of Screwdriver (vodka and Orange Juice), mixed strong, in an ice cream pail and toss it in the freezer. It doesn’t freeze solid, but just in large loose crystals. Makes for a neat “sorbet-ish” dessert.
Cripes! What was he trapping, penguins in Antartica? I’ve eaten snow at -20 without causing that kind of damage, and it’s hard to find places much colder than that. Maybe he was using dry ice for ice cubes? A dash of liquid nitrogren in the mix? Sounds like the Outward Bound version of an urban legend to me.
It tastes better too.
[list][list][list][list]Old Mr. Boston’s
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A couple bottles of isopropyl alcohol will keep pipes from freezing too. The generic drug store stuff is about 99¢ a bottle.
Come to think of it, it probably tastes better than cheap vodka too.
quote:
Originally posted by Broomstick
Cripes! What was he trapping, penguins in Antartica? I’ve eaten snow at -20 without causing that kind of damage, and it’s hard to find places much colder than that. Maybe he was using dry ice for ice cubes? A dash of liquid nitrogren in the mix? Sounds like the Outward Bound version of an urban legend to me.
You can eat ice when it is -100 out and it won’t matter because Ice freezes at 0 C, and essentially gets no colder. If the vodka is not frozen it can get much colder than the freezing point of water.
What?! Of course ice can get colder than 0C. Ice is as cold as the ambient environment. Ice at -100C is also -100C
That’s like saying that because liquid steel solidifies at 1800 F (or whatever the real temp is) it can’t get cooler than 1800 F - but if that were the case I’d burst into flames every time I touched my car.
Well, I guess my original reply is gone forever due to the boards being disabled for a while.
The gist of it was that extremely-cold liquids would be more dangerous than solids at similar temperatures. In the case of snow, it is because a mouthful of snow has much lower heat capacity than a similar volume of liquid, because snow is so un-dense. Thus it would reduce the temperature of your mouth much less.
In the case of ice, I think it’s more a matter of surface area. The surface area of a chunk of ice limits your exposure to it; the shape of liquid constantly changes to conform to the container, say, for example, the human pharynx.
Still I’m not betting my bottom dollar that the hiker-with-extremely-cold -liquor story is true, I’m just saying it’s fairly plausible even with snow-and-ice counter-examples.