I notice the biggest difference with petrol - when I was starting out running the petrol still could be time consuming just because you need so much for chromatography. HPLC grade hexane is cheap nowadays though, so I haven’t heard of anyone distilling petrols for a long time. Saying that, have you seen the price of acetonitrile recently? Lord have mercy, absolutely off the scale! Hoping it’s a temporary blip or the MeCN still might be making a comeback.
The reason I heard for the explosion in price is the ailing car industry. It either produces or consumes a lot of acetonitrile, and its current dire straits apparently has a large affect on the price.
I’m 99% sure the following is right, but file it under “anecdote”, just in case:
Up until the early 1970s, it was illegal to brew full strength beer in Australia. You were allowed to make your own low alcohol beer though. Of course, nobody brewed their own low alcohol beer, and as the strong stuff was off limits, there was no homebrew industry selling the required ingredients. And little to no knowledge base either. So, homebrewers used to concoct vile stuff in their bathtubs using ingredients designed for baking rather than brewing. The bakers’ yeast was especially bad. Suddenly, the first homebrew kit came on the market. Of course, it was for (the legal) light beer. The company cleverly added the following to the label:
Just add 250g of sugar WARNING: DO NOT ADD OVER 250g OF SUGAR AS THIS WILL MAKE THE END PRODUCT TOO HIGH IN ALCOHOL
Ri-iight. Gotcha.
The government of the day realised it had been beaten, and promptly legalised all brewing.
Moonshiners have been known to add drugstore rubbing alcohol (isopropyl alcohol) to their batches to “increase the kick”. Isopropyl alcohol is about twice as toxic as ethanol or methanol, and relatively little can cause blindness or death. For example, in 1981, 7 people died from isopropyl alcohol-fortified moonshine in Georgia.
Yeah, reading through the cite I posted above, I noticed they mention some of homedistilled alcohol’s bad reputation and the exaggerated danger of methanol poisoning through bad distillation techniques has come precisely because of bootlegging moonshiners cutting their product with methylated spirits in order to increase their profit.
Ah, but why the use of the past tense? A good friend of mine has been generous enough to share his personal stash of homebrew Croatian honey rakija - he doesn’t make it himself, but he knows people who do. Tasty stuff, and I’m not much of a drinker, particularly of hard booze. And he isn’t from a village, either.
I don’t know. It should have been present tense. Perhaps because I was thinking of personal experience and was relaying my memories, my tense slipped into the past. I had only seen it done in the countryside, where there was plenty of room for the still, but I don’t see why it can’t be done in cities and towns. Interestingly enough, in Hungary, the major cities have their own distilleries where you can bring your own fermented mash to them, and they’ll distill it for you. Home distillation is illegal in Hungary, but you will see it out in the more rural areas.
According to the Consumers Union Report On Licit And Illicit Drugs, ether was a pretty popular recreational drug all over the civilized world when it was first produced and marketed – it was cheaper than booze, universally legal, and the aftereffects wore off a lot faster than a gin hangover.
There were, however, some serious disadvantages to ether as an intoxicant: you could easily die from an overdose or injure yourself severely while stumbling around loaded on the stuff; and, the flammability of ether being what it is, it was fairly common for ether topers who smoked to light themselves on fire, just like Richard Pryor.