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Hacking Vodka
enrico_suave writes "A group of geeks aimed to find out whether running cheap vodka through a brita water filter would make it drinkable. They claim after several passes through the filter the cheap vodka surpassed the premium Ketel One in drinkability tests. I think they should have done the test 'double blind' although drinking Vladmir Vodka probably could make you go blind anyways... =)"
I believe this has actually been known for a long time.
Here is the canonical list of the top ten things that taste better once filtered through a Brita pitcher six times, in decreasing order of improvement, according to the Brita FAQ:
- Orange juice
- Coca Cola
- Vodka
- Cooking oil
- Urine
- Gasoline
- Blood
- Vinegar
- Water
- Semen
Surprisingly, pus did not make the list....Comment removed based on user account deletion
Martin Sargent from Unscrewed did this on his show a while back.. he seemed to enjoy the taste :)
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Finally a great science project that the kids can do at home.
Great. Looks like someone's nine years of freshman chemistry hasn't been a complete waste.
But it sure doesn't make it taste any better.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Not to mention, killing some of the impurities'll probably help with the hangover. As for myself, Ive progressed to the point where I can occasionally afford vodka from a glass bottle.
Support more choices in goverment-Vote 3rd party.
Sounds like a science experiment that I could actually participate in.
I wonder why they never featured this one on Bill Nye The Science Guy or on Beakman's World. I don't think that Lester, the self-proclaimed, "Man in a Rat Suit" would have been much different, even if he were the hands-on evaluator...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
In Soviet Russia, Vodka filters you!
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
Hmm.. this sounds quite a bit like the Gray Kangaroo filtration system that you can buy on the internet.
They want $41 for it, which is too expensive for me. But in my undergraduate days, I would definitely have considered it. Though you can probably use a Brita filter like these folks have and save a few bucks.
Let's see:
Cheap vodka: $10 (US assumptions)
Name brand filter: $30
Total vodka purity: $40
As compared to: Good vodka - $34.99
Hrmm, I guess it probably made sense when they did the experiment.
Seriously though, it's neat to see hacks like this. It should also be noted that the chick in the middle of this picture is kinda cute. But does anyone know what the pills are in the bottom left corner of that picture?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
What else can be improved using the brita? Beer maybe? Soup even?
:-)
I am so curious now
Anyone else want to do trials and report the results? My mom would probably get upset.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
The question is, did they taste it after each pass through the filter? That would explain the result... ("Thish is farckn great!!")
They should try it with the premium Brita Pur filters, not just the regular Brtia kind. Those are supposed to get out even more bad stuff, and perhaps in less passes? Maybe a three way test: Brita v. Regular Pur v. Super Pur.
l
http://www.purwater.com/yourwater/pitchers.shtm
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
If you really want a double blind study mix Vladimir and Pepe Lopez Gold tequila.
I've just become a home scientist.
PS: Science makes the room spin.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
I tried this five times with rubbing alcohol? How many times before I can get it at vodka level of drinkability?
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Let's see... It still makes sense when you consider you can use the same filter several times. Most are rated in the gallons filtered before they need a change* whereas your "good" vodka is going to start adding up pretty quickly on a bottle to bottle basis. After the initial expense, I'm saving $20 to every bottle you buy.
*A brita pitcher filter can filter 40 gallons before changing
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Na' Vodka's kids stuff. If you are really serious about drinking yourself blind, get yourself a nice bottle of ARAK, and drink it in one sitting. A good bottle will be up to and around 70-80% alcohol. It's big in the middle east. They drink it on the weekends, the rest of the time... it's Window cleaner.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
You kids and your high technology.
Why back in my day we used our kidneys and liver to filter our alcohol and we liked it!
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
For a vodkaphile on a budget nothing beats pearl vodka, it's smoother than Grey Goose and costs only ~$20/750ml. Hell I'm not on a budget anymore but I still see no reason to waste $30 per bottle =) Itgoest through A "five-time distillation and six-time filtration process" which makes it exceptionally smooth.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Drink glass of expensive vokda. Good stuff!
Drink 1st glasss of cheap vodka. Yuck ptooey!
Filter 2nd glass of crap. Almost tolera*hic*tolerable.
Filter 3rd glass of crap. Filter it again. Barely tolerablable.
Filther 4th glass of the stuff. Filther it again and spill some. Get help to filther it a 3rd time. Drink it. Could be better but gimme some more.
Ask friend to filter next glass a few times and give it back to me. I don't know how many time, just do it. Hey, not bad.
Hand glassh to fr*hic*friend and say do it again. This time more fhilther. Fhilther make junk tathe good. *hic*.
Get glass from friend. Hey, this is great!
Pass out.
Wake up the next day and post on Sloshdot.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
We found it--there was a nice patio and a great band. As the evening wore on, we progressed from beer to shooters. A round of vodka seemed a good idea at one point. It smelled like isopropanol (I'm a chemist, I know my alcohols) and tasted as bad as one would expect. To this day, I have wondered what the hell it was we drank, so that I could avoid ever encountering it again. I fear unfamiliar vodkas in unfamiliar bars.
Now, I know it was Vladimir. I can rest easy. Thank you Slashdot!
~Idarubicin
Is it cheaper to do this than buy Finlandia? For those that haven't tried it, Fin is basically tastless. No real taste, no aftertaste. It's probably the best mixing vodka for that reason. It's not as nice to sip as something like Kettle One because the taste of those more expensive Vodkas is one of the reasons to drink them, however it's also not as expensive.
:)
I suppose it would depend on how well the filter held up. If the single filtration kills it, well then it'll be more expensive. If it works for a few times though it could be a fairly cheap alternative.
Something that would be interesting to see a real experiement on is the difference in before/after compositions. Find out what, if anything, is actually getting filtered out. Maybe I should try and talk the chemical engineers at work into trying it.
Actually, as it's just activated carbon the one thing you don't want to run through it is any sizeable amount of bleach. Granular Activated Carbon filtration will remove some small amount of hardness from water, as well as nasty odors and other impurities.
What might be good, would be to use what's known as an "Extruded" carbon cartridge like the ones you get in the water treatment industry. Essentially a porous solid block that has 5 micron holes in it. Hacking one of these together might be a good idea for a college project. Hmm.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Ahhhh!!!!!111oneone This is the exact same annoying thing as people thinking asians say "lice" instead of "rice"!
Now that I've calmed myself, I must inform as many as possible that it is the exact opposite. The Russian language does NOT have a true W sound, and they would NOT pronounce it "wadka". "Vodka" is exactly how it is truly pronounced.
I have no problem with people making fun of different countries' customs, but please, at least do it correctly.
"I could have sworn sulfuric acid was what is in your stomach, not hydrochloric."
;)
Well, if it was, you'd probably burp a smell of rotten eggs.
I think natural selection took care of eliminating the species that developed sulfuric-acid-based gastric fluids
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Pepsi Green!
;-)
I was going to mod down that AC troll, but eh, I figured this was more important.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Have you seen those chicks on the pics ? No wonder they drink vodka.
Go grab those torrents.
Do not read this sig.
Spiked with Methanol,that is, which makes you go blind. One thing I know from working in Chemistry labs is that you should never touch alcohol coming from a lab. (If you don't believe me, squirt a bit into a Gas Chromatography column, and notice that there are two peaks, not one.)
The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
A company called gray kangaroo makes alcohol filters that do precisely what is being described here. Take this with a grain of salt, since the source is biased (they are trying to sell filters), but their FAQ claims the following:
How is the Gray Kangaroo different than a commercially available water filter?
GK uses more filter material than a standard personal water filter. It also uses filter material which is optimized for liquor. Water filters use a variety of filter materials, some of them improve liquor while others (which eliminate chlorine, lead and other hazards in tap water) do nothing for liquor and only waste space. Also some filters use plastics which are dissolved by hard liquor and end up making your drink taste like crazy glue. Most importantly the GK is designed to easily filter liquor multiple times and built to be rugged enough to be used by a group of heavy drinkers.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Initially I was very doubtful of the mixture. It was concentrated from a "vegtable peelings mash" by means of fractional freezing. They concentrated the alcohol by means repeated freezing and thawing. Concentration was done by fractional freezing. Basically they placed the mash outside (where it was -60C or worse) to let the ice freeze, brought it back inside and removed the ice that has formed on the top ... or so
I was told.
So speaking of blindness, I was initially hesitant to sample their finished product. Someone informed me that to refuse a sample would be an insult. I didn't want to offend our hosts so I finally agreed to have a shot. When I was served, I noticed that they poured the vodka out of a Brita water filter. When I inquired about the reason I was told that it made the finished product "better". Apparently they have been doing vodka water filtration for years "in the land way down under''.
The Vostok Vodka was excellent. It was a bit hyper concentrated (beyond the normal Vodka proof), but very fine none the less. The next time you find yourself in Vostok Antarctica you should give their vodka a try! :-)
What a wacky coincidence. I saw this experiment posted up on a message board and just tried it with some friends this evening. They left not 10 minutes ago.
Started off with a 750ml bottle of "Medallion Quality". You don't expect much from a bottle that large that costs in the range of $11 Canadian. Needless to say, it was putrid. Bordering undrinkable. You'd have to be drunk to start with to consume the stuff. Smells reminiscent of rubbing alcohol, tastes like turpentine with an aftertaste not unlike a bowling alley shoe. As my buddy described it, "It feels like a clown is raping my mouth."
We were sure to prime the filter first. It ships with some chemicals in the charcoal, so run a few pitchers of water through.
After 3 filters of the vodka, the odour was drastically reduced. Flavour was not hugely improved, but the aftertaste was lessened and it didn't burn as much going down.
6 filters, the odour is down even more. Taste is much improved. Now comparable to a decent cheap vodka, probably a little better than regular Smirnoff. Goes down not too bad, aftertaste still not great.
10 filters. Odour is near gone. Tastes smooth. Would be undetectable mixed with grapefruit juice.
20 filters. SMOOTH. Goes down like water. Zero odour. Perfect. Easily as good as an upper end vodka like Canadian Iceberg, but not as delicate as the really pricy brands. Definitely a good taste. Pleasant enough to drink straight without shooting it.
Of course we kept a control sample. I did not fully appreciate how good the 20-filtered drink was until I tasted the control sample again. It was truly terrible. While I suggest doing this just to try it, I will not again put that stuff in my mouth unfiltered.
I have heard mixed reports about how well different vodkas turn out. Some are better than others, Medallion had tremendous benefit from the filtering. The taste of the original and final product are not even remotely close.
Also heard complaints about murky vodka. Our first filter result was slightly murky and blue/greyish from chemicals left in the filter. Repeated filtering made it disappear again. I can't help but wonder if those chemicals were doing me any physical harm, but they could not possibly be doing any worse than the original vodka anyways. It's all in the name of SCIENCE!
All in all, this experiment was fun and definitely worth trying. It takes long enough that I wouldn't expect it to be a decent timesaving measure. However, it was fun to do and we will probably repeat the experiment again next Friday with that godawful Russian Prince vodka.
I ran half of the completed product through a carbon filter, and it seemd to improve the smoothness. Maybe. We had a few merry evenings with the stuff, and no nasty hangovers.
I'll be kicking off the next batch soon. Long live SuperYeast!
After reading this site last week, myself and a couple of friends decided to take the "Brita Challenge". To my complete amazement it worked better than I ever could have hoped.
I hate vodka typically, and the 9-dollar "Kamchakta" vodka that we bought burned like a mofo, and smelled like ass. After filtering it several times, it loses all of those impurities (that some might call 'flavor'), and is much more palatable.
Our findings were that 4 filtrations were plenty, and that it took much less time than the other site claims. We were able to filter a 1.75 L bottle of vodka 6 times in well under an hour.
We surmise that if you stuck 3 or 4 filters together in one long pipe, you could have one hell of a filtration system, and do it quickly too. With a little bit of advertising on collegehumor.com, you could be a thousandare, easy!!
To recap:
1) Filter Cheap Vodka
2) ????
3) Profit!!!
Methanol makes you go blind and very likely dead (unless you only drink a tiny amount and get treated immediately), Ethanol gives you a hangover.
HAND.
For those who don't know, Arak is the Israeli (and Lebanese and Syrian) word for the anise liquor known in Greece as Uozo and in Turkey as Raki. There are variations of this drink around the world (from South America to India), and though people may argue that one is better than the other, they're all basically the same idea (I hear that Syrian Arak is the best of the bunch). And I agree, much better than vodka. Especially for the science nerd in all of us as we marvel at the totally clear liquid turning milky white as the water from melting ice mixes with the alcoholic beverage.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
I used to drink Wild Turkey a few years back, but stopped partially due to how harsh it was. (At least the cheapest version of it)
I found myself wondering if this method would work for that, or if it is better suited for something which is primarily water based, like vodka?
No, you can process methanol in the small amounts that you get it in liquor. Unfortuanetely, it metabolizes to formaldehyde and formic acid, which are among the major factors in hangovers.
6 02/educati on/ed3.htmlp /alt.support. disorders.neurological/messages/4240.html
See, for example:
http://www.studentbmj.com/back_issues/0
http://www.talkaboutsupport.com/grou
Especially for the science nerd in all of us as we marvel at the totally clear liquid turning milky white as the water from melting ice mixes with the alcoholic beverage.
And then there's Suisse La Bleue absinthe, which also turns milky white when mixed with water (the milky effect is called louche). Absinthe remains banned in the U.S. due to the persistent myth that the wormwood in absinthe is poisonous and causes hallucinations. It doesn't, wormwood is not, nor ever was on any DEA controlled substance list. It's banned by the FDA, which prohibits the manufacture, import and resale of any foodstuffs that contain wormwood in the U.S. The FDA hangs on to the myth that one of the chemicals in wormwood, called thujone, is bad, nevermind there is thujone in spices such as sage and tarragon. At least the European Union is forward thinking, because as of this year, absinthe is once again legal all across the European Union, with Switzerland and it's much sought after clear absinthe called Suisse La Bleue (once produced in clandestine labs) being the most recent to re-legalize. For more info, go see La Fee Verte Absinthe House.
Here in the U.S., available anise based pastis such as Pernod, Ricard, Herbsaint and Absente all exhibit the same louche effect (albeit green, due to coloring in the liqueur)when mixed with water. The colder the water, the more pronounced the milkiness.
From the guy who brought you the AK-47: Kalashnikov Vodka
a friend of mine recently put up a discussion of vodka on his lj, and it's worth a look
Vodka 101
Here's the short version:
1. Don't drink anything that comes in a plastic bottle
2. If you must drink domestic Vodka, make it Skyy
3. Priviet is awesome if you can find it, and not very expensive
just some of the best vodka you have ever tasted
Indeed! I would describe it as having a delightful initial nose of ethanol, a pleasant burning as it goes down, and finishing smoothly with a subtle aftertaste of ethanol punctuated by a complex ethanol-infused bouquet.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I guess the PUR rep did know a thing or two, since PUR does make a hand pump for desalinating sea water. PUR Desalinator
They mention that a couple lived for 66 days on a liferaft with one of these.
Exactly how does your friend know how it feels to have a clown raping his mouth?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
No. In Soviet Russia WE filter and drink everything that burns. And the Communist Party and Soviet Government try to stop us - mostly in vain.
Recipe 1. Take a long steel rod, cool it to the temperature -50 deg.C or below and let the purified liquid flow along it Every impurity will be frozen. Even the home freezer can produce up th 40% alcohol from the fermented potato without any distillation (Warning! Distillation was the legally prohibited action in Soviet times and freezing was not. Check your local laws).
Recipe 2. Add some potassium permanganate to the liquid. It will oxidize the most impurities and become a brown goo which can be filtered out. I dislike this method since it gives the bad metal taste. I prefer the more scientific method:
Recipe 3. Use the pressure cooker and about 1 meter of spiral made of copper tube (About 1 cm diameter is ok). There is also cyclone filter made of a glass can between cooker and spiral to catch unwanted foam and a thermometer in it. Connect it all with PVC tubes. Then:
Fill the cooker with a raw product, add some lime (CaO) and distil. Cool the spiral with running water. The theory is that the most impurities in a grain alcohol are ethers and they are converted by alkali to salts and alcohols, and alcohols smell alcohol and can be distilled off. Don't forget that the first 2-5 per cent of product must be discarded since they are mostly acetone, and the last parts must be discarded since they are water and the higher alcohols. The thermometer will help you find the correct proportion.
Then filter the product through the coal filter for water. Distil again. Filter through ANOTHER filter (Use the first filter for the next experiment:-) ). Distil again. You get 95% pure alcohol and may dissolve it to standard 40% if you want.
Urine is almost entirely water, with a little bit of other substances dissolved in it. I doubt it's ever more than 5% solutes by weight, in 95% water.
Close. As one would expect, it's variable, but urine can be up to about 96% water. When you drink an abundance of water, your kidneys are free to pass more diluted urine. When body water is at a premium, the kidneys conserve water by passing concentrated urine, which looks darker and more opaque. Completely transparent urine is sign that you're drinking enough water.
Notice I said it was USP-grade ethanol, meaning the United States Pharmacopeia has certified it to be free of harmful impurities and safe for food or drug usage. Well...technically safe; the safety of consming absolute ethanol is debatable. Incidentally, 95% doesn't have the same weird oily/dessicating characteristics of absolute; it's already got that 5% water it desperately wants so it just burns like hellfire going down.
If you're interested, the chemistry behind it: the benzene forms an azeotrope with water that boils at a lower point than the 95-5 EtOH-water azeotrope, allowing the last traces of water to be distilled off. USP ethanol is usually dried out in other ways, like running it over drying salts or using molecular sieves to absorb the excess water....no benzene allowed.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
No, by percentage of effect, its the impurities that give you the hangover.
Care to back that up? According to this ethanol causes dehydration, electrolyte imbalance and low blood sugar. Further, it states that pure ethanol can cause hangovers, and that it is unknown whether ethanol or the impurities have the greater effect.
That's why they are shooting for 100% pure, in theory no hangover...
Who is they? Care to back this up? You do realize that it's impossible to get 100% pure ethanol, right? Although one could probably produce 99.999% pure ethanol, as soon as the bottle was opened, it would begin absorbing water from the atmosphere until it reached the azeotropic composition, about 95% purity, if I remember correctly.