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The Science Behind Powdered Alcohol
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "Last week, the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau approved Palcohol, a powdered alcohol product that you can either use to turn water into a presumably not-that-delicious marg or to snort if you don't care too much about your brain cells. It's the first time a powdered alcohol product has been approved for sale in the US, but not the first time someone has devised one, and such products have been available in parts of Europe for a few years now. Now you may be wondering, as I was, how the heck do you go about powdering alcohol? As you might expect, there's quite a bit of chemistry involved, but the process doesn't seem overly difficult; we've known how to do it since the early 1970s, when researchers at the General Foods Corporation (now a subsidiary of Kraft) applied for a patent for an 'alcohol-containing powder.'"
It turns out the labels were issued in error, so don't expect it to be available soon. But it does appear to be a real thing that someone is trying to have approved.
...can turn water into wine.
I recall powedered alchohol cans when in the 1970s. The alchohol was enclosed in vesicles.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What a boon for boozer backpackers: all the buzz but a tenth of the weight!
Can I smoke it?
Given that unpretentious vodka is pretty much food-grade ethanol and water, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, and powdered alcohol would be food grade ethanol, some sort of dextrin, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, they'd have to be saving a lot of money on the reduced bulk and weight of the omitted water to do any better.
Given that, and given the obvious utility in alcohol concealment and infiltration scenarios, I suspect that they aren't even going for price parity with either the Not Too Much Methanol(tm) brand vodkas or the Tastes Like Piss And Turns to Piss!(tm) economy beer sector.
This will be approved when the powder has a weight, volume, and alcohol content comparable to the liquid forms currently on the market. Which kind of defeats the purpose.
On a tangent, there is no technical reason for rubbing alcohol to be made of isopropyl alcohol (not fit for human consumption), rather than ethanol (basically the same thing as vodka.) There is no technical reason that vodka should cost so much more than rubbing alcohol. This is all due to government regulation. Powdered alcohol will not be allowed to fit through the cracks.
I can get 1.75L of decent vodka for about $13/US. That gives me approximately 39 drinks at $0.33 per drink. How much does this stuff cost?
Because, you know, that's all that matters when you're trying to be wasted every day.
Decent Vodka??? please tell me which brand sells decent vodka at that price? (genuinely interested as a vodka lover) and by decent I mean you should be able to tell the difference between it and metho!
Neither is the powdered alcohol solid alcohol. It is all the same.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
It is if you're going to the ball game. Priced a beer at the local sports arena lately?
I can get 1.75L of decent vodka for about $13/US. That gives me approximately 39 drinks at $0.33 per drink
It can also be used to strip paint.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
In the US, "rubbing alcohol" usually refers to isopropyl alcohol, not ethanol, and it's medical-use purity. And you can absorb alcohol through your skin, so you wouldn't want toxic impurities in it.
That's different from "denatured alcohol", which is usually some combination of ethanol and things that are bad for you, and it's the version that's not food-grade, it's paint-thinner-grade solvent.
The strongest distilled ethanol-water combinations are about 96% ethanol, which has a lower boiling point than pure ethanol; if you want to get it any drier than that, you need to add some kind of other organic solvent such as benzene, so that you can boil off the alcohol-water-benzene mixture at an even lower temperature, leaving the ethanol and less or no water. But you're not normally going to do that for food-grade alcohols, because you don't want any remaining benzene, and because 96% is too strong to be actually drinkable anyway; maybe you'd want a stronger alcohol if you wanted to dissolve some flavoring that's less soluble with the remaining water content, but 96% is usually strong enough to do the job pretty well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Good news, everyone! Ethanol suppository.
I assumed it was short for Margarita, a tequila-based cocktail which is not that delicious to start with.
There are 2 types of people in this world. Those who understand ternary and those who don't.
Hmmm... let's do some quick math....
If you carry 1 litre of denaturated ethanol (methylized) your fuel package contains 100% burnable fuel. I doubt you can squeeze more than 100% alcohol in a powder.
bickerdyke
I've done work for a distiller. My contact there is a good guy and knows a ton about the products and how their made. I had seen some kind of advertising for vodka in that price range and was giving him a hard time, asking why I should buy his premium product when the cheap stuff was being advertised as four-column distilled.
What he told me was that cheap vodka is made from a large percentage of what he called "blend" which is primarily a distilled alcohol product made from waste oranges. As a giveaway to the orange industry, waste oranges can be made into alcohol with a much lower excise tax than grain alcohol. He said you wouldn't make the excise tax on grain alcohol at $13 for nearly two liters, let alone any profit.
I've always gotten rotten hangovers from cheap vodka and he says that "blend" is the reason why, it lacks the purity of grain alcohol.
In the movie an inventor comes up with a candy that had the alcohol content of a triple Martinis. Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Tony Randall.
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You can buy beer in hardware stores?