Why can’t we drink industrial ethanol diluted to, say, 15%, but we can drink ethanol made from yeast?
In: Chemistry
Depends what you mean.
It is possible to get ‘lab grade’ alcohol that is high percentage and uncontaminated.
However, most ‘industrial alcohol’ is actually denatured alcohol, where the ethanol is mixed with chemicals that produce a rather vigorous physical response.
These chemicals can’t be distilled out, and remain effective be even when significantly diluted.
So there’s no easy or safe way to acquire industrial alcohol and drink it, even though it is still ethanol.
Industrial ethanol comes with a lot of impurities like sulfur which can lead to blindness. There are a number of chemical processes which produce ethanol and it usually gets purified in a distillation column. The more pure it has to be; the more expensive it is. Industrial use doesn’t care about the impurities but you wouldn’t want to put it in your body
Sulfur in ethanol can cause blindness
Industrial grade alcohol is legally required to be mixed with a certain percentage of methanol, in most countries.
Methanol is poisonous(well, quite a bit more so than ethanol) and cannot be easily separated by distilling. The latter can be done but requires half a dozen steps and sophisticated equipment.
Adding methanol is done to avoid taxes on alcoholic beverages, because the resulting mixture cannot safely be drunk. This is usually called “denatured alcohol” or “denatured spirits.”
The reasons for this practice are complex and textbooks have been written about the legal history pertaining to it.
One reason is that alcoholic beverage companies whom have long used traditional,time consuming batch methods, don’t want to be undercut by people simply mixing soft drinks and fruit juices with cheap ethanol produced at large industrial refineries.
Whereas, there are quite a few industrial uses for ethanol. Such as a solvent, cleaner, antiseptic, or a raw material for other chemicals. It wouldn’t make economic or legal sense to tax industrial grade alcohol in the same way as alcoholic beverages.
Another reason is to discourage chronic alcoholics from drinking cheap straight industrial grade ethanol. This is by itself pretty dangerous even if methanol wasn’t added. Can easily lead to a fatal overdose.
Of course this hasn’t stopped alcoholics from trying it, those who are truly desperate. The usual result is blindness, peripheral nerve damage and liver and kidney failure. But it’s pretty common knowledge that industrial alcohol is poisonous, and if you’re foolish enough to ignore the warnings, things like laws aren’t going to help you.
Industrial Ethanol is not pure. It has been deliberately contaminated by the government with various compounds to render it toxic to humans. This was a part of enforcing prohibition that has continued into modernity.
You can’t just buy “industrial ethanol” because it needs to be denatured for tax reasons. If you go buy a bottle of Everclear, that’s basically pure ethanol that you can dilute however you want. Drinking straight ethanol, however, is hard on your body, makes it easy to overdose & presents a significant fire hazard.
Here in the US, if you’re buying cheap vodka you probably *are* buying industrially produced ethanol that’s just slightly more purified and watered down. This is because we have massive subsidies for corn & fuel ethanol. The factory just needs to make it a slightly cleaner batch and they can sell it at a much higher profit margin to alcohol producers who add water & a fancy label on it.
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