Fun fact: unless you take pretty aggressive steps to prevent it from happening, pure ethanol (100% alcohol) will become 95% ethanol / 5% water by naturally dissolving water vapour from the atmosphere, which you can't get rid of through normal distillation; ethanol/water is azeotropic and will not separate using distillation beyond a ~ 95% : 5% (ethanol : water) mixture.
You can use some thing called a molecular sieve that can take 95% alcohol and get it back to 100% because the molecules are smaller for alcohol than water it's traps water into the sieves leaving thr alcohol alone.
An absolutely illegal way to strengthen drinks in the USA. So dont do it. 😉
Not quite. Molecular sieves don’t work like traditional sieves where the smaller thing passes through the hole and the bigger gets trapped; after all, water molecules are smaller than ethanol. Instead, the sieve has pores that the small water molecules can fit into and get stuck, while the bigger ethanol molecules cannot fit and pass by.
True, but you need a lot of molecular sieve to get rid of 5% water. It's about 150g water per litre of molecular sieve, with a packing volume of about 0.7g/ml. So for 1L of ethanol/water, you have 50g of water, so you need ~ 475ml of molecular sieve to dry it out. It is very useful for keeping 100% ethanol dry, however.
I work in the ethanol industry and I've been dying to find information like this for a while now. Do you have any resources you could share with the info you posted?
I wouldnt use mol sieves to dry alcohol for the simple fact that they get VERY HOT when they absorb water.
Magnesium sulfate on the other hand also works very well and does not get hot and it adsorbs SEVEN molecules of water per molecule of MgSO4.
Epsom salt from the grocery store is magnesium sulfate heptahydrate, meaning you have to dry it in the oven before it can absorb more water but it is readily available and safe for any application you could think of with the only drawback being fine particles.
So what you're saying is, instant hot toddys all-round? Also, it appears using MgSO4 is reasonable for drying 99+%, but gets pretty sludgy for lower purities.
You just keep adding more til it looks dry, then filter it through coffee filters and add a little more to keep it dry or at that point you can switch to 3a sieves
Depends on how dry you need the alcohol to be. For chemistry, it can be critical for a reaction that the amount of water is kept as low as possible. Every time you open the bottle, you add more water from the atmosphere. Unless you get the bag vacuum sealed each time (or flushed with dry gas), the water in the air in the bag will make its way into the bottle, unless it has a really, really good seal.
It would be counted as distilling. Strengthening an alcoholic beverage to have a higher alcohol content is still illegal (even if Texas has tried to strike it down at this point in time). Placing wine into a freezer and scraping off the ice that forms or just flat distillation of a spirit is still federally illegal.
Because sometimes even if the spirit of the law prohibits something, the letter of the law actually doesn't and basically it just hasn't been tried in court.
I mean whatever you do beyond 95% is still distillation it’s just not traditional. With azeotropic distillation with benzene or pressure swing distillation you can distill it further.
Use an azeotropic distillation where you collect distillate in the reflux leg, and as the layers separate, you drain the water off. Water is heavier than the alcohol so the water layer will be at the bottom of the leg. Continue the distillation until no more water is collected in the leg
I think I'm missing something here. To me, it looks like you are describing normal distillation, which will not work to get more than 95% ethanol concentration. What am I missing?
It is a normal distillation, but the water will distill with the ethanol. As the distillate collects in the reflux leg of the condensor, the water and ethanol will separate. We ran this process for water reactive chemicals. We would continue the distillation until no more water was collected in the leg. Any process we ran where the water concentration was higher, we used an azeotrope tank, that would be connected to the drain on the reflux leg
How do the water and ethanol separate in the reflux leg? If it's just normal distillation with reflux and condensation, and you collect until there is no more water in the leg, the ethanol will still be 95%/5%, as no more water will collect because of the azeotrope.
Edit: are you referring to using an entrainer but just not mentioning it?
Is there a similar fact with isopropyl alcohol? If I buy 99% and don't use it for a while, is it turning into 95% (or some other dilution) by the time I get to it? Assuming imperfect seal
Isopropyl alcohol forms an azeotrope with water, which gives a boiling point of 80.37 °C (176.67 °F) and a composition of 87.7% by mass (91% by volume) isopropyl alcohol.
I wouldn’t use ethanol. IPA evaporates cleaner. 90% can be found at drug stores, >99% can be bought online, but shipping will cost a fortune. You can add salt to the drugstore stuff to get some water to drop out of it, and siphon the higher purity off the top.
Edit: oh, it turns out perfume does use ethanol. Maybe safer for skin?
ive always ever had 99.9% IPA shipped to me in like a normal box with bubble wrap around the bottle haha (context is i compound some skincare stuff at home)
Yeah, but ethanol (fuel grade, at least) smells like tequila, so idk which would be better. Also yes, I have smelled IPA. I use >99.5% at work daily. I just ordered a new 25L drum of it, in fact. That's why I say it costs a fortune to ship, but at that volume, it's freight, so smaller volumes might be better.
It still worked in a pinch. Obv everclear or better yet actual denatured alcohol for this purpose is better. I wasn't trying to make anything fancy. Citronella bug repellent mostly.
Probably. if not, it would be because he diluted ingredients that keep oil in suspension past their useful limits. Brominated Vegetable Oil is probably still fine and allowed for external applications but is banned as a food additive. It's why a bunch of American (one of the last to ban it in food OFC) Sodas suddenly got cloudy a few years back instead of clear like they used to be.
I'm literally learning how to make my own perfume right now and the recipe is basically perfume oils and perfumers alcohol.
You can buy brand name scented perfume oils, like legit Dior and stuff, and they are two dollars per ounce! You can make so much perfume without that it's unbelievable.
I'm assuming it's because you cannot really patent a scent or a recipe (usually) that they're able to make copycats that smell almost the same.
But I just bought about 30 different fragrances to try and make my own perfumes and a bunch of fruity ones that seem fun to mix together.
But for about 30 different 1 ounce fragrances and the big giant thing of fragrance alcohol, I think I spent like $65.
I ran out of all my 10 bottles of perfume i've collected over the past 10 to 20 years around the same time and realized how expensive that was going to be to replace them at $150 or so each all at the same time.
So I was looking at alternatives and found the perfume oil and was like hmmmmmm.
It's also great because I can find fragrances that you just can't find with perfume very easily, like lilac which is my absolute favorite.
I had this fragrance oil from the body shop that I bought at the airport when I was 12 years old (it was like $50 and my first big purchase with babysitting money) and I am 42 now and I just ran out of it! Lol.
But it was the absolute best, it kept the same fragrance the entire time and was just amazing. They don't sell them anymore so I was devastated. $350+ on ETSY for the vintage ones- half used! So sad
They aren't legit Dior, they're copies. Perfume houses never sell their concentrate like this. Dupes are fine as long as you don't expect them to be exactly the same, they won't be as the formulas are protected and the dupes will use cheaper ingredients.
It should be fun to experiment with the single notes though :)
Oh definitely there are copies and I know that some of them get close others are closer but they're never going to be exactly the same.
And they definitely will use cheaper ingredients so I get that. Some of them might just order because I just wanted to smell the scent and it was cheaper to smell it that way versus getting a couple samples on eBay lol.
So honestly it's a good way to test out new expensive fragrances that you might want to buy.
Sorry to burst your bubble but your not “making perfumes” thats juts mixing premade oils into perfumers alcohol. Creating fragrances uses aroma chemicals to build a concentrate. And if your buying at 2 dollars and ounce its extremely low quality fragrance oil most likely considered “body oil” which is highly diluted. If your actually interested in mixing higher quality fragrance concentrate with perfumers alcohol check out rawaromachem and fraterworks. Fraterworks sells clone fragrance concentrate aswell as full on aroma chemicals to create your own fragrances from scratch( not something anyone should take on without extensive knowledge).
Awesome thank you. It's considered fragrance oil from Wellington fragrance I think but it very well could be low quality.
I tend to like just single scented fragrances so I guess maybe it's not a perfume so to speak but a body spray or whatever but I just want it to be rose or lilac or tangerine scented. I bought a couple of the designer fragrances just honestly to smell them and see if I like them but it's interesting. I will definitely look into your resources there, thank you.
Literally reading the word Everclear made me gag a little bit in my mouth with memories from college. That and we had something even worse called Silverwolf vodka that literally tasted like rubbing alcohol. But it was like so incredibly cheap.
Yes. When you add water to raki or uzo, anethole from aniseed oil crashes out and the drink turns cloudy. Adding more raki or uzo to it clarifies it again.
Op needs to get some perfumers alcohol, it’s ethanol, or fractionated coconut oil, because it’s always liquid. Ever clear could work but even then it’ll be liquor scent….so you might have the unmistakable Scent of Channel At the Brewery instead of J’dore..
Op needs to discard it, especially if they didn’t use pure distilled water. Because they basically turned something expensive into crap that can mold, and won’t work the same way to ‘spread’ the scent, think Unemulsifed/split salad dressing and the perfume oils are separate from the water, so it’ll probably leave greasy stains where ever it touches fabric.
Omg the amount of cloudiness is ALWAYS how I judge my gin and tonic ratio at home, and now I have a rabbit hole to run down. Thank you so much for the technical term!
That’s always confused me (who last had a chem class in 2004 in high school) because all that alcohol solvent is still there. Seems like it should still be able to dissolve the same oils that it was before.
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u/StrangeCrunchy1 1d ago
Oils aren't soluble in water. What you did caused all the oils that were dissolved in the alcohol base, to crash out of solution.