Why can’t we drink industrial ethanol diluted to, say, 15%, but we can drink ethanol made from yeast?
In: Chemistry
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.
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