I feel like the harms of alcohol are also magnified by adulterants here. For example, an alcoholic will often choose dirt-cheap beer or spirits to consume on the regular. Is that stuff pure and clean? No. There is no requirement to label ingredients in a bottle of wine, beer, or vodka. You can put any old stuff in there as long as you're not outright poisoning people.
They're going to a convenience store, or a dive bar that carries the worst stuff and they're going to drink that, day-in, day-out, to excess.
I believe that, if drinkers had access to pure and clean ethanol-based beverages, and also maintained good nutrition and a decent diet, they wouldn't get all this liver failure and horrific metabolic stuff that they suffer as alcoholics. I feel it's often tangential to the substance itself.
When I smoked, I often picked up clove cigarettes. My hairdresser friend with purple hair advised me that the molecules of clove smoke were huge compared to tobacco smoke and I was killing myself that much faster. I thank President Obama for finally closing out the clove cigarette market. I was eventually smoking American Spirits, which are mass-market, but touted as extra pure or clean. Who knows, really?
In that case they’re not adulterants but natural byproducts of fermentation. That’s why most liquors are aged, to give the chemical reactions time to eliminate those byproducts (like trace amounts of methanol from fermented pectin).
A “fun” experiment to run along those lines is making prison hooch* or using turbo yeast. You can get anywhere from 20-30% ABV in a week or two, but if you drink it immediately it will result in the worst hangover you’ve ever had. It takes months of aging for it to become drinkable.
* The PrisonHooch subreddit is delightful. Who doesn’t want liquor made from Nerds candy or Gatorade?
NileRed (on YouTube) made alcohol from toilet paper to show what's possible.
Btw, distilling already removes most byproducts. (But you might still want to age.) Your comment seems a bit confused about straight up fermented products vs distilling fermented products.
I'm not sure you can get 20%-30% alcohol just from using fermentation. 18% is already a stretch and requires a lot of tricks. But you can get to your 20%-30% easily with some basic distilling equipment.
Distillation removes most byproducts but not enough to really matter. Their boiling points aren’t different enough and like with ethanol, distillation concentrates the bad stuff. It depends on the fermentation source but even vodka becomes significantly more drinkable when properly filtered.
18% requires a lot of tricks if you’re going the classical EC1118 route* but you can easily get 20% in a week or two from just turbo yeast (although its nigh undrinkable). I haven’t seen many reliable reports of 30% but plenty of 24-26%.
Distillation removes most _kinds_ of byproducts, but leaves some kinds nearly untouched. Eg no sugars come over, but unless really careful you get all kinds of weird other alkanols, like methanol, and other volatile crap.
Filtering can remove that crap, yes.
I didn't know that there are yeasts that are so much more alcohol tolerant. Interesting.
> I was eventually smoking American Spirits, which are mass-market, but touted as extra pure or clean. Who knows, really?
They were sued and are not allowed to call the extra clean line organic anymore. Since the Polonium from fertilizer is a problem, you can avoid it there.
> When I smoked, I often picked up clove cigarettes. My hairdresser friend with purple hair advised me that the molecules of clove smoke were huge compared to tobacco smoke and I was killing myself that much faster. I thank President Obama for finally closing out the clove cigarette market. I was eventually smoking American Spirits, which are mass-market, but touted as extra pure or clean. Who knows, really?
Eh, putting any kind of smoke in your lungs is bad for you. Exactly what kind of plant matter you are burning is mostly a rounding error.
Go and vape, if you want to consume tobacco or marijuana.
They're going to a convenience store, or a dive bar that carries the worst stuff and they're going to drink that, day-in, day-out, to excess.
I believe that, if drinkers had access to pure and clean ethanol-based beverages, and also maintained good nutrition and a decent diet, they wouldn't get all this liver failure and horrific metabolic stuff that they suffer as alcoholics. I feel it's often tangential to the substance itself.
When I smoked, I often picked up clove cigarettes. My hairdresser friend with purple hair advised me that the molecules of clove smoke were huge compared to tobacco smoke and I was killing myself that much faster. I thank President Obama for finally closing out the clove cigarette market. I was eventually smoking American Spirits, which are mass-market, but touted as extra pure or clean. Who knows, really?