How to Make Anhydrous Ethanol from Cheap Liquor

Im so glad you found a use for trash like that. Mezcal in a plastic bottle would probably have led to regret anyways.

Awesome to see more reasonable home lab solutions! The big chemistry channels can get a bit wrapped up in high investment technology that no one here can reasonably recreate. I'd love to see more interesting techniques for obtaining things on a bit of a budget

😂 the best part is when the ceramic ring gets stuck in the flask.

Nice, I didn't know glycerin broke the water / ethanol azeotrope. This is cool cuz clycerin is cheap a.f. I tend to use A3 sieves. They are very cheap on a very well known generalist Chinese site, contrary to chemistry shops.

This a really well made and explained video! Interesting from start to finish :))

Great video and really great tip using the aquarium media for boiling chips. Looks like that works really well.

Can ethanol be concentrated from ~98% to 100% by adding shavings of metallic calcium to the solution. The calcium reacts with the remaining water to produce a precipitate of insoluble calcium hydroxide, which can be filtered out. A bottle of absolute ethanol can also be maintained in this state by keeping some shavings of metallic calcium in the bottle.

I thoroughly enjoyed your creativity, explanations, and decent procedural approach to a welcome and (very unwelcome, one day at a time) often desired substance. ❤❤

Get ethylene glycol instead, car's radiator fluid. For storage, you can use dried whiteboard chalk instead of the sieves, and to separate acetone from nail polish try mixing soy food oil and then distill the food oil. Theoretically you can dissolve the alcohol into some other oil (baby oil? idk) and do the same thing as i mentioned for acetone.

Lol, I just came across your video on my home feed and we made a video on the exact same topic just 2 weeks apart! Although the method I used is drying with anhydrous magnesium sulfate.

I once obtained high concentration of ethanol by dehydrating it with K3PO4, that was obtained by adding KOH to the aqueous solution of KH2PO4 and then drying it on a plate. The only problem was that drying slurry of K3PO4 was bumping and sputtering as crazy... It proved to be quite strong dehydrating agent, and the ethanol I obtained was miscible with hydrocarbons, though I did not measure its exact concentration.

Start with 190 proof PGA or some clearanced hand sanitizer. The hand sanitizer usually have IPA and N butanol, but both can be removed by holding the temperature to get the IPA to come off and ending the distillation early to avoid the butanol. Its OK to leave them in if making ether as they will actually catalyze the reaction. If going for pure ethanol. Distil once from magnesium sulfate alcohol mix then add molecular sieves to grab the rest of the water. Leave them in when storing it.❤

Well done.

Do you guys have Everclear there? That stuff is like 95% alcohol and only around $20 for a 750 mil bottle.

You can make anhydrous ethanol using copper sulfate. Copper sulfate usually exists as a hydrate (blue), but if you heat it in an oven, it will turn white (with a slight tint of blue), i.e. anhydrous. Then, as soon as the copper sulfate has cooled, immediately throw it into the ethanol and stir well - copper sulfate, even in hydrate form, is insoluble in ethanol. Close the lid and let it sit - you will end up with a blue precipitate because the anhydrous copper sulfate has "taken away" the water from the water/ethanol mixture. You can then save this portion of ethanol for further dehydration. Typically the cycle is repeated until the cycle when a new portion of anhydrous copper sulfate, added to the ethanol, remains white.

You could get very close by just using salt. Soak the ethanol in A3 zeolite and then distill out the zeolite powder is probably the best method to get to 100%. It would be cool if somehow you could percolate the alcohol vapor through the glycerin. Essentially the process for dehydrating natural gas. It’s not exactly glycerol, but TEG, triethylene glycol. Easiest method is put ample NaCl in the first two distillations, then dry with zeolite, and do a final distillation to clean it up, and don’t allow air to touch the product.

I don't know if it would go all the way to anhydrous alcohol, but I've heard that adding table salt to an water-alcohol mix will make the alcohol drop out of solution whilst the salt takes its place dissolved in the water. Maybe an idea for another video? 😅 Cheers from Brazil

Might as well add myself to the list

El segundo mejor uso del tio tony

You can buy 97% ethanol at the liquor store where I live. I generally stick to the methods that allow me to just add something.(Calcium, sieves, ect) I'm being time efficient, definitely not being lazy.