One of the worlds best selling psychoactive substances, Ethanol or EtOH (in organic chemistry), the fermentation of sugar or hydration of ethane with catalytic processes, ethanol the spirit in alcohol that gives beer, wine & other "spirits" their mind altering capabilities.
Second only to caffeine in terms of popularity, ethanol was a big hit during the early modern, middle ages & high renaissance, & continues to sell well today as carbonated flavored beverages in a cans, micro-brewery beers & all sorts of wines & hard alcohol spirits, of which vodka & gin are my personal favorites.
Levels of Drunk & Buzzed
To start with, all fermented foods contain a small amount or some level of ethanol content as a result of the yeast that does the fermenting converting starches & sugars into CO2 & ethanol, as a completely natural process thats been happening for thousands of years. Kimchi, sauerkraut, yogurt, kefir, kombucha, are all examples of 100% naturally fermented foods & beverages which people wish to consume in its natural unadulterated & unregulated state not affects by antiquate tax codes or other innate ignorant government regulations from the prohibition era. Let's pass laws that remove restrictions on health promoting probiotic rich substance, foods & beverage that contain far less ethanol than light beer. No sane human is drinking kombucha to get drunk, eating sauerkraut to get drunk. These laws do not even make common sense, let alone technical or scientific sense. I understand that people do not want their children drink 3% ABV Kombucha, but perhaps water is a better beverage for children / please watch this video from Business Insider on YouTube https://youtu.be/7o2dILl8Fhc
So why do you get buzzed or drunk with ethanol containing drinks like beer or wine or spirits? Drunkenness level depends on your BAC or blood alcohol content. The more you drink, the more rapidly, the more this level will rise, producing increasingly profound effects. At moderate doses you can expect happiness, euphoria, decreased anxiety, increased sociability, sedation, cognitive/ memory & motor control impairment; decreased balance & coordination, reduced sensory function, & depression of your CNS function. As your approach blood alcohol poisoning, you become stupefied, unable to balance or make clear choices, engaging in reckless or dangerous behavior. As the blood alcohol level continues you loose the ability to form memories & experience black out events. Many people are robbed or rapid or killed while passed out from drinking too much. Less is more when it comes to ethanol friends.
More Water + B Vitamins Helps Reduce Hangover
I found a trick from my former boss, who told me "For every drink, drink 2 volumes of water & take a multi-B vitamins with B12 & B6 & B5 & B3. When you wake up from being passed out, drink another tall glass of water. You are going to pee a lot, try to sleep as much as you can, sleep in on your day off after partying the night before.
A lot of the toxic effect from hangover because ethanol dehydrogenase from acetaldehyde, before acetate is produce, & acetaldehyde carcinogenic & cytotoxic or deadly to cells. So if you have a lot of ethanol in your blood, your liver & a few other processes will try to metabolize the ethanol into acetate, which is non toxic & can exit in your urine as a funny smelling substance; its the stupid acetaldehyde that causes most of the hangover problems not caused by diuretic or water elimination increase from the ethanol itself.
Thats why staying well hydrated by drinking enough water before you drink alcohol & after you drink alcohol, helps to reduce the toxic hang over effects. B12 consumed as a rate dependent reactant during ethanol metabolism, so adding that to the water helps replace what is lost because of the ethanol.
Ethanol in Your Brain
Enhances inhibitory effects of GABA, thereby suppressing activity in the brain. Ethanol also affects glutamate, glycine, acetylcholine, serotonin & dopamine receptors, modulating the levels of these neurotransmitters in addiction creating reward pathways that give rise to alcoholism. Outside the brain, ethanol & its intermediate toxic metabolite produce unpleasant toxic effect on many systems of the body which are directly mediated by acetaldehyde.
Solving Hangover Science
If someone can produce a drug that causes ethanol to be converted directly to acetate, by bypassing or avoiding the formation of acetaldehyde, then that will become a trillion dollar blockbuster supplement or pharmaceutical "drinking without hangover" I can hear the marketing jingles forming. As our understanding of biologics & life science increases, it's only a matter of time before someone develops & commercializes a hangover preventing drug that actually works by preventing acetaldehyde from forming during the metabolism of ethanol.
Ethanol in Science
Also known as ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol, drinking alcohol, or alcohol. C2H6O written as
CH3−CH2−OH or C2H5OH (ethyl group linked to hydroxyl group) also known as EtOH in organic chemistry shorthand. A volatile, flammable, colorless liquid with a floral wine-like odor & pungent solvent perfume cologne like taste, its the psychoactive, recreational drug & active ingredient in alcoholic drinks!
During the fermentation of sugars by yeasts or through the hydration of ethylene from petroleum gas distillate products, ethanol has medical, antiseptic & disinfectant properties useful in hand sanitizers popular because of COVID19. Turning carbohydrate containing fluids into alcoholic drinks an ancient process that people have been doing for at least 10,000 years. A huge industry with lots of value added, tax generating sales revolves around alcoholic beverages. Sold in aluminum pop cans, glass bottles & metal kegs, beer one of the best selling & oldest alcoholic beverages. I started a micro-brewery with my buddy many years ago, but we stopped making beer & started random-x mining crypto using the power that would be used to energize the boilers & fridges in our microbrewery.
Added to common E10 gasoline mixtures sold in the United States of America as a biological corn ethanol product to replace the aquatic toxin MTBE which was previously added as the oxygenation additive to common gasoline; but, significantly because many gas station fuel storage tanks underground leak, MTBE being acutely toxic to aquatic wildlife, made ground water leaking problems with gas stations so profound that the EPA selected Ethanol or EtOh to replace methyl tert-butyl either or MTBE as the fuel additive to improve the clean burn properties of common gasoline fuel.
I buy EtOH free or Ethanol Free or E0 gasoline from The Grange in Issaquah, Wa, USA, distributed by CENEX an agricultural supplier. In my pressure washer (Honda GX160), Weed-whacker, Honda PCX-150 scooter, Yamaha MT-03 Motorcycle, my Honda EU2000I generator; I do not like E10 gasolines propensity to attract moisture from the air, which can corrode, rust & preventatively accelerate the decay of my expensive vehicular & power equipment machines that already suffer from depreciation losses. Small engine carborators in infrequently or seasonally used equipment often damaged by the ethanol content of E10 gasoline or the water H20 the ethanol pulls into the fuel by atomic hydrogen bonding forces. I understand that for passenger car usage, E10 gasoline fine in vehicle made after 2008 with gaskets & seals in the fuel system & engine that were specifically designed to handle gasoline ethanol mixtures of up to 15% ethanol content.
In medical & antibacterial wipes a 70% mixture of ethanol in water more effective at killing pathogenic bacteria by allowing the solution to fully saturate the cell membrane, where it then dissolves the lipid bilayer & denatures proteins. Sometimes hydrogen peroxide added to ethanol mixes to enhance the antibacterial & sanitization performance.
As the ethanol molecule engages in hydrogen bonding, it has a higher boiling point than other similar small molecules without dipole moment inducing hydroxyl or -OH functional group attached to the ethyl or 2 carbon saturated hydrocarbon base structure; this hydrogen bonding & the polar moment of the ethanol molecule also makes it strongly interact with water or H20 molecules, forming azeotropic mixtures of around 95% ethanol & 5% water, formed via common distillation at 78 deg C to concentrate ethanol from fermented sugar solutions.
Absolute ethanol or pure or strait ethanol can be obtained by passing this 95% mixture over a drying agent, or polymer molecular exchange beads to remove the remaining water, though 100% ethanol exceedingly hygroscopic & can extract water vapor from the moisture content of atmospheric or room air, slowly diluting itself back to that ~95% concentration Et-OH range again if containers of 100% ethanol are left open to the air. Ethanol will also evaporate more easily than water, from an open container, or dish. Ethanol combusts with a clean burning blue flame that can be hard to see in brighter lighting conditions. Small camping stoves that burn ethanol fuel are typically fueled with denatured ethanol into which some toxic chemical added to discourage consuming the fuel as a intoxicating beverage, making it much less palatable & much more poisonous.
Hangovers
Additional information about alcoholic beverage consumption & a hangover or feeling bad after drinking, either that night or the next day, reveals that congeners like methanol & propanol form during fermentation as do fusel alcohols & similar small molecules. In small amounts, very tiny amounts, these mostly just add flavor depth to the ethanol mixtures, but too much methanol can cause blindness & can be fatal with just a tiny serving of methanol. During distillation the heads & tails or what comes over first & last, usually discarded because those fractions will contain most of the junk not desired in the final product.
Sugars, flavors, & additives of many kind are frequently included in alcoholic beverages to give color & taste & smell. In gin for example, many different botanical herbs & spices are boiled or steeped into the concentrated ethanol mixture or high proof liquor. Ethanol has a non-polar end with a CH3-CH2 allowing it to solvate or extract many essential oils, terpenes & related solutes present in the natural ingredients brewed in the ethanol to make Gin, imparting flavor, aroma, taste, improving the mouth feel & after-taste with what I like to call "floral" essence, though I happen to think that ethanol itself has a sorta floral flavor & smell, somewhat like a cheap perfume or cologne. Vodka the cleanest ethanol spirit with mostly just ethanol & water, having gone through 3-7 distillations to "clean up" & purify the resulting spirt. Of all the drinks consumed, vodka will produce the least hangover & only the ethanol & its nasty intermediate metabolic byproduct acetaldehyde produces as your body exports acetate for expulsion in your urine & feces, will be responsible for dehydration & chemical toxicity that underlies what causes the negative unpleasant hangover experience. Headache, joint point, feel sort, tired, out of it, blank, confused, lethargic, tired, unwell, sick, nauseated, with unpleasant liquid poop & worse. If you drink alcoholic beverages with lots of additives, the hangover will be even worse.
Learning about this during my early 20's, I used my then brand new borosilicate chemistry distillation apparatus to distill wine & later vodka to make strong ethanol for berry extraction. I would put mashed blackberries into a glass Kerr canning jar, perhaps 1 cup whole berries or 1/3 cup berry mash, then pour in some of that vodka distillate, much stronger, & let the resulting mixture steep at 68 deg F for 3-10 weeks. Cold filtering the resulting ethanol extracted mash through a coffee filter in a ceramic Buchner funnel using vacuum assist, the resulting dark blue purple fluid picked up fructose & biological compounds of both flavor & aroma from the berries, giving the blackberry spirit a lovely taste & smell!
The wine distillates were inspired by similar commercial products. I would buy common red win bottles of 750 ml & then distill perhaps 150 ml of wine extract. The mostly clear wine distillate was much strong in terms of ABV or percent by volume, where the starting wine perhaps 11-15% ethanol, the extract was probably ~30% or stronger. I started making a caramel based spirit by caramelizing sucrose or table sugar & then steeping the resulting product in ethanol inside the serving bottle, indefinitely, until all was gone. This sweet liquor was added to fruit juices & other products to give them the adult kick, with dinner or after, at night time, when everyone was staying home for many hours to allow the ethanol to metabolize for driving safety etc. Beer & wine & spirits, beer was always my favorite.
I made contact with & reconnected with a childhood friend & we started brewing beer in a 10 gallon steel pot on the stovetop of his then rental house, using dry malt extract, a think viscous sugary mixture that when boiled into water makes beer wort, to which then hops are added & further boiled to impart additional tastes & aromas. The resulting hop infused wort was then added to 6 gallon glass carboys & yeast was pitched into the vessel. A bung with a water filled gas escape trap was added to the top of the carboy to allow some of the CO2 produced during fermentation to escape. This glass beer making vessel was then stored in a dark room temperature closet for 2-3 weeks. The resulting beer was poured through a filter & funnel into a stainless steel keg & then pressurized CO2 from a steel high pressure tank was added to carbonate the beer. This vessel was then placed into a fridge. After cooling to 38 F, a tap handle was added. The CO2 tank, and Keg with a Tap was ready for serving action. Later kegerators were created to allow these smaller Keg's & the smaller CO2 tank to be inside, while the tap & serving handle were plumed through the door for easy access.
We kept expanding on this basic idea until he decided to build a 1/2 barrel setup in his then apartment. I fabricated the copper tubing for the mash-tun using a drill press & 1/2in copper tubing & joints. We installed this system with silicon tubing into a 90 gallon plastic cooler. We then would buy bags of roasted grain from a local distributer, & using a drill powered grinder, grind the grain for wort making. Large quantities of hops were purchased in vacuum sealed bags, we used larger gram scales & plastic cups to weigh up hops for different batches. Commercial yeast packets were obtained to pitch the finish wort to make beer. We operated this system for a few years until he married a childhood friend of mine. They bought a house nearby & we expanded to a fully electric 2 barrel setup & started a microbrewery. With limited retail sales of our beer & a tap house created in the garage, weekend brew sessions produced many tens of gallons of beers. At first we were breaking even & later started turning a decent profit. At one point, we even had 1 employee working in the garage to keep everything clean & online & ready to go, so that by the time we got there on Sat to run a brewing session we could do it with less time. Unfortunately, she quit & we decreased the sessions to every few weeks & then cold offline. During this time he decided to go deep into random X GPU crypto-rig mining & I even setup one by repurposing my gaming desktop with an additional pair of graphics cards. Today this 3 GPU rig acts as a 270 watt electric space heater in the bedroom of our overprice apartment & turns $0.80 of electricity into $5 of BTC daily // I don't drink much beer anymore & even took a break from interacting with my buddy because he was being intensely mean & judgmental & saying distasteful things to me during a tumultuous time where I was more emotionally sensitive. I told him to just give me space for a while & that brings us right up to present. If I ever personally brew beer at home again, it will be on a desktop scale for fun & to make a series of YouTube videos about it // lol
If you are truly interested in a deep dive TLDR style on Ethanol, please consider the wikipedia entry for more information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_(drug)
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