I did research and a little bit of experimenting with salting out ethanol out of vodka and no I did not drink it because I don’t drink. the picture above is high concentration of ethanol on top and water with potassium carbonate on the bottom dissolved into it.
I am here trying to archive my research onto the fediverse and let the community preserve the science I have done. now I have a PDF file of this discourse post I made. https://discourse.eom.dev/t/salting-out-recommended-procedure-by-solidheron/434 and I don’t seem to have any place to put it and I’m up for suggestions.
if you do want to read the post id recommend skipping the procedure and reading the second half that goes into why you should. procedure is put first because the HOW is more important than the why. please feel free to comment on any mistake I made in the post or if you have any suggestion to improve on it.
95%+ is totally possible with a column still. I can easily pull 92% on mine, and it’s not set up to do ultra high proof. Distillit percentage can easily be measured with a hydrometer, they’re less than €10, and fairly accurate. This process might be really useful to pull the last 20% of water out after distilling.
I’d love to see this experiment done on something like everclear. That’s around 95% abv. It’d be interesting to see if you could get the last 5% of water out of it. It’d also be interesting to see it done on something like an 8% abv wine or beer.
Pic related, it’s my 250 liter column still. I usually get heads that are 92% abv, and an average abv of 80% across a run.
Collum stills are interesting since they work on the principle of bubbling. Kinda gives me a new principle to look into.
I need to order a lot more potassium carbonate to get enough ethanol to use a hydrometer or to get the ethanol to measure to better accuracy with my equipment.
I need to find a sample bottle of ever clear and salt out that and see if any water layer appears. The appearance of that layer would prove salting out can break the limit
I still believe that salting out is a less energy intensive and simpler method than distilling and at least worth doing prior to distilling.
I do this to turn 70% isopropyl into 92%! Can’t believe I’m seeing this because I was wondering just yesterday if I could pull ethanol out of some nasty drinks we have at the house.
It pulls all organic compounds including ethanol out
Imma try it then! My wife rarely drinks and I only drink cheap beer. We have loads of crappy alcohol around we’ll never touch.
How does ethanol compare for the task I would use isopropyl for? Cleaning stuff mainly.
I used results from my experiments for hand sanitizer. But I assume pure ethanol would be good window cleaner since it evaporates so easily.
you want to concentrate isopropyl and you can use table salt and a lot of shaking, but potassium carbonate probably will work better
Neat! I’d thought about doing this before so it’s cool to see you’ve done it. Although I would want to taste it. Surely it’s salty right?
Depends on how much you put in but I think it taste like battery acid at really high consentration but it’s chemical similar to baking soda
After decanting the alcohol can you precipitate out the salt?
I haven’t experiment with dessication, but you can get salt back after salting out and even use it for future salting out. I should run it few more times to get a feel for how effective the resulting potassium carbonate is.
I mean getting it out of the alcohol, or maybe I mean getting it out of the water in the alcohol. I don’t think reclaiming the salt from the lower level is hard.
I don’t think much potassium carbonate dissolve in alcohol. I lit the ethanol on fire and couldn’t tell if any residue of either water or potassium. I never tasted much of the ethanol since I don’t want to drink alcohol. Apparently it’s insoluble in ethanol.
Potassium carbonate is suitable for consumption up to 100 grams a day
That’s very cool! I’ve heard that calcium oxide can work as a “decanting” agent to pull water out of ethanol too. I wonder how they compare.
It annoys me that I just figured out dessication in distillation. Like now there’s a bunch more experiments to do and I know so little they could be useful for medical piracy.
From research with distillation they’re pretty necessary to get high consentration of alcohol
