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200-Year-Old Alcohol Found in Shipwreck Is Still Drinkable
- rikkus 12y agoNot any more. Sorry. hic
- jacquesm 12y agoAlcohol is used as a preservative, this being a distillate it should not be surprising that it is still 'fit for consumption'. Given that people will drink window cleaner and glycol it should be even less of a surprise but I figure the article meant that his was originally intended for consumption rather than as a cleaning product. Poland has a fairly active bootlegging industry, and a typical reward for some favour or other is a small bottle of the local poison. Those bottles can be quite old as well and I've yet to hear of someone complaining their vodka had gone bad.
- pif 12y agoMaybe what is surprising is that the bottles are still well sealed.
- ejr 12y agoClay is quite a hardy material and the relatively small size of the bottles may have helped to protect them from ocean currents and debris that have destroyed larger containers http://www.livescience.com/47382-shipwreck-alcohol-bottle-discovered.html http://www.livescience.com/47382-shipwreck-alcohol-bottle-di...
- xxs 12y agoThe risk is in distillation process. Even small amounts[1] methanol can be devastating. Other than that unopened high spirits don't change much at all. [1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol#Toxicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol#Toxicity
- nkozyra 12y agoEven so, the risk of deadly or injurious methanol levels in typical distilling is low. It's only when people are using improvisational pieces in the process (like the radiator/moonshine legacy) that things get dangerous. In other words, making liquor (or even lower-ABV alcohol like beer and wine) is pretty safe across the board assuming you aren't just using old car pieces or old wood in the process. I'd think that in most cases there'd be some degradation of the ABV over a long period of time that might make it susceptible to human pathogens, but that level is pretty low, something like .8% ABV.
- floor_ 12y agoReminds me of the plot of the movie Leviathan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_%281989_film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_%281989_film%29
- huhtenberg 12y agoBah. Lots of things that contain alcohol are "drinkable". My fellow Russians were known to drink aftershave, to extract and drink alcohol from industrial glue and do an equally impressive voodoo with a recoil buffer grease. I mean it's more remarkable that the bottle didn't leak than the fact that its contents were drinkable :)
- ufmace 12y agoI remember hearing somewhere that Russian jets and tanks and such used alcohol for hydraulic fluid, and soldiers would sometimes drink it all, leaving their military hardware unusable.
- lmm 12y agoI once met a guy who swore blind that he and some friends had found a sunken greek galley while scuba-diving, and swagged an amphora or two of drinkable 2000-year-old wine before reporting the find.
- sophacles 12y agoI can't tell if this is a methanol joke or not...
- cgtyoder 12y agoI'll try it.