Alcohol - Periodic Table of Videos

we're gonna be looking at alcohol today and in particular ethanol because ethanol was the alcohol that most of us are most interested in It' Martin! How was the filming, Martin? It's only just begun. This is a model for ethanol: two carbons, 5 hydrogens here, oxygen here, and another hydrogen there. Most people are familiar with alcohol because of alcoholic drinks. One of my colleagues at my old university did point that it looked a bit like a dog shape so although hair of the dog is an English term referring to an alcoholic drink you drink in order to combat hungover it doesn't come from the shape the molecule beer wine all sorts of things like vodka these all made by fermentation of some natural material, maybe juice from some sorts of fruits like a grape or some sort of grain wheat barley and so on today what we gonna do with all these different alcoholic drinks is actually distil them so the process of distillation will actually purify these alcoholic drinks it all mean that we can actually get as as close to pure alcohol as we can alcohol has been terribly important in human history because in the days before people discovered how to purify water they used to drink wheat beer where the alcohol killed most of the bacteria and so they could drink safely in a Asia people used to boil water and make tea but this wasn't discovered in Europe and and the West to many many years later what we're going to do now is actually distill the alcohol out of a kind of beer so beer is going to go into that large flask there will connect up to this which is known as the store head topic that will be of the moment so alcove label clicked around here go down this arm and into this bit not here without you got so cold running water are creating a jacket above coolness around the a glass tube inside it so the alcove a power will get condensed into liquid outflow down into the receiver into our a round bottom flask alcohol has now certainly or ethanol you sell alcohol has become enormously important as a possible means absolving out transport problems you can burn ethanol in car engines you can mix it with gasoline to produce and material which will still operate in car engines you can make the ethanol from also two different grains from wheat from maize ??? cool points for a living (laughing intensifies) It's ridiculous surely abysmal job good there you go can a beer in the flask now gonna heat up the iceman toes are heating up side that were actually heat up the sides and the bottom of this round bottom flask so what's going to happen is that you put alcohol and water inside that vessel the water should stay in there until you know if we go up to 100 degrees C any them when it boil but before we get to 100 Alcohol will come off first around about 78°C any organic compound that contains and oxygen hydrogen group is known as an alcohol people when they talk about ethanol usually also called alcohol but you can get ehmm.. so-called methyl alcohol methanol which has CH3OH and you can make these methanol by distilling wood and is sometimes known as wood alcohol it's very poisonous causes blindness and quite frequently that methanol is added to ethanol to stop people drinking it so-called methylated spirits but there are a whole series of alcohols propanol, butynol, pentanol and so on and all of them a used in making chemicals doing chemical reactions but ethanol is by far the most common and so alcohol when chemist is talking is often the shorthand for ethanol but the alcohol there which is bubbling up forming alcohol vapour into this area which is still hot so what will happen is there is vapour once it hits scope of glass condenses on it and is trickling down flows along the condenser so what we're going right at the end here into the receiver and then into the round bottom flask is the alcohol from beer one of the problems when you distill alcohol from water is that you cannot get it a 100 percent pure because ethanol and water form a so-called azeotrope what distills over is 97 or 98 percent pure but you can't get rid of the last two percent water the only way you can remove it is by adding a third material quite often people add benzene to it so the alcohol that we have in the lab doesn't contain much water but it does contain nasty things which means that if you drink them you could be seriously poison for this kinda beer we've managed to get about this much alcohol and say no huge amount but that's what we've managed achieved our crude distillation apparatus here but there you go I drink some wine unfortunately but I don't like beer which is a real disadvantage in some countries where beer drinking it's a big tradition so I'm fail and when I go to countries like Germany or Belgium I can't really appreciate their national drinks we're going to be putting some fortified wine now into our round bottom flask and not be connected to the distillation apparatus alcohol is used in the lab quite frequently very often as the solvent for doing chemical reactions it can also be used just for washing things because it will dissolve quite a wide range of organic compounds so if you wash your flask in alcohol then you can get nice clean glassware it should come off about 78 there are bacteria that can oxidize ethanol they turn ethanol into ethanoic acid, citric acid it's what makes vinegar and so if you have a bottle of wine it.. leave it open to the air or and leaks into the bottle it starts getting acid welcomes more like vinegar and when I was teenager again I was quite an enthusiastic chemist my father opened the bottle of wine which was a bit acid so I had this brilliant idea I took a so-called ion exchange resin that removes the acid from anything and I pulled his wine through the ion exchange resin it was a fantastic success it stop being acid but its tasted absolutely foul right and there we have it so there's wine as the Alcohol from it, Cheers!

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 655,409

Rating: 4.9546361 out of 5

Keywords: alcohol, ethanol, methanol, distillation, beer, wine, azeotrope

Id: CheFL8see30

Length: 7min 45sec (465 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/thefabnab]

I love these videos

[u/cockoftehwalk]

These videos just keep getting better. Cheers!

[u/ezbang]

I found many things wrong with this video. If you're trying to get to the azeotrope, you need a reflux column. He said 97-98% alcohol; I was always told 95% but I'm not sure if he means %vol, %mass, %mol, etc. How can you not like beer?