

200-Year-Old Alcohol Found in Shipwreck Is Still Drinkable - pif
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/200-year-old-alcohol-found-shipwreck-still-drinkable-180952373/

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jacquesm
Alcohol 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.

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xxs
The 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)

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nkozyra
Even 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.

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huhtenberg
Bah. 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 :)

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ufmace
I 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.

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lmm
I 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.

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sophacles
I can't tell if this is a methanol joke or not...

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cgtyoder
I'll try it.

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rikkus
Not any more.

Sorry. _hic_

