How to make anhydrous ethanol (100% alcohol) 

When I was in highschool I was in a chemistry club. I joined due to a girl I liked. Chemistry was fun and obv. I still love it, but my work is unrelated to the field. One time we had the task to ferment some grapes into a sort of wine then seperate the alcohol and later further destill it into 100% ethanol. This was a whole semester wide project that took many sessions time and effort on the whole club (6 people incl. the teacher). I remember very clearly when we had the 100% ethanol and how happy we were to achieve our goal. I remember filtering the ethanol with the m. sieves through a coffee filter. I remember washing the sieves with distilled water. I remember realising that I just dilluted the batch to less then 50% and so destroyed two weeks of work. That day I realized that I am just slightly, but definitively a moron.

Also known in labs as "the good stuff".

I’m so glad I found this! I’ve been needing to make 100% ethanol as well for no reason. I don’t have any of the equipment or the money to buy any of the ingredients, including the ethanol, but it’s good to have the instructions on hand just in case.

Finally, a drink strong enough for Norse Gods.

My pharmacy sells 95% alcohol... [Laughs in Polish where literally every corner shop sells 95% alcohol]

0:16 Fun fact, undergraduate labs sometimes include additives that make anyone who would attempt to ingest the alcohol puke it up faster than they would with actual alcohol, so at the undergrad level it wouldn't necessarily be 100% anyway, azeotrope or no azeotrope.

You missed some ethanol at the filter. Try washing it with a bit of distilled water!

Chemical engineer here. First of all, great clear and quick explanation of azeotropic distillation even though you opted not to use that method. I rarely, if ever, see it explained so clearly in my engineering books. A couple things worth noting: 1) Mole sieves are the pretty much the best nonreactive way to get contaminants to the lowest possible percentages if they're applicable to the situation. 3A is perfect for removing water as it doesn't fit almost any other molecules except H2O into the pores. However, mole sieves have much lower capacities in exchange for their high adsorptivity. 5% water is probably too much for a mole sieve I thought up front, but I was pleasantly surprised that you were able to adsorb all that water in just two treatments. At higher volumes, though, mole sieves would become uneconomical. Great for keeping your ethanol dry, though, in storage as you're doing. In engineering practice at larger volumes, using only adsorption, it's most cost effective to use alumina first as a cheaper bulk adsorbent for water, then polish the last remaining bits of water out with mole sieves. Both can be regenerated with heat. Silica gel is another possible adsorbent that can be regenerated, but you'd have to check your gel's affinity for water over ethanol just to be sure it'll work. Adsorption is a very versatile separation method as long you do your adsorbent homework. 2) There are a lot of other ways of "breaking" azeotropes listed in the Wikipedia "Azeotrope" article. Changing the distillation pressure will usually change the azeotropic temperature and composition allowing you to get past the atmospheric azeotrope. Apparently, that pressure swing effect won't work for ethanol-water, but it's viable for other mixtures. Using selective membranes will also work. There are many other methods. Obviously, not all will work for all types of mixtures or be viable at lab scale. I just wanted to expand upon your point of showing that there are a lot of other interesting separation processes, both physical and chemical, that we use after good ole distillation reaches its limits.

I just realized how old this video is... this is being filmed in his dads garage lol im so happy his parents were so supportive of him... bc look how far hes come and where hes at today! thx mom n dad

alright gentlemen we have pure ethanol, time to get wasted!

2019: Let's use the alcohol to make moonshine 2020: Let's use the alcohol to make hand sanitizer

Take a shot of ethanol every time he says "sieves"

My brother drank the fortnite juice under the sink and now he won’t wake up

Molecular sieve dust can interfere with reactions, and the sieves do effectively gobble up a good chunk of your solvent (as you can't fully drain the flask). If you're going to distill the ethanol anyway, there is a better route that does remove ALL the water (down to undetectable levels - sieves can't quite get there and a small amount of water will be released towards the end of the distillation if you end up distilling it dry). Put your azeotropic ethanol (or sieve-dried ethanol!) into a beaker, add a lump of sodium (sufficient to react with the water present), wait for it to dissolve, and then distill the resulting mixture. The sodium lump will immobilise the water into sodium hydroxide, allowing you to distill the solvent mixture to dryness (don't do this at a large scale, as dangerous contaminants may collect - but for lab scale there's no issue). Excess sodium will form sodium ethoxide, which is a water scavenger itself (it reacts with water to generate ethanol and sodium hydroxide). If you want to do this process at large scale (check local law!), you want the benzene pressure-swing process. It's not regeneratable but it will give you analytically pure ethanol. You can store it over some magnesium turnings, which can be used in the place of the sodium if you like - although this route needs a crystal of iodine to activate the magnesium [breaks through the oxide layer] before you start. So really it depends on how well-stocked your lab is!

Another of your experiments that I cant wait to try! Thanks for always providing great projects and fun things we can try at home with just a little bit of effort! My clear wood continues to impress people and I intend to try it again soon. Thanks again, NileRed!

I really love your experiments!! I just wanted to share some things I’ve learned about sieves. Molecular sieves will slowly pull air molecules into their pores as they sit. It is generally best to freshly bake the sieves before using them. This drives the gases out of the pores and allows the water molecules to be literally pulled directly into them. It’s essentially a vacuum that adds a lot of extra pull. You can demonstrate this by sealing freshly baked sieves in a plastic container, and as the air is absorbed, the plastic container will collapse. If you don’t use freshly regenerated sieves, you have to wait for the air molecules to get driven out (displaced), which adds a significant amount of time to the solvent drying process.

How nerds make moonshine...

I just woke up and I misread the title as "androgynous ethanol". It made me laugh a full 2 seconds.

i like how youtube recommended this since ethanol products are scarce in our market... or they are just listening to my home conversations

There is a hybrid distillation technique using glycerol. Pass the ethanol vapors through hot glycerol; the ethanol passes right on by, the water hangs out to party!! Glycerol is easily swapped out & dried.

Thank you for the video. Something I have had to explain myself and you did a good job. I worked at a chemical plant. We ran a reaction with 99.5% ethanol. We bought the ethanol in rail car quantities. Water would react in the place of ethanol as you mentioned. Other alcohols would also react in place of the ethanol so we could not use ethanol denatured with other alcohols. Our ethanol was denatured with toluene which was inert in our process and was stripped off later in the process. Just a note, a lot of ethanol is denatured by a mix of methanol and isopropyl alcohol about 0.5% each. A small fore cut on your distillation removes the methanol but, by distilling to dryness you left the isopropyl in the ethanol. You would probably need a good still with a reflux column to really get all the other alcohols out.

There is a third method as well, which is pressure swing distillation. After reaching 95%, take that mixture and do a high pressure (10 bar) distillation, and the ethanol will come off the top at nearly 100%.

Incredibly clear explanation of Azeotropic solutions, often taught awkwardly. Thank you.

Drinking this will send you to the shadow realm

An excellent video. More than 40 years ago I used to share a lab with someone who regularly had to produce 100% ethanol so that he could make a metallic compound that was very sensitive to water, also air. He used the magnesium method, and used to say that it was one of the more difficult experimental manipulations he had to do in obtaining his PhD. Grignard reagents are of course one of the standard ways of alkylating anything, particularly if you can't buy pure alkyl lithiums.

Ever clear is what I buy when I need to mix up some shellac for a non toxic wood finish. This is way over my head but it was fascinating to watch! Thanks!

Use cotton wool to filter stuff. Thats what we use for HPLC and LCMS at our company. Pretty much all colloidical residue remains at the filtering agent.

Legend says it still wasn’t strong enough for the Russians and the scots

best chemistry channel i've seen. Good work. You earned a Sub.

I love the idea of keeping a liquid dry

"store ethanol somewhere safe" -Me "GET IN MY BELLY!"

It's important to note that when you remove the H2O from the ethanol, in order to keep it at 100% ethanol, you should keep it in an inert atmosphere so the water vapor in the air won't diffuse into the ethanol.

Take a box of corn starch spread it on a cookie sheet. Place in a 250F oven for a couple of hours to dry it from 11% w/w moisture to 3-4% w/w moisture. Place it in a glass container with a silicone snap lid until ready to use. When ready, dump it into the 190 proof ethanol and stir for a few minutes. Filter the corn starch out on a coffee filter and your ethanol will be 199 proof. The corn starch can be recycled by letting the ethanol air evaporate and redrying the starch in the oven. Be very careful with the re-dried cornstarch as it's explosive is dispersed in air. Your 190 proof should be booze alcohol because the starch won't necessarily take out denaturants.

Excellent tutorial. You're a natural teacher. Keep going.

2020 Coronavirus: RU-vid recommendations:

Always diverse...always interesting! I wish you teach other yt'ers your methods of work, presentation and enough pertinent information as instructions and safety precautions to make each video unique and a pleasure to watch! Thank you for sharing, yet again!#!

By far one of the most useful of your video, since anhydrous ethanol is difficult to find and quite expensive!

I will probably never make anything, but i find it very intressting to just watch the process. Thanks for uploading.

Finally something to start the morning with.

You are an excellent chemist. Much respect to you from a junior chem student.

Molecular sieves (like zeolite) are also used in medical and industrial oxygen concentrators. Remember that atmospheric air has only 21% oxygen. Molecular sieves allow oxygen molecules to pass but leaves the other gases behind, so it makes 30% - 99% oxygen from room air.

I was freaked out when you put the foil over the vertical tube and y adapter. DON'T YOU NEED TO MEASURE THE BOILING POINT?? But then I realized there's not actually any water left to recondense in the collection flask. Nice procedure, Nile.

Molecular sieves are a comparatively recent development. Back when I was in school, we used calcium oxide (quicklime). CaO + H2O yields Ca(OH)2.

Finally. The perfect drink to have during the debate tonight.

You can use CaO to absorb the water and then careful distillation. Last year i closed the 95% ethanol in a nylon bag with CaCl2(dehydrator) and after some days the ethanol became 100%.

Here's a tip if you want your ethanol really extra sooper dry : dissolve a little bit of sodium in it prior to distillation. Of course, this only makes sense if you then handle it in a dry atmosphere (for instance, via a Schlenk line), or it will otherwise pump moisture back from the air. (but if you have a schlenk line, distillation becomes super easy : you don't even need a condenser! Two flasks, a T-shaped piece of glassware and some liquid nitrogen are enough!)

BTW - another use for 100% ethanol is for quick test of circuit boards for shorts. Can't have any water in it when pouring it on; or you are making a short. Since a short creates some heat, the alcohol will evaporate quickly and leave a dry spot - which is easily noticed. However, if the short is too hot it can be a catastrophe by making a fire. Best used for low amperage/voltage (less than 100mA) short detection using only a small amount of alcohol and checking only a different small area each time with good ventilation . . . Use utmost care - you are responsible!

In power electronics assembly with solder strips instead of paste we use a small of 100% ethanol between the chip and solder to hold everything together. In the soldering oven the ethanol evaporates away without effecting the soldering surfaces

1:32 and the 3rd and most important reason (pure substances are so satisfying)

100% ethanol is really important for certain molecular biology procedures like DNA extraction and purification. This is a good procedure to know, thank you.

Trying to make Mercury Fulminate by using Absolute Ethanol, this video helped a lot, thank you sir!

There is also the option of distilling under a vacuum. However, making ethanol that is about 100% is pointless as it is hygroscopic and will attract moisture from the ambient as soon as it is taken outside the vacuum conditions.

When storing the 100% ethanol in the bottle it occurred to me that you could put the seeds in a paper teapouch to keep the dust from getting into the ethanol.

Nile Red: I'll do this extra step and distill this to get rid of the sieve dust. Also Nile Red: Since we removed the sieve dust I'm going to pour it back into the ethanol.

By the way, it's a great solvent for making plant-based potions because it evaporates easily and is not poisonous in trace amounts. 100% is good if you're making oils for instance

you can mix it with Aluminium ethanolate. It will react with water to form Aluminium Hydroxide and ethanol

At the end when he said to store the ethanol somewhere safe, I really hoped he would also add 'do not drink' cautionary.

Best moonshine tutorial on youtube

You didn't put the ethanol back into the original container because it had some left over denaturing agents!

Hi, Pixel Schnitzel here. I came back here from the future to tell you that this is, by far, a better format than you'll be using in 2023/24. Please consider keeping it like this.

Me: Sees video title Also me: 'Cheers, I'll drink to that, bro.'

how your voice has changed....

Details @ 1:47, the audio says that "ethanol" is poured into the graduated cylinder whereas the closed caption states that it is "methanol". Furthermore the label on the bottle states that it contains 95% ethanol.

Fun fact: in Poland you don't have to go to pharmacy to can get 95% ethanol - you can buy it in most grocery stores. We use them to make a liquor called "nalewka" that's prepared by pouring it over some fruits or whatever (I like to dump some anise into the spirit) and leave it for a month or so. In case of the watery addon it usually makes the concentration go down to 40-60% which is perfectly drinkable.

6:51 yes, like a shot glass...

You're a life saver! Had some 3A sieve hanging around, glad I didn't toss it. Thanks :)

No one: Dad's during quarantine: *interesting*

Bro you have an amazing channel. Been watching tons of your vids. I’m feel like a chemist just watching you lol!

Back when Nilered spoke normally

I have been wondering if you could not get rid of the dust by washing them sieves beforehand, or do they constantly decompose?

I can tell who's a chemist in the comments and who's not based on the whether they mention getting drunk or not

We use molecular sieves in our Gas Chromatograph along with specific “columns” to separate the individual elements out of the compounds we are analyzing.

doesnt ethanol equalise at ~95% due to it absorbing moisture from the atmosphere, as in if you leave the 100% ethanol bottle open for some time it will equalise to ~95%?

Ayee back when you used to work from your parents garage!

I add dry magnesium sulfate to the 95% etOH then distill it from that. The MgSO4 helps it boil. Some molecular sieves are added to the receiver to grab what's left.

"my local pharmacy simply sells it" >me being kinda shocked that he can't just buy it at convinience store(in my country there is like 96% in almost any store and it's even drinkable

Do you have a video about Bio-diesel, a demonstration or description on how to process or a good reference? Your videos brought me memories of my Chem. Lab. days in college. Thank you.

I saw a doc. on Jonny Appleseed. He in fact planted apple trees to make applejack. In the winter people would put their applejack out side. The water part would freeze but not the alcohol part. Pick out the ice and have stronger liquor.

Interesting process; thank you for the information and tips. The pronunciation of "sieve" could do with some distillation.

In the first minute I had learnt more about this than a year of high school science.

The pure ethanol is used as biofuel addition to gasoline. It is relatively expensive to distill ethanol to 100% in industrial scale. All the biology laboratories basically uses 96% ethanol and mostly makes calculations as ethanol is 100% when making 70% etOH.

Take a shot, bruh. For science.

Yo, my dad used to do that but that was years back. Haven't seen him since.

95% alcohol What the Russians call "a girly drink"

5:46 AS FREEDOM BURNS!

I was in the petroleum service industry from 1998-2012. I remember years before then hearing about the difficulties of producing and storing what they called gasohol. Later, when my job was addressing issues caused by water contamination in 10% ethanol/ gasoline blends, there were many solutions, however, few of them were practical and none of them were long-term. Needless to say, it was a constant concern. There were so-called water filters that were made for alcohol-blended gasoline, If I'm not mistaken they used corn starch to absorb the water, and clogged quickly.

I love your glassware, Nile.

that there is no lid on top of it in the thumbnail triggered me sooo much 😂

1:05 is that a bowl piece IYKYK

Here's a tip if you want your ethanol really extra sooper dry : dissolve a little bit of sodium in it prior to distillation. Of course, this only makes sense if you then handle it in a dry atmosphere (for instance, via a Schlenk line), or it will otherwise pump moisture back from the air. (but if you have a schlenk line, distillation becomes super easy : you don't even need a condenser! Two flasks, a T-shaped piece of glassware and some liquid nitrogen are enough!)

Dry gelatin has been used as a drying agent to produce 100% Ethanol.

Well here I am 7 years later 🙃 in 2022 watching all you're videos

I've only ever heard it pronounced "civ", which seems to agree with Oxford Languages.

Nice video Nile. By the way, the word sieve rhymes with give. It’s the name we give to the kitchen implement I think you call a strainer. That bowl shaped wire mesh thing for removing lumps from sauces.

In Poland we call this a warm up drink

Slavs: H o h o, *yes*

6 yrs old now but I’ve been on a NileRed binge lately lol love the ethanol content since that’s what I run my car on well E85 which is really only around 70% Ethanol and 30% Gasoline in my area wish I had the means to make my own lol

You are lucky you can buy 95% Ethanol at the pharmacy? In Germany you can buy 96% Strohrum in the grocery store.

Sieve is pronounced siv, with a short i, as it is the noun form of the verb "to sift".

It took NileRed like 12 seconds at the start of the video to explain the simple concept that school FAILED to properly explain to me for like 12 years.... I really don't know what to say, it's so simple... mixture boils before any of the components can, so you can't boil out just one of them, it's that simple!! Why don't they explain things this way in school or college???