Can you distil mouthwash?
bigclivedotcom 2:39
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Most mouthwash contains water, alcohol (hopefully mainly ethanol) and various cleansing, antibacterial and flavouring agents.
To prevent people from simply getting industrial sources of ethanol and distilling them into drinkable vodka-like solutions the governments usually specify that alcohols have to be denatured, either by mixing them with methanol to blind people or otherwise making them unpalatable or capable of causing ill-health to protect the financial revenues generated by alcohol tax.
So I spontaneously decided to use my water distiller to distil a bottle of Pearl Drops mouthwash to see what the resultant alcohol tasted like. The 400ml bottle yielded 100ml of 40% ABV (Alcohol By Volume) liquid that is close to the alcohol content of commercial vodka. But the liquid also contained other volatile elements that had stayed in suspension with the alcohol, mainly flavouring oils that had multiplied in concentration by 4 times accordingly. This rendered the liquid absolutely disgusting to taste.
The remaining 300ml of liquid was just basically water, sweeteners and cleansing agents.
So the answer? You can distil mouthwash, but the results are quite unpleasant and with the unknown variable of the exact types of alcohol and the additives used it is probably better just to buy nice clean fresh tasting vodka. (Cheap supermarket stuff, because ultimately it's just 40% ethanol and 60% water.)
To prevent people from simply getting industrial sources of ethanol and distilling them into drinkable vodka-like solutions the governments usually specify that alcohols have to be denatured, either by mixing them with methanol to blind people or otherwise making them unpalatable or capable of causing ill-health to protect the financial revenues generated by alcohol tax.
So I spontaneously decided to use my water distiller to distil a bottle of Pearl Drops mouthwash to see what the resultant alcohol tasted like. The 400ml bottle yielded 100ml of 40% ABV (Alcohol By Volume) liquid that is close to the alcohol content of commercial vodka. But the liquid also contained other volatile elements that had stayed in suspension with the alcohol, mainly flavouring oils that had multiplied in concentration by 4 times accordingly. This rendered the liquid absolutely disgusting to taste.
The remaining 300ml of liquid was just basically water, sweeteners and cleansing agents.
So the answer? You can distil mouthwash, but the results are quite unpleasant and with the unknown variable of the exact types of alcohol and the additives used it is probably better just to buy nice clean fresh tasting vodka. (Cheap supermarket stuff, because ultimately it's just 40% ethanol and 60% water.)
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