Counterfeit brandy

Szalony kucharz via Wikipedia Commons

In the 15th and 16th centuries, working out the alcohol percentage of wine was no easy feat. For ease, the authorities taxed alcohol according to volume rather than percentage, making importing gin a better deal than wine or beer. And so, naturally, the merchants looked for a loophole, and they found one – or so they thought: distil down the wines, and add the water back in after passing customs. It seemed foolproof. But they had not accounted for one thing: warming wine changes its chemistry. Volatile chemicals are lost, other chemicals – esters, acids, aldehydes – decompose, or undergo reactions. When the merchants rediluted their wine, it tasted different. Wrong. “brandewijn”, or “burnt wine”, they called it, and nowadays, we call it brandy.

Cop That!

Copper. Slang for a police officer. A coin. That metal pans and wires are made of.

What’s so mysterious? A lot.

Copper is a catalyst. It’s variable oxidation states and low coordination numbers allow it to do funky things, bonding and unbonding with whatever floats its way.

 

Copper coins via Pikrepo.

 

Whisky still IProspectIE via wikimedia commons.

Copper is used in whisky stills, partly because it’s malleable and conducts the heat through the whisky really well, and partly because it seems to affect the flavour. One story, related to me by Ben from The Whisky Shop, was the story of Old Pulteney whisky, back in the days when the distillery was first setting up, the days when they decided to make the most important feature of the distillery – the still. It was made offsite and transported carefully to the distillery in the Highlands of Scotland, where they tried to take it into the building – but couldn’t. The manufacturers, so the story tells, had made a mistake and ordered a still too tall for the distillery. Still, never mind, they said, and they lopped off the top, making a low, squat-looking still pot that led to shorter refluxes, forever after blamed for the “dirty” flavour of the Old Pulteney spirit.

Alcohol and Caffeine (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #9)

It’s the Christmas season and, for many people, time to get merry. But pregnant women can’t drink – alcohol or caffeine – or can they?

All things, wrote Paracelsus, are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.

And dose, apparently, works both ways. You may be able to have too much of a good thing, but you may also be able to have too little of a bad thing.

We often think that a drug does nothing to us until the point where it has an effect – the threshold dose. However, this describes a linear dose-response relationship… which doesn’t fit every drug. Researchers think that some substances follow a biphasic dose response: at some point they switch over from stimulating to inhibiting or from inhibiting to stimulating. Alcohol is one such drug.

This dose response phenomenon is known as hormesis, and is explained in more detail in this article.

The hormetic effect. © TWDK.

What causes hangovers?

What causes the dreaded hangover? The answer is simple, right? It’s alcohol. But how does alcohol cause hangovers? The answer is less straightforward.

Evidence of alcohol dates as far back as 10,000BC. We suspect hangovers do, too.
Image credit: Annie Mole, via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Some will say it’s dehydration, others will blame your electrolyte balance, or blood sugar levels, whilst insisting you ingest copious volumes of orange juice. But whilst orange juice might ease hangover symptoms, it doesn’t cure it. In fact, we don’t know of any reliable hangover cure at all - probably because even though the hangover predates the Egyptian pyramids^[1], how it comes about remains a mystery.

A major reason for this massive void in our understanding is the fact that almost nobody seems to be researching it. It’s like we don’t care. Whilst the glut of folk remedies tells a different tale (we do care - we don’t want hangovers), some argue that hangovers are better left not understood so that we can’t cure them. Hangovers are an incentive to drink less, a natural mechanism that, if removed, could lead to widespread drunken barbarity with no comeuppance for the perpetrators. On the other hand, it’s important to point out that not all hangovers are equal. Some people don’t even get hangovers (23% - either because they never drink to excess or they’re just very lucky). We don’t know why this is either, but it does challenge the idea that removing hangovers would lead to epidemic alcoholism, or that experiencing a hangover is somehow “fair”.

And this isn’t all we don’t know about alcohol. We don’t know how alcohol causes mood swings, lowers inhibitions and reaction times, or makes us clumsy and bad at driving. We don’t know whether curing a hangover could lessen the damage caused by alcohol - combining making it easier to drink with making it safer - it’s certainly possible, but we can’t know until we know more about hangovers.