Ever found yourself staring down a punch bowl at a frat party and wondering just how spiked it might be?
What you needed was the AlcoQuick 4000, a briefcase-sized infrared spectrometer that can accurately determine the alcohol content of a wide variety of beverages in just 60 seconds, according to a new study in the open source journal Chemistry Central.
For every day use, you can use an alcoholmeter, first developed by Gay-Lussac in the 1820s. It's essentially a tube that you can insert into a liquid-containing beaker that uses the difference in density between water and alcohol to determine how much alcohol is in the beverage.
But some people, notably scientists and tax collectors, need more precise readings of alcohol content. They use complex techniques that require the liquid in question to be distilled. That limits the diffusion of the techniques and can prove downright impractical in some settings.
The German researchers who conducted the study say that the AlcoQuick could be especially useful in analyzing "unrecorded alcohol," which you might know as "moonshine." They estimate that one-quarter of the world's alcohol consumption comes in this form, largely in developing countries without strong regulatory regimes.
"In this context, expensive laboratory measurements such as distillation and pycnometry are not practical, but portable, battery-powered infrared sensors offer a feasible alternative in areas of lower socioeconomic status," they conclude.
So, watch out Bangladesh, your days of moonshining could be coming to a technology-induced end soon.
**Citation: "Rapid and mobile determination of alcoholic strength in wine, beer and spirits using a flow-through infrared sensor" by Dirk W Lachenmeier, Rolf Godelmann, Markus Steiner, Bob Ansay, Jurgen Weigel, and Gunther Krieg. doi:10.1186/1752-153X-4-5
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