So I recently pulled a 750 ml bottle of a liquor out of the freezer which I know to be approximately 75-90% ethanol. The bottle contained about 750 ml liquor at room temp. Upon taking it out of the cold freezer however, the liquid inside had shrunk to a size of around 730 ml (an estimate).
This got the gears in my head turning. Since water and alcohol obviously have different expansion properties with cold/heat, could you use this to accurately determine alcohol content of just about anything? (Assuming the major substituents were just ethanol and water). This would simply include measuring the density of a liquid at room temperature, then measuring the density at near freezing. (Ice crystals are less dense than water and would skew calculations). The greater the density change, the greater the concentration of ethanol.
Obviously things would become kind of dicey with low alcohol substances (beer) because of the smaller amount of expansion would leave more room for error. Theoretically all you would need for this process is an accurate scale, an accurate way to measure volume, and a freezer.
This got the gears in my head turning. Since water and alcohol obviously have different expansion properties with cold/heat, could you use this to accurately determine alcohol content of just about anything? (Assuming the major substituents were just ethanol and water). This would simply include measuring the density of a liquid at room temperature, then measuring the density at near freezing. (Ice crystals are less dense than water and would skew calculations). The greater the density change, the greater the concentration of ethanol.
Obviously things would become kind of dicey with low alcohol substances (beer) because of the smaller amount of expansion would leave more room for error. Theoretically all you would need for this process is an accurate scale, an accurate way to measure volume, and a freezer.