Household Tip That I Had Thought Everyone Knew,
Until I Realized That Only All Russians Knew It: Keep vodka in the freezer. That way you don't have to shake your vodka martinis with ice (especially if the mixer is already cold), or otherwise dilute good vodka with mere voda (water).
The same principle likely applies to other hard liquor which people like to drink or mix ice cold, though I can't speak about this with the same familiarity that I can about vodka.
Fastest way to freeze a brew.
Lol, and I thought I had learned all the tricks from fraternity life... Def. a good idea!
Of course, here in Minnesota all you have to do is leave the bottle sit out in the porch...
I wonder if anywhere on the internet there's a graph showing which liquors can be stored in the freezer based on their alcohol content.
2. Pace James Bond, Martinis (and other drinks that do not contain fruit juice, eggs, or dairy products) are stirred, not shaken.
3. The dilution that comes from stirring (or shaking) room-temperature spirits with very cold ice is crucial in the preparation of a properly balanced cocktail.
4. However, if Russian food is on the menu, then ice-cold vodka straight from the freezer is probably necessary.
I can attest through somber experience that it is definitely "best" when kept in the freezer. At least as far as I can remember.
Can we expect future Volokh housekeeping tips like:
"Keep ice in the freezer."
"Don't burn down your house."
"If you wash clothing it will become clean."
"Don't pee on the electric fence."
BTW, gin belongs next to vodka in the freezer. Seriously, the myths about freezing ruining the botanicals do not make any sense.
As far as I'm concerned, that's a distinction without a difference. Gin is merely vodka flavored with juniper berries or the like.
Seriously, like a Russian would have the patience or electricity necessary to chill a bottle of vodka in the freezer!
(I won't even get into what would happen to you if you tried to dilute vodka into a martini in the presence of a real-life Russian.)
On another question, for the Russians -- is the similarity of the word "vodka" to "voda" (water) purely coincidental? Or something more?
The BATF, incidentally, does not categorize gin as a vodka:
I've always kept my Aquavit in the freezer right next to the gin. I keep the vodka where it's most handy: in the basement next to the sink and the paint brushes.
Avi: gin is just vodka flavored with juniper? And wine is just diluted vodka with grape flavoring? You, sir, are a philistine!
As to how cold or how strong the vodka would have to be to avoid freezing, if I remember my chemistry correctly, 40% ethanol to 60% water freezes at negative 10F. Any typical hard liquor is going to be 40% (80 proof), and is unlikely to freeze unless you keep your freezer extraordinarily cold.
Pure ethanol (or grain alchol, 190 proof, 95%) freezes somewhere below the temperature of dry ice, (-77C, or about -150F). So as to the story of the killer vodka, it might be theoretically possible. I'm fairly sure (and correct me if I'm off) that it can reach -50F and colder in siberia. A very strong liquor wouldn't freeze at that temperature, and if you managed to ingest it, would cause massive tissue trauma to the throat, probably enough to close breathing passages.
"A vodka martini isn't."
As a "real life Russian," I can only tell you that you are deeply wrong. The only time we don't put our vodka in the freezer, is when we put in the snow on the window ledge. (This trick is easily repeated in Boston).
We do eat cucumber, but pickled, and usually not sliced. A better chaser is pickled herring, or if you are a man, a hard sniff of your own fist. And don't forget to exhale when you throw the shot at the back of your throat.
- Josh
Freezer is fine for Vodka, fine for grappa and fine for gin although I prefer it warmer, and great for European brandies like Eau-de-vie. mmm, rasperry eau-de-vie!
Any form of chilling is completely unacceptable for whiskys whiskies cognac and its derivatives (armagnac, etc).
If you don't really like scotch or if it's really hot, you can add an iceblock. But if you don't really like scotch, why are you buying 18 yos?
Stirring does not get the mix cold enough. A good Vodka martini is served (in a chilled glass) as cold as you can get it...which means shaking (there's no such thing as a good martini...it's got gin in it so you can stir that concoction to your heart's content).
Finally, Gin may not ACTUALLY be juniper flavored vodka, but you could get a pretty good approximation of the flavor of gin by soaking one of those pine tree automobile air fresheners in a glass of Vodka for an hour or so. Of course, why anyone would want to ruin a perfectly good glass of Vodka in such a way is a bit beyond me.
liquor is of course water + ethanol + impurities, so the freezing point will be somewhat lower than CRC numbers for H2O + ethanol.
Um, that's a distinction with a difference. If you asked for one of those flavored vodkas, and the bartender gave you straight vodka, would that also be a distinction without a difference?
Or what if you asked for a rum and coke, and got a glass of rum -- is that also a distinction without a difference?
As someone my brother works with said, "vodka is like coffee -- it's great, but it doesn't belong in a martini." But as long as it's referred to as a "vodka martini", though, and understood to be a completely different drink, each one to his taste.
Actually, the faster way (according to Mythbusters, anyway) is to put what you want to chill in a bath of ice, cold water, and salt. The salt lowers the freezing point of the ice so that your mixture is below 32 deg. F. I've done a few bottles of champagne, white wine, six packs, and even a growler of beer this way.
Brita/PUR filters are a poor way to do it. Instead, try something designed for liquor, like the Grey Kangaroo
People call anything in a martini glass a martini these days. Hows about an olive oil and Tang martini?
triticale: Wine will freeze solid in the freezer, although it'll take ten hours or so. I've put bottles of wine in the freezer to cool and forgotten about them more times than I care to remember. Usually it just pops the cork rather than breaking the botttle, so once thawed it is drinkable - just don't wait too long.
tmittz: Pure grain alcohol will not cause "massive tissue trauma to the throat", at least in small quantities (i.e. half an ounce). It's darned unpleasant but not immediately traumatic. Yes, I've tried it, no I don't want to repeat it and would strongly dissuade anyone else from doing it.
Take that ABV number and divide it by 100 minus ABV. You should then have a number between 0 and 1. Divide -10.44 by that ratio, and that'll be your freezing point, in degrees Celsius.
I rather like sipping Grey Goose warm, oddly. For cocktails I have no favorite vodka but highly recommend Hendrick's in a martini (but not a gin and tonic).
What Patrick said. What the hell are you doing putting 18YO single-malt in the freezer, or putting ice in it?
PLEASE tell me you did not do this with the Macallan 18.
Please send me any bottles you are even thinking of doing this with, &I will send you nice bottles of Dewars or Johnnie Red (Churchill's fav) in exchange.
(Btw, picked up the Glenfiddich 18 this weekend which I hadn't had before. Very nice for a sherry-casked Scotch.)
1: Not only may bottles of high-proof liquors not freeze if placed in a freezer at ordinary temperatures, but if they do freeze they might well not break their bottles. Pure water would freeze from the outside in and the inner core breaks the little bottle-shaped ice container, but strong solutions freeze with a porous crystal structure and also the water freezes first so sooner or later you get a core of pure alcohol [which may even freeze if the freezer is cold enough, but ethanol doesn't share water's quirk of expanding as it freezes, if I remember correctly].
2: I keep five plastic 1-gallon jugs of strong brine in my deep freezer, which I normally keep at -5 degF [-20 degC?] . Some of the water freezes, but not all of it [I think]. The purpose of this exercise is to save my food from a 1-2 day power failure. If you do the math it takes the freezer a full day to freeze the water [it runs flat out for about a day, then about 30-40% depending on the season] which you get back if the power goes out.
3: It's normally true that for two substances that are miscable in all proportions in the liquid phase there is a ratio where the melting/freezing point is lower than the lower of the melting/freezing points of the two substances. Electronics solder is an alloy of lead and tin and has a substantially lower melting point than the melting point of either. I would expect this to follow for water and ethanol as well.
-dk
And I'm not from Russia
In other words, this particular brand of "vodka" was nothing more than water mixed with alcohol and the alcohol separated out once the water froze.
...
What do you imagine other Vodkas to be, at the chemical level, pray tell?
(Even if you meant pure alcohol with water mixed in, I assure you that there's no magic to vodka (or for that matter whiskey) which naturally produces them at exactly 80 proof; they are almost always (99%+) sold diluted down to their target proof by the addition of water.
The exception being cask-strength whiskeys, bottled undiluted somewhere in the 130-140 proof range; though I've never heard of that being done with vodka, it's certainly possible.)
They're all going to be ethanol and water, except for very small amounts of impurities ("flavor", we call it), unless it's Very Bad Vodka Indeed, to have significant amounts of anything else.
That works. It works better if you add finely chipped dry ice to the salty water (ahh, science...)
It ALSO works better--much--if you spin the bottle occasionally, to get rid of the water layers which impede the heat transfer. That's the principle behind the 'instant chillers' you may have seen sold for a single can.
Ok. Booze dont freeze. Why I know this I am not so proud of. Just somwhere I possesed some as a lad and, at -35 F it was just fine. yes, I'm working on my problem.
Vodka v Gin. Its like the difference between the Packers and the Bears. Its what you like.
Anyone that would put an 18 yearld scotch in a freezer, should be hung by the neck until dead. And, not tommorrow morning, RIGHT NOW!
A Very good single malt is servered a temp no lower than 55 F. My brother was at a persons home for a drink one nite, and the host offered a him a 12 year old single malt, my brother accepted and said that a scotch on the rocks sounded very good. The host brought him A Canadian whisky on the rocks and said if he would add ice to a 12 yr old single malt he would never now the difference.
To add to the household hits gambit. At a friends the husband errupted when he found his wife failed to chill the white wine. My wife rushed into save his wife. My wife poured the wine into a zip lock baggie and floated it in a sink filled with ice cubes and just a bit of water, and a quarter box of salt. 5 minutes, cold wine.
Thanks for all the laughs. drinkers are the funniest people
I got a bottle of gin as a present once, tasted it, and put it in the freezer. I don't drink much, so it was probably about a month and a half until I thought of taking it out again. I assume that it was the frost-free mechanism that had sucked out about a cup of liquid.
I assume it was the roommate mechanism, or the visiting teenager mechanism, or some similar. I've left many bottles of gin in frost-free freezers for much longer than this with no loss...
I don't know how reliable this is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_vitae
They are related. As someone mentioned in passing above, "vodka" is the diminutive/familiar/affectionate form of "voda." The best translation that I have ever heard is "A wee drop." It's not exact, of course, but it seems to catch the connotation.
Although I am biologically incapable of typing a smiley face, I'm smiling right now.
I don't think that's it, though; my fiancee's the only other person in the house, and she doesn't drink at all. (She actually alerted me to the decline in volume by insinuating that I was nipping drinks on the sly.) The bottle has a plastic cork top, so I'm going to blame that. Or, maybe I don't know her as well as I think I do...
More viscous out of the freezer. Crack some black pepper on the top.
There is a problem with this analysis. The CRC tables refer to MASS PERCENT of ethanol solutions at 20 deg C while US measures of ethanol content are PERCENT VOLUME at 60 deg C. The numbers are different due to the large difference in density between ethanol and water.
Put this way: if you mix 40 g of pure ethanol with 60 g of pure water you will have 40% by mass ethanol with a density of 0.9352 g/mL and a volume of 106.9 mL. However, the volumes you mixed were 50.68 mL of ethanol and 60.11. By the American definition then, the % ABV is 45.74 %, or 91 proof. Hence, if you double the volume of the drink by adding only water, the % ABV is cut in half to 22.87 %.
An 80 proof bottle of vodka, which is about 34.5% ethanol by mass, freezes around -24.7 deg C, or -12.5 deg F.
Note this ignores the small effect of doing the measurement at 60 deg F (15.6 deg C) instead of 20 deg C.
I'm not sure if ap guessed the (approximately) right % by mass for an 80 proof bottle, just knew it, or that was the only data he/she had. The 83rd ed. CRC has extensive aqueous ethanol solution tables (page 8-62).
ALL vodka is pretty much ethanol and water.
As far as potency, I did once get plowed on Mai-Tais made from Bacardi 151. I survived but only barely. Clue: if, when projectile vomiting, you feel ten hard objects at the back of your mouth, stop at once. Those are your toenails, and you are about to flip inside out.
Boring. Go get yourself a bottle of Ardbeg - even the 10 year old. Fantastic stuff.
Take it to the next level. Grab an old cardboard milk or juice carton of the half gallon variety. Fill it with a couple of inches of water and put it in the freezer. When the water freezes, place a bottle of vodka inside the container and fill with more water. Put that in the freezer. When solid, remove the cardboard carton (run it under hot water for a few seconds).
Your vodka bottle is now encased in a block of ice, ready to spend the entire evening on the table while remaining cold as you and your friends get blitzed on its icy goodness. Looks cool too.
Cheers.
I keep five plastic 1-gallon jugs of strong brine in my deep freezer, which I normally keep at -5 degF [-20 degC?] . Some of the water freezes, but not all of it [I think].
Given the massive difference in the heat of fusion versus the specific heat, wouldn't you be able to store more cold in the bottles if they did all freeze?
I guess by using brine instead of water you get the advantage that the whole system maintains a lot of cold and uses a lot of heat getting past the melting point of the brine. If you used water the system wouldn't have much stored cold keeping itself below 0C, and while that's a good temperature for a refrigerator or a cooler, it's not enough for a deep freezer.
IIUC using salt plus ice (to chill booze, or to make ice cream) won't actually cool the stuff to below the temperature that the ice was at, but because it induces melting it causes the ice to suck the heat out of the stuff (to satisfy its heat of fusion) much faster.
I keep gin in my freezer. Which is strange, because I drink Manhattans.
These are called eutectic mixtures and they are common, but not the norm. Ethanol/water is not a eutectic mixture, although it is azeotropic (boiling point is maximized at 95% ethanol). On the otehr hand, salt and water is eutectic with a minimun freezing pt of -21 C at 23 wt% salt.