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Alcohol Drinks
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How do you calculate the alcohol percentage on a home made rum punch?
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.Do't take this a sgospel, as I've never done it. If you take a quantity of your punch and measure the volume, then heat it so the alcohol boils off (about 65-70C I think), maintaining at this temperature until liquid stops disappearing, then re-measure the volume. This will show what %age was ethanol. eg if you had 100ml at the start, and 70ml at the end you lost 30ml, so the brandy was 30% alcohol v/v. This would however require proper distillation equipment, and acurate measuring recepticles.
If you put in a whole 1 litre bottle of 40% abv rum (alcohol by vloume) and dilute it with three litres of juice / cola / lemonade etc, there will now be;
40/100 x 1000 ml of alcohol (ie 40% of 1 litre) = 400 ml in 4000ml of liquid (the total amount of liquid).
So the new abv would be 400 / 4000 x 100 = 10% abv
I am of the opinion that gas chromatography will give a more accurate measurement of % alcohol than fractional distillation, as trilobite says: it is an azeotrope. They agree with me http://www.ritchieproducts.co.uk/calculatingABV.htm