OneEyedPyro
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Cinnamaldehyde azeotrope with ethanol?
An uncle of mine recently passed away and left behind a bunch stuff and I've been tasked with removing whatever property that his kids didn't already
take, I found a couple cases of fireball whiskey that apparently nobody wanted.
I'm not a big fan of fireball but I figured I could extract the ethanol and use it for recrystallizations or something, unfortunately the cinnamon
flavoring is coming over with the ethanol during distillation.
Any ideas on how I could overcome this without going to too much trouble?
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clearly_not_atara
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It simply happens that the human nose is extremely sensitive to cinnamaldehyde. Some contaminants are always carried over in distillation because all
compounds have a positive vapor pressure. I suppose you could remove it as the bisulfite adduct, but for all practical purposes, redistilling should
be enough.
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fusso
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Oxidize aldehyde with Benedict/Fehling solution and remove cinammate salt? Not sure if this work on conjugated aldehydes.
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OneEyedPyro
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It definitely wasn't a small amount coming over. The distillate had a yellow tinge and an extremely strong smell/taste of cinnamon, seemingly even
more so than the whiskey itself but that might just be due to the alcohol concentration being much higher.
I already have several gallons of methanol which works as well or better than ethanol for anything I might need an alcohol solvent for, it wouldn't
make sense to go to any more trouble to purify it.
I think I'll just hang on to it until I find somebody who likes Fireball.
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UC235
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Volatile compounds co-distill even if they don't azeotrope. It's why steam distillation works on all sorts of compounds. If they're even kinda
volatile, they have a partial pressure at the boiling point of the carrier solvent and will get carried over. Your options are basically to
fractionally distill the stuff with a good column or try to chemically destroy it. I wouldn't suggest NaOH though, since that is shown elsewhere on
this forum to produce acetaldehyde and benzaldehyde through a retro-aldol.
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