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Question: I have a very broad question: what is alcohol, and why does it work like it does? To be clear, I know that alcohol is in drinks and gets us drunk. But I don’t understand how it works, really, or why you can light alcohol on fire in the movies, yet we put it in our car engines safely (because antifreeze is alcohol, right?–but if that’s true, then why can’t you drink it?). I know this is a big question, but I’m looking for a general sort of answer, and I’m kind of too embarrassed to ask my friends (and please don’t tell me to just Google it–everything I find is full of words I don’t understand).

Answer:  You are absolutely right to note that alcohol is everywhere in our culture and in our world. It is a big part of our social culture and also plays roles in everything from cleaning products to green fuels. As we’ll see, part of the reason for alcohol’s flexibility is the fact that it’s not just one compound, but a whole group of them.

As a college student, you probably know alcohol best as a part of alcoholic beverages. Alcohol plays a major role in our culture and is a big business, say the retailers at beverage distributorship Columbia Distributing. Bars and nightclubs pull in $24 billion in revenues each year. Drinking alcohol also plays a big role in college life, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. More than a third (37.9%) of college students report binge drinking within the past month. That’s very dangerous, as alcohol poisoning can be deadly.

Beer and liquor are dangerous in high doses. But, as you point out, there are more dangerous types of alcohol out there–like the type in antifreeze, which can kill in doses that are only a fraction of the size of a serving of beer or wine. Why is this?

It’s because there’s actually more than one type of alcohol. An alcohol is an organic compound that has a certain structural feature in its molecules: to be exact, it needs a hydroxyl functional group attached to a saturated carbon atom. That’s technical stuff, but the bottom line is that there are different molecules that fit this description, and while they all have something in common (and are all considered alcohol), they are all different. We drink ethanol, but there is also methanol (the antifreeze one), isopropyl alcohol, and cyclohexanol, to name just a few.

As you might expect, these different types of alcohol can be used for all sorts of different things. Alcohol is used in the production of biodiesel, say developers at SeQuential. Alcohol can be used as a disinfectant, burned as a simple fuel, and, of course, enjoyed in a beverage. Just remember: it’s not always the same type of alcohol that plays all of these roles!

“There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled.” — Ovid

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