Would this childhood locked-room mystery actually work? Frozen alcohol

November 4, 2023 5:50 PM

Please tell me if I could kill a man with frozen vodka. And for bonus points, find a childhood lost book of locked-room mysteries!

One of my 'white-whales' from my childhood is a book of "Locked-Room Mysteries". I don't think it's Encyclopedia Brown, but I remember reading that series at about the same time as this lost book. I grew up in Canada in the 1980s, so I probably read this book between 1986-1992.

A detective is called to a crime scene. It may have been a 'Trapper's Cabin', definitely the crime scene having been freezing in the past, but warmer since, was important. A man is dead, behind a locked door, with only a nearly-full opened bottle of vodka and a pencil by his side.

The solution is that he took the bottle of vodka from some sort of freezer, and saw that it had nearly frozen solid, with just a bit of liquid right at the center of the bottle. Desperate for a drink, he uses the pencil to drill down to the liquid center, and is fatally poisoned by the pure alcohol at the center. The pure alcohol is supposed to have "frozen last", having -what? titrated? out of the solution?


Clearly I didn't pay attention in chemistry, because I have no idea if this would have ever worked. My pre-teen brain took it at face value, but if this were how it works surely people would have died from drinking frozen bottles of vodka before now, right? Some dumb teen would have tried distilling their own ethanol in the freezer?

Hope me askmetafilter, I need to settle my brain for the night and this one won't let me rest. And extra bonus points if you remember what this book was!

posted by deadtrouble to Media & Arts (23 answers total)

This reminds me of Five-Minute Mysteries (a series) but I have no other info.
posted by Comet Bug at 6:03 PM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I recall a different version. In my vague recollection the vodka was liquid, but because alcohol freezes at a much, much lower temperature than water, the massive swig he took proved fatal because it froze his insides.

I suspect that the pure ethanol would freeze last, but drinking pure ethanol isn't automatically fatal. 151 Rum is 75% alcohol and people drink that. Drinking it in cold weather could be bad for other reasons, but those reasons would apply to unfrozen vodka, too.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 6:12 PM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Doesn't vodka not freeze? My dad always keeps a bottle in his freezer and it's liquid all the time.
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:18 PM on November 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

Here is a bit about fractional freezing of alcoholic beverages - a simple method used historically to increase alcohol content. The basic idea is that you get the solution below the freezing point of water, which turns the water - but not the alcohol (and some other constituents) - into ice. You just grab the water ice and remove it. What is left has a higher alcohol concentration than before.

Wikipedia gives some more details, and also a possible method by which impurities could also be left behind, causing some problems (though not necessarily death):

Ethanol and liquid water are completely miscible, but ethanol is practically insoluble in water ice. That means almost pure water ice can be precipitated from a lean ethanol-water mixture by cooling it sufficiently. The precipitation of water ice from the mixture enriches ethanol in the remaining liquid phase. The two phases can then be separated by filtration or decanting. The temperature at which water ice starts to precipitate depends on the ethanol concentration. Consequently, at a given temperature and ethanol concentration, the freezing process will reach an equilibrium at a specific ratio of water ice and enriched ethanol solution with a specific ethanol concentration. . . .

Fractional freezing can be used as a simple method to increase the alcohol concentration in fermented alcoholic beverages, a process sometimes called freeze distillation. Examples are applejack, made from hard cider, and ice beer. In practice, while not able to produce an alcohol concentration comparable to distillation, this technique can achieve some concentration with far less effort than any practical distillation apparatus would require. The danger of fractional freezing of alcoholic beverages is that it does not remove impurities, unlike (heat) distillation. Thus, fractional freezing may increase the ratio of impurities to the total volume of the beverage (though not necessarily the ratio of impurities to the amount of ethanol). This concentration may cause side effects to the drinker, leading to intense hangovers and a condition known as "apple palsy"

posted by flug at 6:19 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

An interesting and widespread historical example of freezing distillation in the US is applejack, also ice beers.

I don't think even think 94% ethanol everclear is deadly to adult humans in the doses you could get with a few sips or shots, much more likely to harm your esophagus and cause damage via vomit/hangover.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:39 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: If you were already on a Donald J. Sobol kick, the book may have been one of his "Two-Minute Mysteries" (1964, 1971, 1975; 1986 reprint; as one volume; at Amazon, too: Two-Minute Mysteries, More Two-Minute Mysteries, and Still More Two-Minute Mysteries..

Edited to add: a 1986 cover, a 1991 cover.
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:43 PM on November 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Fractional freeing enrichment of alcohol is a thing, sure. You don't get pure alcohol out though (see the note in the wiki link above.)

But vodka doesn't freeze at normal household freezer temperatures is IMO the bigger problem. I have a bottle in my freezer, it stays liquid. (A mixture always has a lower a freezing temperature than a pure substance.)

Finally, vodka is 40-50% alcohol. You can certainly kill yourself with alcohol poisoning with it, but a sip of supposedly pure stuff is just two sips of the normal stuff.
posted by mark k at 6:43 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: OK, here is what looks to be a somewhat reliable/reasonable resource that lays out potentially fatal doses of alcohol. Making some calculations based on the info that doctor lays out, it takes somewhere between roughly 12 and 20 units of alcohol (one unit being the usual amount in roughly one "drink" - ie, a glass of beer, a glass of wine, a shot of liquor) to get into the region where the alcohol could cause death - a blood alcohol content of around 3.50‰ (per mille).

And consuming 18-25 units of alcohol gets a person to 5.00‰ (per mille), which is the point of 50% mortality rate.

The reason for the variance is because men/women, smaller/larger people, and other factors create a different amount of alcohol needed to reach the given blood alcohol concentration.

Also, drinking the entire amount of alcohol quickly - or, at the most extreme, all at once - will very likely cause a higher blood alcohol concentration than spreading it over a period of time.

So, for example, consuming even 12-15 units of alcohol all at once - as pure or nearly pure alcohol, or instance - could put a person in some danger of death due to alcohol poisoning.

Finally, a bottle of 80 proof liquor (ie, vodka) has 40% alcohol content, and thus a typical bottle has 24 units of alcohol, per the chart in the linked article.

Thus, if one person managed to drink all of that 24 units alcohol at once, or even most of it within a short period of time, it would definitely put them into the region where death by alcohol poisoning is very much possible.

So I don't know if the fractional freezing process I linked above would actually result in basically the entire alcohol content of a bottle of vodka left as the "liquid center" while the 60% water content was frozen completely solid.

(In fact I rather doubt that would happen - even if you posit some extremely cold scientific research freezer or something, it still wouldn't be quite THAT precise in separating the alcohol and water. And, as mentioned in the links above, the fractional freezing process is most productively applied to a "lean" mixture of alcohol and water - which I take to mean something more akin to beer or wine or fermented apple juice, not hard liquor like vodka at 35-40% alcohol content. Also the temperature where the water starts to crystalize out varies by the proportion of water and alcohol - and becomes lower the higher the proportion of alcohol. This is the principle behind some anti-freeze formulas. Such formulas freeze at a lower temperature than plain water but every one of them will start to freeze at some temperature. I'm not really familiar with the practicalities of the process and but it is very possible or even likely that that there are some very, very cold conditions that would lead to a higher-than-expected concentration of vodka due to fractional freezing. Even if not 100% pure alcohol remaining you could probably posit that it would have a vastly higher alcohol content than would be expected from ordinary vodka. So you could posit this could lead a person to consume what they thought was a high but safe amount of vodka, while in reality they had consumed a possibly lethal dose due to it being more concentrated than they expected.)

Anyway, fractional freezing issues aside, it definitely is true that consuming the entire alcohol content of a bottle of vodka - particularly doing so all at once - does definitely put a person into the zone where death by alcohol poisoning is a distinct possibility. Perhaps not an absolute inevitability, but certainly a possible or even somewhat probable outcome.

I don't know if this is realistic enough that it would happen in real life, but there is certainly enough there that some author could have latched onto it as the gimmick of a mystery story.
posted by flug at 6:59 PM on November 4, 2023

As someone from a state where Everclear was readily accessible to young adults I think I can definitively say that no, this is not a realistic mystery scenario. I mean, sure, you could drink yourself to death on it, but it's not considerably different than drinking yourself to death with any other distilled alcohol. As noted above, it would be about twice as strong as normal vodka and fairly unpleasant to drink.
posted by pullayup at 8:07 PM on November 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

If the bottle of vodka is nearly full, let's say that generously he has consumed 20% of the total volume. Even if he'd somehow managed to get to an azeotropic mixture of ethanol and water (about 96%), he'd still only have consumed about 750ml * 0.2 * 0.96 = 144ml or 114g of ethanol, which is eight standard drinks. Enough to make a person pretty drunk if consumed rapidly, but not enough to kill you.

But vodka does not freeze at all at normal household freezer temperatures. You need -37C to freeze enough water to get to 60% alcohol and -59C to get to 80%. Maybe in a trapper's cabin in the far north with very cold outdoor conditions, you might be able to get to 80%, which would be less than seven standard drinks.

Finally, the unfrozen alcohol wouldn't be in the centre of the bottle, it should be on the top as it is less dense than ice (50/50 ethanol/water has about the same density as ice, so you'd expect once a little bit of water had started to freeze, the remaining liquid would soon be less dense then the ice). So the drilling down with a pencil thing doesn't make sense either, unless he was somehow spinning the bottle constantly like a centrifuge while freezing it.
posted by ssg at 8:07 PM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Just want to say, I am pretty sure I read this too
posted by potrzebie at 9:09 PM on November 4, 2023

I read a lot of Two-Minute Mysteries as a kid, and this does sound like it could have been one of them.

There's another book of similar, maybe longer mysteries by a German author that I found in a local library in Florida around 1987-1988. I unfortunately don't recall the name of the book or the author, but it was something like Mystery of the Red Room. It would have been something translated into English for kids in the 1980s, and I think there was more than one book. If your culprit isn't a Two-Minute Mystery, it might be from that series.
posted by verbminx at 10:31 PM on November 4, 2023

Searching on the keywords "fractional freezing" and "vodka" some more details emerge. Most have been covered by other commenters above but FWIW:

• Between 0 and minus 120 C the ethanol in the liquid fraction increases with lowering of temperature until you get to the azeotrope of ethanol-water which is the lowest freezing temperature at close to -120 C. *At that temperature the solid contains ca 93% w/w of ethanol and has a lower freezing point than pure alcohol. . . . It has been claimed that the ethanol concentration may be increased by 56.5% when the stirring rate Is 500 rpm and the cooling temperature is -14 C (link).
• At what temperature does vodka freeze?
• Why Vodka Doesn't Freeze in Most Home Freezers

posted by flug at 10:42 PM on November 4, 2023

I have done 3 shots of Ever clear in a 20 minute time period. As far as I can tell, I am still here, alive, with no permanent damage. I did have a monster headache in the morning that a Coke and a bacon, egg and cheese sammie on a roll seemed to cure.

And, as mentioned above, it did burn my throat going down. I really struggled with and hesitated on the 3rd one
posted by JohnnyGunn at 11:17 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had assumed your vodka (and for these purposes the weaker the better) was going to be dripped in freezer to form an icicle which would then be used as a dagger, no?
posted by rongorongo at 12:14 AM on November 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I would have assumed he just froze to death if the temperature was cold enough to freeze most of the bottle of vodka...

But let's say he drank the equivalent of 8 servings of alcohol (as calculated above). While alcohol makes you feel warmer, it actually makes your body less able to handle cold weather - it messes with your temperature regulation. So maybe the extreme cold combined with chugging mostly pure ethanol caused him to die?
posted by litera scripta manet at 4:26 AM on November 5, 2023

Just adding to rongorongo's idea, ice bullets are also a thing. Obvs the dead person has been punctured, but by what kind of weapon? This doesn't answer your question about the mystery of the frigid cabin, but might help in other searching.
posted by JimN2TAW at 7:47 AM on November 5, 2023

I believe pure alcohol isn’t directly poisonous, but it can turn off your gag reflex and make you choke on your own vomit while you’re passed out. I think if you died that way the cause of death would be pretty apparent.
posted by Phanx at 8:43 AM on November 5, 2023

This isn't what you're looking for, but here's an excerpt from Polar Star, by Martin Cruz Smith, that involves someone dropping dead from drinking from a bottle of frozen vodka.

"Arkady sat at the edge of the flames, arms out to cup the heat. He remembered a picnic he'd once had in Siberia of frozen fish whittled into shavings, frozen reindeer sliced into strips, frozen berries formed into patties and Siberian vodka that had to be constantly turned, first this side and then that, towards the fire. The year before, an Intourist guide had taken a group of Americans into the taiga and laid out an even more splendid lunch but had forgotten to turn the bottle. After many toasts with warm tea to international friendship, mutual respect and closer understanding, the guide poured glasses of nearly frozen, almost congealed vodka and showed his guests how to drink it in one go. "Like this," he said. He tipped the glass, drank it and fell over dead. What the guide had forgotten was that Siberian vodka was nearly two hundred proof, almost pure alcohol, and would still flow at a temperature that would freeze the gullet and stop the heart like a sword. Just the shock was enough to kill him. It was sad, of course, but it was also hilarious. Imagine the poor Americans sitting around their campfire, looking at their Russian guide and asking, "This is a Siberian picnic?""
posted by merriment at 9:45 AM on November 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

In my hazy 1980s "icicle" weapons short-mystery memories, it's as naturally-occurring icicles (from roof eaves) and stalactites. In 1925's "The Tea Leaf"

a murder in a Turkish bath is carried out via thermos-preserved icicle.

Blocks of ice were for standing upon, or being crushed beneath.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:58 PM on November 5, 2023

According to at least one source, the freezing point of a 40% ethanol solution (such as a standard bottle of vodka) is -23º C. Household freezers don't go that low. So let's say he's in an uninsulated cabin during the winter, and it's -22° C so the bottle of vodka is still liquid but below the freezing temperature of water. I haven't consumed anything that cold, but I've consumed a bottled Martini straight from the freezer (at about -16º C, and yes I have experimented with this, hence the link), and the first couple sips kind of hurt if you drink too fast. It almost feels like it burns your tongue. It might be bad to chug vodka that's that cold, but I'm not sure how bad.

At the extreme, there's medical literature about what happens if you drink a cocktail containing liquid nitrogen (in that case a stomach rupture). I don't think the theoretical bottle of vodka would be cold enough to cause instantaneous tissue damage the way liquid nitrogen did, but OTOH frostbite can happen at temperatures as warm as -0.55º C (according to some Googling) so I guess it's possible. Maybe he damaged his esophagus and then either asphyxiated or died of blood loss.
posted by fedward at 2:09 PM on November 5, 2023

Response by poster: Holy cow, Metafilter comes through again! It was definitely Two-Minute Mysteries, as soon as I saw that 1986 cover I recognized it!

So many of these answers are great, but Flug really brought the research! Thanks!
posted by deadtrouble at 6:43 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

In the TC Boyle novel Drop City, a newcomer character dies in Alaska in the winter from drinking supercooled alcohol. If I recall correctly, he keeps a flask in an outside coat pocket, and he's been out on a snowmobile or something like that, so the outside temperature (and thus, the alcohol in the flask) is probably 40 below. He takes a massive swig and it kills him almost instantly by freezing his throat, and when an experienced native finds him later, he refers to it as a "rookie mistake", like this isn't the first time this has happened. I'm not sure this is actually possible, but it's definitely a trope that's out there. I bet it could be a factor if you were already hypothermic, at the very least.
However there's a huge difference between 40 below and the cold of your average commercial freezer, which definitely would not kill you. I mean, people swallow bits of ice all the time.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 7:25 AM on November 6, 2023