The risk of methanol contamination in distilled alcoholic beverages overseas has been in the news lately.
But this is closer to home! ABC’s 7.30 team bought a bottle of ‘vodka’ from an Australian supermarket and had its contents tested, with alarming results.
After purchasing the bottle of Dirty George vodka from a legitimate Melbourne IGA liquor store, we took it to an independent testing lab.
Those tests detected the presence of tert-butyl alcohol, which is a key ingredient in industrial cleaners like paint stripper.
“We detected tert-butyl alcohol at about 500 milligrams per litre,” said John Leeder, managing director of Leeder Analytical Laboratory, which routinely tests beer, wine and spirits for impurities and methanol.
… “That same sample, we also found that it contained about 3 per cent of glycerine, [which] can be added as a sweetener or as a masking agent.”
Tert-butyl alcohol wouldn’t be unusual in industrial alcohol, but is definitely not safe for human consumption.
Michala Kowalski from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre said that the 3% glycerine could also be a problem.
“That amount of glycerine is actually probably going to cause a lot of digestive upset. It could be diarrhoea or nausea for days, especially the levels that you found, that can actually cause quite a lot of kind of gastrointestinal distress.”
Eric Hadinata, an addiction medicine specialist, treats patients who have suffered organ damage because of substance abuse. He says 7.30’s findings have prompted him to review whether tert-butyl alcohol could have been a hidden cause of organ damage in some of his patients.
He says he wants to see better tracking of possible tert-butyl contamination and alcohol poisoning in hospitals.
“In emergency departments in Victoria, we have the ability to test for substances in people’s blood,” he said.
He would like tert-butyl alcohol to be included in testing.
“So if someone comes into the emergency department substance-affected, we could ask whether adulterants or common adulterants for alcohol be included in that toxicology panel.”
Dr Kowalski is seriously concerned about the quality of the liquor and the presence of contaminants in bottles from liquor merchants that her team has been testing.
Two bottles they tested contained methanol and plasticiser.
“Both of those are things that you don’t want to have in vodka. You don’t want to be drinking them. They can cause long-term damage,” she said.
She’s urgently calling for more testing of liquor in Australia before more contaminated products make it into the market.
“In the European Union, all food and beverage products, and this includes alcohol, are subjected to randomised testing for quality control,” she said.
“That’s something that could really go about increasing consumer confidence.”
