Dave Uebele wrote: > Larry Bliven wrote: [snip] > > Another story was about a fellow who entered an unheated Norwegian cabin in > > winter. He took a sip of brandy and died immediately from a frozen gullet. > The brandy is at ambient temperature, below freezing point of water, > but not below the freezing point of alcohol. Not sure a sip would do it, > but maybe a good swallow. The body, trying to heat up the alcohol > loses enought heat that the moisture in the throat freezes. Sort of > like cold throat from eating ice cream too fast, only worse. > Hmm, also, as the brandy is diluted (slight evaporation of alcohol > as the brandy is poured, plus dilution with saliva, may allow the brandy > (going from about 40 percent water to maybe 30) to freeze (less concentration > of antifreeze). Ice crystals tearing up the throat? I do not see how this could be life-threatening. Maybe a small bit of mouth / esophagus injury from freezing, but not likely to be a big deal. In addition, even if he did injure those tissues, it would take quite a while to die. Caveat: perhaps some version of the deep diving reflex might cause the fellow to *aspirate* the brandy, which might cause death from asphyxiation (I doubt it, but maybe). Re: the freezing hypothesis: The heat capacity of alcohol is substantially smaller than that of water, so that more heat is required to change water's temperature than is required to change the brandy's temperature. In addition, a big contributor to "ice cream headache" is that a goodly portion of ice cream is **ice**, which requires a lot of heat to melt. The brandy is not frozen, so that there is no latent het of fusion to supply, in contrast to the process needed to heat the ice cream to body temperature. That means the residual water in the gut (and in tissues therein) will not go *down* in temperature as much as the brandy will go *up.* Net effect is that the brandy is probably not as dangerous as a huge wad of ice cream, suddenly ingested. In the spirit (hee! hee!) of scientific inquiry, nonetheless, I would accept a case of fine brandy and gladly undertake the requisite experiments to see just how cold a shot of brandy I can intake without damage. Might take quite a number of shots to get data statistically significant, and I'd want to creep down on the temperature pretty slowly ...) I'd chalk this one up as an urban legend. Does make ya think, though ... suicide by overconsumption of **ice cream?** Maybe that's what got Elvis ... -- Dave Kruger Astoria, OR *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced/forwarded outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Tue Oct 03 2000 - 11:50:51 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:30:32 PDT