I too keep vodka in door of my freezer and despite what the internets tell me, the contents appear to be frozen, well somewhat frozen. Due to some previous frost issues, I also keep a thermometer in the freezer and even when the bottle is most crystallized, the temp is never close to the minus teens, so what gives?
Alcohol freezes as at negative 173°f/114°C. Domestic freezers keep items at about 0° to negative 10°f. Even accounting for the fact that vodka isn’t pure alcohol and can freeze solid at -20°f, so unless you have some crazy, liquid nitrogen cooled place to store your Ben & Jerry’s odds are your vodka isn’t really frozen.
If you were to stick cider, roughly 3-8% alcohol by volume in your freezer, it would appear to ice over. Lacking distilling technologies, various New England tribes made concentrated applejack by freezing hard cider in snow banks and removing the ice from the top of the cider – this ice isn’t water, solids or impurities but a dilute of alcohol – still containing alcohol, just a lower % than what remains. This method, called freeze distillation or progressive freezing has limits… it will produce a very strong cider, around 20% alcohol (40 proof), but even in the worst Northeast winter, accounting for wind chill, the temp isn’t ever going to drop low enough to make Everclear or freeze the alcohol solid.
But vodka isn’t made by separating solids from alcohol, it is made by concentrating the alcohol through distillation. A process that pretty much homogenizes the alcohol into the great mass – much in the same way that milk doesn’t turn into solids and whey after sitting for a week in the fridge, at 40% alcohol (80 proof, the benchmark for most bottled liquor), the alcohol is in a stable solution and acts differently than it does with beer, wine or cider.
Alcohol’s inability to freeze is actually maddening to those who make their own ice cream and sorbets – you’d think just a little grappa in lemon sorbet would add flavor but as little as 2% total alcohol in a recipe will turn what you thought would be a good idea into a slush the consistency of something from a Margarita machine. I’m not bitter, years later and I am still willing to experiment in the kitchen, maybe a little bitter.
As great as science and mathematical truths are, the vodka still looks frozen when I pull it out of the freezer. Two things, your vodka is to viscous to pour – the ketchup effect and less likely but still somewhat probable, it is possible that at the neck of the bottle, the thinnest past, some of the liquid has frozen blocking the vodka’s exit. Even when my bottle appears the most frozen and least cooperative when I want a drink, it takes about 3-5 minutes at room temperature to turn this ‘frozen’ mass into something pourable – ice won’t turn to ice water that quickly.
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