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Denatured alcohol, also called methylated spirit (in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom) or denatured rectified spirit[1], is ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage recreational consumption. It is sometimes dyed. Pyridine, methanol, or both can be added to make denatured alcohol poisonous, and denatonium can be added to make it bitter.

Denatured alcohol is used as a solvent and as fuel for alcohol burners and camping stoves. Because of the diversity of industrial uses for denatured alcohol, hundreds of additives and denaturing methods have been used. The main additive has traditionally been 10% methanol, giving rise to the term "methylated spirits". Other typical additives include isopropyl alcohol, acetone, methyl ethyl ketone, methyl isobutyl ketone, and denatonium.

In the United States, mixtures sold as denatured alcohol often have much greater percentages of methanol, and can be less than 50% ethanol.

Denaturing alcohol does not chemically alter the ethanol molecule. Rather, the ethanol is mixed with other chemicals to form a toxic or bad tasting solution. For many of these solutions, there is no practical way to separate the components.

Formulations

Different additives are used to make it difficult to use distillation or other simple processes to reverse the denaturation. Methanol is commonly used both because its boiling point is close to that of ethanol and because it is toxic. Another typical denaturant is pyridine. Often the denatured alcohol is dyed with methyl violet.

There are several grades of denatured alcohol, but in general the denaturants used are similar. As an example, the formulation for completely denatured alcohol, according to 2005 British regulations was as follows

Completely denatured alcohol must be made in accordance with the following formulation: with every 90 parts by volume of alcohol mix 9.5 parts by volume of wood naphtha or a substitute and 0.5 parts by volume of crude pyridine, and to the resulting mixture add mineral naphtha (petroleum oil) in the proportion of 3.75 litres to every 1000 litres of the mixture and synthetic organic dyestuff (methyl violet) in the proportion of 1.5 grams to every 1000 litres of the mixture.

Uses

Denatured alcohol is used identically to ethanol itself except for applications that involve fuel, surgical and laboratory stock. Regular ethanol is required for food and beverage applications and certain chemical reactions where the denaturant would interfere. In molecular biology, denatured ethanol can be used for precipitating nucleic acids.