YouTuber Spends Two Years Making Alcohol From Thin Air, Doesn't Even Get Wasted

Nigel “NileRed” Braun is one of the OG chemistry YouTubers, and he’s become famous on the platform for his Charlie Brown-esque air of melancholy, along with his unstinting devotion to performing experiments both ambitious and, well, strange. One of his ongoing projects involves turning anything and everything into alcohol. (The fact that he does this despite not in fact appearing to like alcohol feels significant here.) Anyway, in a new video, Braun puts all his previous alcohol videos to shame by setting out to produce ethanol from thin air. Really. The theory is actually pretty simple: air contains, among other things, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Ethanol contains hydrogen, carbon and oxygen! So basically, the idea is: And in fairness, that is the idea—it’s just that, as ever, there’s an awful lot of detail lurking in those question marks. Watching a NileRed video is often like a journey into the depths of human emotion, just with added chemistry and expensive, esoteric machinery from China. This one is no exception—our hero declares at various points that, “I was completely delusional,” “Everything I was doing was totally wrong,” “This was a total failure” and “I completely scre