What our ethanol is used for, and what each use demands of it

Different industries fail differently, and the controls that prevent both kinds of failure are largely the same controls. This page describes what each application needs from an ethanol supplier — the specification itself is agreed with you, not published here.

Pharmaceutical manufacture

An excipient in almost every use

Ethanol is a pharmaceutical excipient in nearly every application — a solvent, a vehicle, an extraction medium, a granulation fluid. It is an active ingredient only in specific products, principally alcohol-based antiseptics.

Solid dosage: Granulation fluid, coating solvent and binder solutions.
Liquid preparations: Syrups, elixirs, tinctures and fluid extracts, as a solubiliser and a preservative adjunct.
Extraction: Botanical and active-ingredient extraction, where impurity load in the solvent shows up later as unexplained peaks in the product.
Antiseptics: Alcohol-based hand rub and surface disinfection, where the quality of the alcohol is the quality of the product.
Documentation: The qualification pack that a regulatory affairs team assembles when it brings a new supplier onto a dossier. We supply it in full — see the quality page.

What a pharmaceutical buyer is really assessing

Not the alcohol. They are assessing whether your supplier can evidence what is in it, whether the process behind it is under control, and whether they will be told before anything about it changes. A supplier who cannot answer the third question has already invalidated the validation work you are about to do.

Fine fragrance & personal care

The largest ingredient in the bottle

In a finished fragrance the alcohol is the single biggest component by a wide margin. Every other ingredient is dosed in fractions of a percent and argued over for months. The carrier deserves the same attention, and rarely gets it.

Fine fragrance: Extrait, eau de parfum, eau de toilette and cologne, where the alcohol must carry the composition without contributing to it.
Attar & oriental perfumery: Solvent for concentrated oil blends. When the material costs more per gram than the alcohol does per litre, a carrier with a note of its own is an expensive mistake.
Air care & incense: Room and car fresheners, diffuser bases, incense and agarbatti — high throughput, and the applications where batch-to-batch drift is noticed by the customer first.
Cosmetics & personal care: Carrier, solvent, astringent and viscosity control, denatured where the destination market requires it.
The governing test: Odour on dry-down. A trained assessor evaporates the alcohol from a smelling strip and confirms it leaves nothing behind. No instrument performs that test, and no analytical result replaces it.

Also supplied

Other applications

Extraction & processing

Flavour, colour and botanical extraction, and process solvent duty where consistency between deliveries matters more than any single figure.

Disinfectants & sanitisers

Base alcohol for surface and hand sanitiser manufacture, and for biocidal product formulation.

Inks, coatings & cleaning

Printing inks, lacquers and industrial cleaning formulations, including denatured product where the application allows it.

Laboratory & precision cleaning

Reagent and precision-cleaning duty, where residue on evaporation is the parameter that actually matters.

Denaturing

The formula is decided by where the product is sold

Denatured ethanol is prepared to the formula the destination market recognises — not the one the manufacturer happens to use. Getting it wrong means a consignment that cannot clear customs, or a cosmetic that cannot legally be placed on the market it was made for.

Tell us where the finished product is sold and we will tell you which denaturant applies before we quote, rather than after. Bespoke formulations are prepared against a written specification and an end-use declaration.