The major contributors of acute toxicity of tobacco smoke are
carbon monoxide (CO) and nicotine (Hoffmann & Hoffmann,
1998). CO is produced from thermal decomposition during smoking
and hence not found in tobacco-derived beverages and foods.
The presented results have shown that nicotine is less volatile than
alcohol during hydroalcoholic distillation. According to typical production
practices for distilled spirits, heads and tails fractions are
separated and excluded from the final product (Léauté, 1990).
The assumption is made that about 0.5% of the total volume is
the heads fraction (equal to about 10% of the first fraction in this
experiment), and that the distillation is usually stopped at 10% ethanol
by volume (this concentration was reached in the 12th fraction
(Fig. 6)). Therefore, the last fractions, which exhibited the
highest nicotine content, would not go in the final product, the distillation
resulting in a detoxification of about 80% of nicotine. The
final concentration of nicotine in the liqueur therefore depends