Ammonia in snus?

[brendo20]

A friend of mine held my can of roda loose under her nose and told me it smelt of Ammonia..... Is there ammonia in snus? I was wondering if I should stick to newer more controlled brands like skruf, as opposed to 100 yr old brands like roda, ettan etc which have been unchanged and unpurified over the years.... Unsure. What do you think?

[Zero]

There is absolutely no ammonia in snus - it has a strong smell, yes, but no ammonia. It's also completely untrue that the Swedish Match brands (Ettan, Roda, etc) have been "unpurified". In fact, they are all manufactured using the Gothiatek process which really set the standard for high quality, modern snus. To meet Swedish law, all snus must contain only food-grade ingredients and ammonia certainly cannot go in food products! :shock:

[nzkiwi]

I don't think the roda recipe is exactly the same as it was 100 yrs ago. Zero is right, you're not going to find better quality and safety standards than Swedish Match.

WWW.Gothiatek.com

[Zero]

To go a bit further - cigarette manufacturers use ammonia in their tobacco because it has a high pH and works to freebase the nicotine and give you a stronger hit. They don't really care how bad it is for you, though. Snus uses sodium carbonate (which you use in shortbreads, etc) for the same effect, but without using poisonous chemicals.

[chainsnuser]

At least some snus-brands contain ammonium chloride, which can dissociate into ammonia and hydrochloric acid.

I'm no chemist and I guess, (at room temperature) this happens only in trace-amounts, but i too have smelled it once.

More informations regarding snus-ingredients can be found at Swedish Match's website: http://www.swedishmatch.com/Tech/Eng...tCategoryID=12

Cheers!

[Zero]

Yeah, but ammonia and HCl react at room temperature to make ammonium chloride. To drive the reaction the other way you have to heat the stuff up to about 360°C...I think it's safe to say that snus should never get that hot! A strong reducing agent will also break the chlorine away from the ammonia but anything that strong would be too dangerous to put in snus anyways (caustic soda, for example). It says that it's used as a flavour on the Swedish match site and, since it's certainly used in liquorice as a flavour enhancer, I suspect that it only gets put in things like Catch Liquorice. I still don't think one would ever find ammonia in snus.

[Craig de Tering]

Plus Ammonium Chloride is an essential part of the whole salmiak/licorice taste. The snack bar at my high school sold "straws" full of it mixed with some other ingredients. It was called "Zwart-Wit" or "Black-White" and actually looked that way, like mixing a white and a black powder together. It tasted very salty and very much like licorice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_chloride
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licorice_candy

[chainsnuser]

To drive the reaction the other way you have to heat the stuff up to about 360°C...

Yeah. My chemistry-teacher, back in school, was quite notorious for his failed experiments. You should have seen his table salt-synthesis (out of heated sodium and chloride gas). Nothing happened, until, after 15 minutes, he tried to force the reaction by dropping water on the sodium. Guess, what happened: The whole equipment exploded. :lol: Fortunately, this saved us all from tasting the stuff.
His excuse for failed experiments often was, that no reaction strictly goes only one way.:roll:

Plus Ammonium Chloride is an essential part of the whole salmiak/licorice taste.

Yes, overall I think, what I smelled in the Nick & Johnny loose - can was rather a strong licorice-taste than ammonia. It didn't keep me from making further prillas and the stuff still tasted good, till the can was empty. 8)

[Zero]

:lol: Great chemistry professor. If he couldn't get sodium to react with chlorine then he's just a terrible scientist - that's one of the most energetically favourable reactions ever. It goes to 99.99999999..etc % completion :lol:

[chainsnuser]

My guess is, that he did not clean the sodium well enough, so it still was moistened with petroleum, in which it usually was stored.