Sterno ("Canned Heat") is a fuel made from denatured and jellied alcohol. It is designed to be burned directly from its can. Its primary uses are in the food service industry for buffet heating and in the home for fondue and as a chafing fuel for heating chafing dishes. Other uses are for camp stoves and as an emergency heat source.
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The Sterno brand is owned by the Candle Corporation of America, a subsidiary of Blyth, Inc. The name comes from that of the original manufacturer: S. Sternau & Co. of Brooklyn, New York, a maker of chafing-dishes, coffee percolators and other similar appliances. It had previously applied the name to its "Sterno-Inferno" alcohol burner. In 1918 it promoted its Sterno Stove as being a perfect gift for a soldier going overseas.
Invented around 1900, Sterno is made from ethanol, methanol, water and an amphoteric oxide gelling agent, plus a dye that gives it a characteristic pink color. Designed to be odorless, a 7 oz (198 g) can will burn for up to two hours. The methanol is added to denature the product, which essentially is intended to make it too toxic to be drinkable.
In 2007, two NASCAR crew chiefs were fined $100,000 for lining their fuel tanks and intake valves with Sterno. When the highly regulated NASCAR fuel was added, the Sterno would liquify giving the car an added octane boost.[1][2]
There are many instances of people drinking Sterno to become intoxicated. The earliest documented case is of notable bluesman Tommy Johnson in his song Canned Heat Blues which was recorded in 1928.[3] The practice is said to have become popularized during the Great Depression in hobo camps, or "jungles", when the Sterno would be squeezed through cheesecloth or a sock and the resulting liquid mixed with fruit juice to make "Jungle Juice" or "Squeeze".[4]
In an article for the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1961, Capt. James H. Shinaberger, MC writes about a study of 3 people who had suffered methanol poisoning as a result of drinking Sterno. One of the patients, "had been drinking Sterno for about a week and had been in the city prison for 48 hours when severe abdominal pain and vomiting occurred".[5]
In December 1963, a rash of 31 deaths in Philadelphia's homeless population were traced to a local store that knowingly sold Sterno to people for them to consume and get drunk.[6]
The 1971 movie the Andromeda Strain, based on the novel by Michael Crichton, famously focuses on two survivors of an otherwise universally fatal infection by an organism from outer space - an old man and a baby. "We'll have the answer to this disease when we know why a sixty-two-year-old Sterno drinker with a bleeding ulcer is like a perfectly healthy two-month-old baby."