Blue Sky (Heisenberg's Methamphetamine)

No Mom, I'm not running a bloody meth lab.

Elliot is completing his Master's thesis on AMC's Breaking Bad, a truly great television series that you're probably familiar with unless you live in a vacuum or something. On that off chance that this is the case, all you need to know is that the series' main character makes a particularly potent type of Methamphetamine distinguished by its blue colouring. Elliot will probably kill me for such a shoddy precis but this isn't the place for it. Do yourself a favour and watch the show. 

I wanted to give Elliot some of the notorious Blue Sky Meth for his birthday as part of a larger Breaking Bad themed present. According to the show's prop master Mark Hansen, the meth crystals used on the show are just chunks of blue coloured rock candy. Buying some would have been relatively easy, but that's no damn fun at all. Besides, doing it myself means I can make it exactly to my specifications. Walt would be proud.

My first idea was to grow a group of blue crystals on a string suspended in a super-saturated solution. This method would have produced more natural looking crystals but was going to yield unpredictable results, not enough overall and take a matter of weeks. No good. I needed something I could experiment with repeatedly until I got a result I was happy with.

Way back in my board treading days I learned how make sugar glass to be used as a prop in stage combat. Done well, it produces fairly convincing, clear, transparent panes that shatter like glass. My head went through more than one. Shattered fragments of coloured sugar glass would be perfect, with the bonus of being delicious and not having to pick it out of my hair this time.

I experimented with a few different methods to achieve the result I was looking for. Making the glass is easy enough, but colouring and flavouring it complicated matters more than expected. Below is a comparison of three of the coloured batches. The sample on the far left looks green due to being heated to too high a temperature. It began caramelizing and yellow + blue = you know what. I also noticed that after adding the blue colouring the sugar began recrystallizing in the solution, creating an unwanted opacity. No good. I tried adding a little more water and reheating it slowly but this resulted in much too soft a texture and couldn't save the clarity.

With the top sample I heated the solution far slower and removed it about 5°C sooner. It was much clearer and hadn't caramelized but as soon as I added the blue colouring it began to crystalize again and ended up grainy. Bad texture, bad clarity. No good.

I decided embrace the spirit of the show and get a little scientific with the next sample. I added the colouring to the original solution before heating it in the hope of suppressing whatever chemical reaction was shocking the sugar back into crystal form in the previous batches. I also added a small amount of tartaric acid to the sugar in order to break down the disaccharide Sucrose into its constituent monosaccharides Fructose and Glucose, which individually crystallize far less readily.

These steps seemed to do the trick and resulted in the beautifully transparent pool of glass on the bottom-right. It hardened well and shattered perfectly. A little too perfectly actually. Heisenberg's meth on Breaking Bad is a little bit duller looking and smoother around the edges but still seems to retain a kind of brilliant lustre internally. To achieve that look I threw the whole batch in a glass jar and shook the hell out of it. This roughed up the edges and covered all the crystals in a fine sugar powder that took just enough shine away from the surface. Next, I sifted the whole sample through a colander to remove the finest particulate and was left with what you see in the photo at the top of the post. Throw it all in a small dodgy looking zip-lock and voilà! Heisenberg's Blue Sky Methamphetamine, with extra authenticity owing to the fact that my name actually is Jesse. 

Don't have it all at once, bitch.