High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Birch Reduction is an organic reaction which is particularly useful in synthetic organic chemistry. The reaction was reported in 1944 by the Australian chemist Arthur Birch (1915–1995) working in the Dyson Perrins Laboratory in the University of Oxford, building on earlier work by Wooster and Godfrey in 1937. It converts aromatic compounds having a benzenoid ring into a product, 1,4-cyclohexadienes, in which two hydrogen atoms have been attached on opposite ends of the molecule. It is the organic reduction of aromatic rings in liquid ammonia with sodium, lithium or potassium and an alcohol, such as ethanol and tert-butanol. This reaction is quite unlike catalytic hydrogenation, which usually reduces the aromatic ring all the way to a cyclohexane.