crazy liquor laws

In a prior posting I talked about how many years ago I contemplated starting an organic fruit infused line of alcohol but abandoned it due to the expense and over regulation by the government. This article is a classic example.

For years bars have been infusing spirits with various flavorings but no one seemed to care. All of a sudden the ABC decides to crack down. And of course it is a bar that is popular and making money. The moral of the story? If you are making any money as a businesses someone wants a piece of the action.

In my experience of researching liquor laws one odd law baffled me. Vodka by definition has to be clear and 40 percent alcohol (80 proof). Since I was infusing the alcohol with fruit and it was changing color from all the beneficial elements in the fruit (and real flavor) by definition it could not be called vodka. That is why I was using a slightly lower percentage spirit called soju which is just like vodka but is diluted with water to around 22 percent (44 proof) and I was going to give it a new name – sojuice. All distilled spirits are super powerful and are usually diluted with water to lower the alcohol percentage. This goes for whiskey, scotch, rum etc. Some scotch is full strength, and of course moonshine is as well.

So this means when you buy a flavored alcohol, such as say a Absolute Mandarin, or Skyy Pineapple, they are always clear. Now think about it. If there were real fruit in the alcohol would it be clear? Of course not. An orange flavored vodka should have some orange color to it but by definition that is illegal. So what do they do? They add some orange paint to the bottom of the bottle or something to make it appear slightly orange. It is funny how so many consumers buy flavored clear alcohol and never second guess why that is strange.

To get around this law, liquor companies must use highly concentrated fruit extracts made in a factory. In fact I was steered away from using real fruit in favor of these Frankenstein concoctions. I was put in touch with several of the major flavor manufacturers. They explained to me that to make say the flavor of strawberry they actually use all these other flavor compounds to build up into the final strawberry flavor. This could be a bit of carrot, and all kinds of odd flavors and usually no strawberry to speak of is in the strawberry flavor. Joanne Chen offers a glimpse into the flavor manufacture business in her excellent book Taste of Sweet.
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I was obviously horrified when they told me to send some of my natural product and they would duplicate it using their own strange flavor compounds. ‘Why not use real stuff?’ I asked. And the answer was real fruit is too unpredictable and the flavor changes too much. Of course we all know this. Each time you eat a strawberry it will taste slightly different from the last one depending on the variety, how old it is, when it was picked etc. And this explains why flavored foods taste off and not real. Over ten years ago when I was working on this the alcohol business did not use the word ‘natural’ flavors. Either it was against the law to use real for these manufactured flavors, or they were artificial. Today they use the world ‘real’ or ‘natural’ when in fact technically they are not. Here is a mock up of an ad I was working on to exploit this:

So back to the booze. Big alcohol companies that flavor their alcohol first cannot by law use real fruit since it would change the color. Second, they are discouraged in the name of consistency. And finally the consumer, you and me, get an inferior flavor.

Of course when I was going to launch this business I was going to exploit this by focusing on how my product had real color from real fruit and real flavor. Next time you see an ad for Skyy vodka with ‘real’ fruit flavors or some other brand – be aware it is not real per se – but a flavor made from other natural flavors in a laboratory that have nothing to do with that flavor and therefore are not real. And in my book, a strawberry flavor must be red. Not clear. Thank the liquor laws for this.