How can the same amount of beer and hard liquor have such different alcohol %. What exactly is different?
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Beer is the byproduct of the fermentation process. Grains are inoculated with yeast, which eats the sugars and converts the sugars to alcohol. When the beer reaches the desired ABV (alcohol by volume) the process is halted. Wine is produced the same way, they just use grape juice rather than grain.
There is a maximum ABV that can be achieved via this process. Eventually, the amount of alcohol in the beer becomes toxic to the yeast, and they die off.
To get a higher ABV – like whiskey – you take the fermented solution and distill it. Alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so by separating off the first substance that boils out of the liquid, you can get a **much** higher ABV in the distillate. Depending on what the distiller wants in the final product, they will then water down the distillate to the desired ABV and/or age it in barrels to get the desired end liquor.
TLDR: Whiskey is distilled, beer isn’t.
Hard liquor and beer are not pure alcohol. There’s water, other naturally occurring chemicals that give it the taste, etc.
The actual alcohol that is drinkable is ethanol. The Alcohol % basically tells you how much ethanol there is in the actual drink.
EDIT: See u/Ansuz07’s comment on how to get those % values.
The same amount of soda and water and coffee can all have different amounts of sugar in them, right?
When it comes to alcoholic drinks, the “alcohol” is specifically something named *ethanol*. The drinks all simply have different amounts of ethanol in them. The “alcohol %” is literally the percentage of the drink that’s ethanol.
Answer: It depends on the amount of sugar that is fermented during the brewing/distilling process. In both processes grains are soaked in water which activate enzymes that create fermentable sugars. Yeast is added to the sugar water mixture and feeds on the sugar. The byproducts of that reaction are ethanol(alcohol) and carbon dioxide. The amount of sugar and the duration of the yeast reaction determine the percentage of alcohol in the mixture.
Alcohol is made by fermentation, a process in which living bacteria and fungi digest sugars without oxygen. Normally you can digest sugar with oxygen and end up with water and CO2. Without oxygen you can’t digest the sugar that far, so you end up with alcohol which is sort of like a half-way point between sugar and water+CO2.
Now alcohol is a poison (remember, we literally use it clean out wounds), that’s a side benefit for the organisms, it keeps competition away from their food. In making alcohol one of two things will happen, the organisms run out of sugar *or* the have tons of sugar and eventually make so much alcohol they poison themselves and they die.
This means there is a limit to how much alcohol you get from fermentation. For beers it’s common to have around 5%-8% alcohol by volume and for wine it’s closer to 12%.
Once you get to around 15% alcohol you really to the limit of poisoning the organisms people are smart and we’ve figured out ways to get it even higher.
But that being said, the upper limit is about 15% alcohol by volume with the remaining 85% being mostly water. AND water boils at a higher temperature than alcohol.
So what you can do is heat up the beer/wine/cider *but* don’t let it boil. Somewhere around 200F the alcohol will start to evaporate quickly and turn to alcohol steam. You can suck the steam up and let it cool down where it ill turn back to a liquid, but it’s pure alcohol liquid. This process is called ‘distillation’. And that’s the big separation from beer to liquor – one is fermented, the other is fermented then distilled.
For what it’s worth most of the liquor you drink is produced in bulk by a small handful of manufacturers. The make a strongish beer and then distill it to basically pure liquid alcohol. They then sell this pure liquid alcohol to the brands you know where they add flavor, water it down, and bottle it.
You can think of most beers, wines, and liquors as basically a mixture of water (H20) and ethanol (CH3CH2OH). There’s some other stuff in there too (sugar, especially) but we’re just going to round it off and assume it’s water.
So when a beer, for instance, is 5% alcohol by volume (ABV) that basically means it is 95% water and 5% alcohol. If the beer is 12 fl oz (~350 ml) that means that there is 0.6 fl oz of ethanol and 11.4 fl oz of water.
But if you poured a 12 fl oz glass of 80 proof (40% ABV) vodka, there would be 4.8 fl oz of alcohol and 7.2 fl oz of water.
>What exactly is different?
The amount of alcohol in the drink.
I know that you’re “drinking alcohol” when you drinking them, but (100 – alcohol content)% of the drink is something else than alcohol, primarily water.
A 40% vodka is 60% water.
A 5% beer is nearly 95% water, with a reminder of the stuff that gives it taste and colour.
I suspect you’re talking about the lesson many of us learn in school (or driver’s ed), where the actual amount of alcohol in one beer, one glass of wine or one hard liquor drink is about the same.
If that’s the case, the answer is serving size.
Beer has less alcohol by volume, but “one beer” is 12 or 16 ounces of liquid.
Wine has more alcohol than beer and less than liquor, but a glass of wine is less liquid than a serving of beer and more than a typical serving of liquor.
Liquors like vodka or whiskey have a lot more alcohol by volume, but are served in much smaller portions.
It’s also worth noting that different types of beer or wine or liquor have very different alcohol levels. That comparison is mostly intended to give people an idea how much time it takes to metabolize drinks and be able to drive safely.
(If that’s not what inspired the question, sorry for wasting your time.)
Imagine you have 2 glasses, each able to hold 100ml of liquid.
You pour 95ml of water and 5ml of pure ethanol into one. That one now has a 5% alcohol content, or an APV of 5%.
You pour 85ml of water and 15ml of pure ethanol into the other. That one now has a 15% alcohol content, or an APV of 15%.
actually kinda simple. beer is brewed with yeast as an ingredient. while in the cask, the yeast breaks down proteins in the mixture to form ethyl alcohol. due to the amount of water in the mixture, which yeast cannot break down, you’re limited by the volume of water. with liquor, water is removed by distillation, leaving a concentrated alcohol.
in overly simple terms, they boil off the water in liquor, leaving just the alcohol.
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