how do spiked selzters not contain any sugar if some of their main ingredients are cane sugar?
In: Other
Short answer: The sugars have been eaten already.
Alcohol is produced by fermentation. Fermentation is a fancy word to describe the process of bacteria eating sugar and pooping out alcohols. You can ferment anything with sugar and get different results.
Ferment pure sugar cane and add extra carbonation to the resultant liquid, you’ve created a spiked seltzer. Ferment grapes, you get wine. Ferment fruit, you get fruit wine (blueberry wine, strawberry wine, peach wine, etc.). Ferment a grain like barely, wheat, or rice and you get beer. Ferment barley and hops together to get an IPA. Ferment honey and you get mead.
You can also further refine the fermented product through distillation to get hard alcohol. For example, if you ferment corn and distil the results you get whiskey. Ferment something high in sugar like potatoes and distil it to get vodka. You can even ferment and distil cacti to get tequila. If instead of adding carbonation you distilled your fermented sugar cane you’d have rum.
That said, the bacteria don’t necessarily eat *all* the sugars. This is easily seen in wine: the difference between a dry wine and a sweet wine is how much fermentation took place. If the bacteria ate all the sugar in the grapes it will be a dry wine, but if they leave some behind it’s a sweet wine. This gets into the “no added sugar” thing discussed in other comments, since the sugar in the drink is leftover from fermentation as opposed to added later on.
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