I’ve never understood what dry gin (Gordon’s), dry vermouth, or extra dry beer (Toohey’s) etc means..
Seems very counter-intuitive to me.
In: Chemistry
As the other commenter said, it’s essentially the opposite of sweet. Dryness refers to how much of the sugar has been converted to alcohol. The drier it is, the less sugar left after the fermentation.
Fully dry (“brut”) means the yeast have converted all available sugar to alcohol, leaving little/no residual sugar. A brut beer still has some residual sugar, and this is because yeast can’t eat maltose (malt sugar). In contrast, the sugar in fruit alcohol (cider, wine, champagne, etc) is fully digestible to the yeast, so a brut wine will have no residual sugar.
*EDIT – other redditors have made right what I got wrong in the comments below. Here’s a fresh take at the point I was attempting to make: It is a challenge to produce a fully dry maltose-based alcohol (e.g. beer) because the yeast will naturally cease activity before all sugar is consumed. Conversely, it is a challenge to produce a sweet or semi-sweet fructose-based alcohol (e.g. cider) because the yeast will generally be active until all sugar is consumed.
In a very simplified way it refers to how sweet or, in this case, not sweet a drink is. A dry drink is not going to have much sugary (or fruity – another term used) taste in the mouth.
So a fruity drink is sweet while a dry drink is not sweet to the taste.
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