Drink the Best, Burn the Rest
Posted: April 7, 2008
I stumbled across this rather amusing commentary on NJ.com “El diablo ethanol: Part dos.”
Paul Mulshine starts out saying, “A popular theme of mine is the idea that ethanol is better consumed in beverages than in gas tanks.”
He goes on to talk about the Absolut vodka ad controversy noting that it gives “patriotic Americans good reason to drink some other vodka.”
And if that’s not reason enough, consider this: Taste tests show Absolut doesn’t taste noticeably better than the stuff that goes into your fuel tank.
He references a 2005 vodka taste test done by Eric Asimov of the New York Times that compared 5 of the 10 best-selling unflavored vodkas in the United States and the 5 best-selling imported vodkas.
American-made Smirnoff at $13 a bottle beat them all, including Absolut.
“In the United States almost all vodka producers buy neutral spirits that have already been distilled from grain by one of several big Midwestern companies like Archer Daniels Midland,” wrote Asimov. “The neutral spirits, which are 95 percent alcohol or more, are trucked to the producers, where they are filtered, diluted and bottled.”
Yes, that’s the same Archer-Daniels Midland that makes so much of the ethanol that goes into cars. Once you distill corn into alcohol, that alcohol can go into either shot glasses or gas tanks.
Which brings us to the moral, and the headline, of the story. Drink the best and burn the rest.
Oh yeah, and Mulshine also makes this point. “The wholesale price for ethanol at the moment is about $2.50 a gallon. If you could get it at that price, dilute it with water and put it in a bottle - which is what domestic vodka makers do - the cost of the ingredients of every 750-milliliter bottle would be a mere 25 cents. You heard that right. The typical bottle of lower-shelf vodka has about 25 cents worth of vodka in it.”
And that, my friends, is why ethanol for fuel is “denatured” - or poisoned - so people can’t use it to make their own vodka at home.