What separates the processes used to make different alcoholic beverages such as ciders and malternatives?

While browsing the local bottleshop or distributor, a wide variety of choices are available when it comes to beers - ales to lagers, light to dark, and countless ranges in between. However, there are a few beverages that just don't seem to fit in. The flavored malt beverages or malternatives as some call them (such as Smirnoff), hard lemonades and teas, wine coolers, and ciders have nearly the same alcohol content, cost nearly the same, and have many similarities but they just aren't truly beer. So what makes them different?

Malternatives are probably the closest relative to beer; some even are labeled as flavored beer for tax and legal purposes. They are made almost identically to beer; some even add small amounts of hops. The primary differences are the greatly reduced hop concentration and the number of sweeter ingredients added to cover any tastes that are often associated with beer. Often paler malts are use to avoid any of the grainy tastes some beers have. Often extensive filtering or coloring is employed to further differentiate the visual appearance of these beverages from beer. Malternatives are really beer that has been somewhat masked by heavy fruit and sweet flavors.

The vast majority of wine coolers, hard lemonades and teas are malternatives flavored to taste like their namesake. Thus they are simply varieties of the malternatives. Some of these beverages are made by mixing spirits with other non-alcoholic sweeteners but a few legal and tax issues made this more rare.

Cider is produced using the extracts or juices of apples which provide the sugar content rather than malts. Not any apple variety will make an ideal cider as the tannins present in some apples help precipitate. In addition, cider is traditionally aged in oak barrels, which provide some of the necessary tannins.

As with beer, cider is fermented cold but cider production is much more likely to take advantage of natural yeasts than is beer production. Additionally the sugars in fruits such as apples are simpler molecules and ready for fermentation unlike those from grains which must first be enzymatically converted. Cider fermentation also traditionally takes longer than most common beers. While the lagering or aging process for many beers is on the order of weeks, good cider must be aged for many months.

As the trend begins to show, most alcoholic beverages are made in very similar processes. A source of sugar, whether from a fruit or grain, is processed, and wild or cultivated yeast is used to convert the sugars to ethanol and carbon dioxide. For spirits, this liquid is then distilled to ramp up the alcohol content. Yeasts cannot produce products of high alcohol content as the ethanol becomes toxic at increased levels depending on the yeast strain so it is separated off, most often by distillation.

The major distinction between most spirits is actually rather minor. Brandy is distilled wine. Cognac is simply a brandy made from very precise grape wine. Whiskey is basically distilled beer. Bourbon is whiskey made from at least 50 percent corn and aged only in charred oak barrels. This is certainly an oversimplification as small differences can result in high degrees of variety and taste disparities but the basic principles are more similar than not. If you desire to make a new alcoholic beverage with any sugar source, be sure to research a method as you may end up with something undesirable such as vinegar or worse.

Chris Straub is a senior majoring in chemical engineering and a Collegian columnist. He is also the great-great grandson of the founder of Straub beer. His e-mail address is cts150@psu.edu.