Are you saying all Frank Lin products are made with the same grain ethanol and just different flavourings? I'd be astounded if that's the case. I thought things labelled as for example 'wine' or 'rum' had legal definitions. Can you really sell flavoured grain ethanol as unqualified 'wine'?
If you look at their site, it's all college rot gut, and well liquor level stuff. It's the brands that you go and get a giant 1 Gallon handle for 10$. Which makes sense given their business model.
This is the stuff you'll get at a corner bar when you say "I don't care." When they ask what kind of vodka you want.
And about three seconds' thought would tell you: "GeorgeBeech, no idiot running a 'premium' liquor brand would allow their product to be featured on a bulk purveyor of flavored methanol products manufacturer website."
Brand appearances are tightly controlled. The message is as much about what you want to be known as what you want to be concealed.
Skyy Vodka was featured on the Frank-Lin web site back in 2006.[1] "One of our current contract customers is Skyy Vodka. We are very proud to mention that we bottled the first bottle of Skyy for Maurice Kambar and have bottled every single bottle for him since." That was in 2006. Campari later bought out Skyy, and moved production to a Campari facility.
It's all ethanol, water, and flavoring. Deal with it.
Coca-Cola's "Dasani" is tap water that's been run through a deionizing plant and had some minerals added.
Same deal with the "Scotch" and "Cognac" appellations. They're protected by law.
The thing to remember is, there's plenty of completely crappy Scotch and, presumably, Cognac. It's not mixed from pure ethanol - the countries who control the use of the appellations have laws about how the stuff can be made - but every drink industry has its bottom of the barrel stuff that it needs to get rid of somehow...
As far as I know "Scotch" and "Cognac" are only protected in the EU.
In any case, the parent claims that Frank-Lin Distillers just uses pure ethanol to produce all of it's products. Given things such as bourbon permit the addition of "neutral grain spirits" those products make sense. I was curious about the Canadian whiskey case since it is explicitly one of the few protected spirits in law and appears to at least require production and aging in Canada.
> As far as I know "Scotch" and "Cognac" are only protected in the EU.
That's an interesting thought. I'm aware of France fighting misuse of its wine appellations overseas but I don't know about the rest. They're pretty aggressive, though.
> In any case, the parent claims that Frank-Lin Distillers just uses pure ethanol to produce all of it's products. Given things such as bourbon permit the addition of "neutral grain spirits" those products make sense.
The "bourbon" label is protected in the United States: you need to use certain ingredients to make bourbon, or rye, or tennessee whiskey, or whatever. With bourbon, for example, an ethanol distilled all the way up to azeotrope wouldn't be legal in the United States. The limit you can use is 160 proof.
In the parent's defense, "flavored ethanol" isn't a bad way of describing a lot of vodkas. Some of the better vodkas come out of industrial continuous distillation. The parent is just overstating his case, and in a small way, missing the point. A lot of that cheap stuff would be BETTER if it were pure ethanol and an additive...
Wine is fundamentally different from liquor, but he's probably referring to fortified wine, which is cheap wine with neutral grain spirits added to it.
It's an open secret in the wine industry, though, that a large quantity of grapes for California wine -- even of Napa Valley product (though I'm not sure how strict the rules are for appellations) are sourced from elsewhere in the state, much of it from near Fresno and Clovis. There simply isn't enough acreage within Napa Valley to supply production.
How much individualized production Frank-Lin does would be quite interesting to establish.
