Spot the difference
10 Jun 2010 by Evoluted New Media
Cheap supermarket brand vodka and brand labelled vodka – what’s the difference? Vodka is virtually tasteless; a mixture of 40% ethanol and 60% water, and scientists thought there was no difference between brands – until now.
Cheap supermarket brand vodka and brand labelled vodka – what’s the difference? Vodka is virtually tasteless; a mixture of 40% ethanol and 60% water, and scientists thought there was no difference between brands – until now.
Dale Schaefer and colleagues from the University of Cincinnati and Moscow State University studied the composition of five popular vodka brands and found a difference in the concentration of ethanol hydrates. Dmitri Mendeleev - creator of the first version of the periodic table of the elements - first observed these peculiar hydrates in a 40% ethanol 60% water solution in 1865, which became the global standard for vodka.
A century later, Linus Pauling – a Nobel Prize-winning chemist – speculated that the hydrate clusters consisted of an ethanol molecule sequestered by a hydrogen-bonded framework of water molecules and scientist believe it’s these clusters which give vodka its ‘taste’.
“Beverages with low structurability are likely to be perceived as watery, because the fraction of water clusters is higher than in brands with high structurability,” the team say in their report, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Beverages with high structurability harbour transient cage-like entities where the ethanol is sequestered by surrounding water molecules, and – at high alcohol contents – these clusters stimulate the palate differently.
