Spot the difference
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.
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.
