If I distilled all of the alcohol out of beer or wine or whiskey (or take your pick) would I be left with beer juice, wine juice and whiskey juice sans alcohol?
Could I then make them as they were by simply mixing pure alcohol back in in the correct ratio?
I am almost sure the answer to the above is no and the results would be disgusting but I cannot think of why that is.
The results seem variable. Spirits seem to work. Others not so much. Beer and wine don’t have all that much alcohol anyway and the CO2 is going to be a problem with beer.
This has been tried.
Interesting.
I am amazed at how little “whiskey juice” (for lack of a better term…that one sounds terrible) there is once you distill the rest off. Just a little bit of syrupy looking stuff which I am betting is quite strong in flavor (not palatable on its own).
Reminds me of soda dispensing machines. 95% carbonated water and a little syrup mixed in.
You can’t just “distill alcohol” out of beer or wine or whiskey. Let’s take whiskey for example : among other things, the taste comes from esters. Esters are formed when the acids in freshly produced whiskey react with alcohol over long periods of time. Esters are sweet smelling and sweet tasting : many of them have vapor pressures similar to ethanol and will distill out, if you tried distilling.
Btw : acids are formed by yeast during the fermentation process. So are a slew of other nasty tasting stuff.
Bottomline : Beer, Wine and Whiskey : all have ingredients that impart it’s characteristic taste. If you try distilling them at ambient pressures, then you will destroy many of these ingredients or they may leave with the alcohol.
Are there any other process(es) other than distilling, that could extract all the alcohol from these beverages? (Centrifuging, maybe?)
If you thus remove all the alcohol from wine, does that leave you with grape juice? Obviously not: In the fermentation process, the yeast or bacteria or whatever ate most or all of the sugar, and simply removing the alcohol won’t put that back.
So, if I distilled the alcohol out of gin and vodka and whiskey and then put that output back in but mixed it up I’d have a mess?
E.G. Put the gin distillate back in the vodka, the vodka in the whiskey and the whiskey in the gin?
(I know…this is some mad scientist stuff.)
@Whack-a-Mole - the world of beverages is weird. Very weird. Its a pseudoscience : taste is a pseudo science.
For example : Vodka is required by law to be distilled so many times that it has no flavor. Vodka is actually produced as very pure almost industrial grade alcohol and then water is added in before it is bottled.
If you have the time, give a listen to this Planet Money episode on Vodka. Episode 826: The Vodka Proof : Planet Money : NPR
You can also convert Vodka to Whiskey by simply working Oak “essences” in it. For examples watch this : How to Make WHISKEY at Home 10 YEAR OLD in ONLY 10 DAYS 🥃 Homemade WHISKY without tools 😉 - YouTube
But distilling is a high temperature process; (unless you want to go vacuum distillation or use some kind of mol seives); and it will effect or change the flavor molecules in the beverage.
I am not a flavor expert - and most people cant tell the difference between pepsi and coke in a blind study.
I remember being surprised that sometimes whiskey is shipped by rail in a concentrated form and then water is added to rehydrate it at the destination.
The problem with this idea is that the heat of the still will destroy a lot of the flavor that you’d be looking to preserve.
Professionally we do this by vacuum distillation. If you can get the boiling point below 100 you’ll preserve most of the flavors. The most common reason to do this is to take wines that have reached a higher tax tier drop their abv and save money on taxes. Once you have distilled out the ethanol it is no longer considered beer or wine and so you can’t add it back in.
There isn’t much reason to partially distill spirits and then add them back.
Normal bottle strength whisky is diluted down from cask strength, but the dilution only adds say 20% water. Cask strength is a bit brutal to drink neat, and the water added seems to do more than just dilute things a tiny bit. Similarly, most whisky drinkers will add a tiny bit of water even to bottle strength before drinking it, as it seems to open up the flavours and nose. I’m not sure why, but it does seems to work. I’m talking of Scotch here. Stuff you need to filter through charcoal to make drinkable is only for for cleaning. 
Well, not legally. Whiskey must be distilled below 95% and in most cases 80% abv so once a spirit becomes vodka there is no going back to whiskey.
At home lots of people mistake the flavor of wood for the flavor of whiskey so yes you could just load everclear up with wood chips (charred) and getting something wood flavored. You would be missing a lot of the grain flavor. The “barrel” entry period will also determine the flavors extracted from the wood in general higher proof will extract more vanillans while lower proof will extract more tannins. If you go below 50% abv you’ll extract a lot of grass and barnyard notes which isn’t advisable unless you have a large batch you’re blending into for complexity. Also remember you need oxygen contact for maturation.
I would think that if you could snap your fingers, Thanos-style, and remove all the alcohol from a bottle of say… rum, then you could probably reconstitute it later by just adding in the requisite amount of alcohol.
But without supernatural abilities, pretty much any method used to remove alcohol is likely to remove some degree of the volatile compounds that make your product distinctive.
You see it with wine and brandy right now. If you just managed to distill out the alcohol, you’d effectively have vodka and leftover dealcoholized wine. But a great deal of other compounds come through in the distillation, giving you brandy (or grape eau-de-vie, I suppose) instead of vodka, and leaves wine residue that’s been heated up and that you can’t turn back into wine, even if you add the distillate back in.
Even if you did it in a vacuum, you’d just reduce the issues with the heat; you’d still distill out other stuff besides ethanol.
You could design a distillation system to completely separate out all on the non ethanol components and then return them to the pot ale. It would be expensive and large but it’s technically possible.
I’ve got a 70 plate system I’ve designed for a 750-gallon batch system that strips out ethanol from 10% to 96% on a single pass and also removes all of the components more volatile than ethanol so you don’t have a heads cut. It’s not a vacuum system but that wouldn’t be hard to rig up. Then you’d just have to pass the volatile portion out of the hydroselection column and add it back to the pot ale. You might need to be closer to 1,000 gallons to make it work and we’d be close to a million to make it work maybe more if you wanted to dehydrate the ethanol and pull off 100% abv.