Is there anything readily available that is dehydrated alcohol? if so what? I’m not talking about distillation but a just add water and you have back your original fermented product.
Not really. Alcohol is a liquid in its own right, not a solution of something in water.
Like powdered alcohol? I don’t think that’d work. You could probably trap it in some fine substrate like dry water
I know there’s an old formula for creating an instant asshole by adding alcohol, but that’s not quite what you asked.
I think what the OP means is an alcoholic beverage sold without its water content; you will still have liquid, but a much smaller volume, depending on the original concentration (e.g. some drinks might be only 5% alcohol by volume, with a negligible amount of flavors and other stuff, so that is a 20:1 reduction in volume; even hard drinks can still have an advantage). Although distilling would probably cost more than shipping the drink undehydrated (but hard liquors need to be distilled anyway, you aren’t going to get a very high alcohol concentration naturally), so this would only be feasible where you had a limited amount of weight to carry and ready access to water (or perhaps not, since this is what “made from concentrate” means on a container of juice, they remove most of the water for easy shipping then add it back).
I’m a little unclear–you mean like pure ethyl alcohol + flavor packet, add water and stir? Might have been useful for camping when I was a teenager, we used to pack in case of beer!
It’s called barbiturates.
While chemically somewhat different from alcohol, their effect on humans is nearly identical: users become loud, boisterous, and foolish, and eventually pass out. The next morning they suffer from poor appetite, trembling, and headache – classic hangover. People can become addicted, and once addicted, going ‘dry’ results in withdrawal symptoms, including delirium tremens (the dt’s), just like alcoholics.
See the chapter Alcohol and barbiturates: Two ways of getting drunk in the book Licit and Illicit Drugs.
Not really. You can dehydrate some foods because they’ve got so much water content. However, alcohol has no intrinsic water content; the intoxicating chemical is just ethanol, which is a liquid at room temperature and standard atmospheric pressure. I suppose under great pressure, serious refrigeration, or both, you could freeze it and then grind it into powder, but it would just melt back in your house.
It would be hard to completely remove the water from an alcoholic product because water and alcohol together (in a 5/95% ratio) actually boil off at a lower temperature than either water or alcohol separately. (I knew the technical term for this back in college, but it’s escaping me now). Getting rid of that last 5% water would be quite difficult, but perhaps not a problem if you’re just trying to reduce the weight of a product.
As others have said, you’d still have a liquid. But if you got alcohol to 0% water, I’d consider that “dehydrated” whether it looks like a powder or not.
One problem might be solubility of flavor components. Especially in high-water drinks (beer and wine, say) I’m not sure if you could keep everything in solution once you’d removed most of the water.
Another problem would be the lack of idiot-proofing. You know that someone would mix drinks with half the recommended water content, die of alcohol poisoning and then their parents would sue you.
There is powdered alcohol sold in some places. It’s not just alcohol though. It’s ethanol trapped in cycoldextrins. It’s a dry powder,but when you add water, you get an alcoholic drink.
A problem with distilling alcohol further than 95.63% ethanol by weight is that ethanol forms an azeotrope with water at that concentration at one atmosphere, which means that, instead of the ethanol boiling off at a lower temperature and leaving the water behind, the ethanol and water are both boiling at the same temperature.
There are a few ways around this; the way I’d try for making alcohol you could re-hydrate and drink later involves increasing the pressure to progressively shift the point at which the azeotrope is formed to higher temperatures and, therefore, allowing me to remove progressively more of the water from the water-ethanol mixture.
We buy 100% ethanol for the lab. It’s a liquid, like rubbing alcohol. And yes, once opened, it quickly absorbs water from the air and goes down to about 95% ethanol.
I have some powdered water but I don’t know what to add to it.
It’s extremely easy to make 100% ethanol, depending on exactly how pure you want it. Sure, you can’t get there with straight up distillation, but a benzene azeotrope or molecular sieves will get you there. It’s still a liquid, bit we referred to it as “dry” if the water was removed.
Will either of these methods leave the ethanol in a drinkable state on rehydration?
There’s a sort of “dehydrated” wine: it’s called brandy.
There’s also a sort of “dehydrated” beer, roughly speaking: one version is called whiskey, another vodka.
I’ve seen powdered beer advertised in several places. It claims to have alcohol in it. But I have no idea what it is.
ETA: Here’s a web site for a powdered beer product.
Might want to try clicking on the purchase button. 
Hah! I had no interest in it, so didn’t even bother. I’ve seen something like this advertised in novelty catalogs. It could all be the same joke.
No, its not all a joke. I think beer would be hard because of the carbonation, but I’ve seen powdered wine at online camping stores. The alcohol is stored in cyclodextrin.
http://wineportfolio.com/c/?p=581
I don’t know if this is sold anywhere anymore. I never saw it in the US.