The Museum of Hoaxes on powdered alcohol.
Powdered alcohol exists:
I remember reading a while back about it being a problem among Kenyan school children, or something like that.
No need to rehydrate; you can drink it neat, although I don’t think I’d enjoy it. I doubt the FDA would approve of either method. I’d be wary of the benzene azeotrope for health reasons.
Here you go:
Oddly, in a way the old joke about “dehydrated water- just add water!” has come true. You can buy trace minerals to add back to your distilled water so that it doesn’t taste so flat.
Water and alcohol form a lesser boiling azeotrope. For that reason Pure Grain Alcohol is 5% water. You can throw in benzene and the lesser boiling azeotrope will now be over 99% but will contain trace benzene and therefore cannot be used for human consumption.
Could you use a dessicant to remove the remaining water?
I would imagine if you took some wine and cooked it off at about 160 degrees you would have most of the alcohol out of it. Now seperate your alcohol and continueto cook off the remaining water in the wine. Once the water is cooked off add the alcohol back to the dry wine mix, ship it out and customer could re add water when he decided to drink it. YUK!
I used to work for a coffee company and experimented around with making coffee extracts for vending purposes. The powders are hydroscopic and tend to clog and gather around moisture. The coffee extract tasted fine when hydrated.
This actually may work. I wasn’t looking for a powered form (but that would be acceptable), but just a lighter weight/volume, a way to carry low proof drinks over long distances by foot.
Perhaps slowly reducing wine then adding brandy to re-proof it would be a way of doing this.
If you did this in a vacuum you could do it with a much lower temp.
Maybe powdered sugar would work. Just takes a while after adding water. Add yeast in the sugar for a quicker result. Pop goes the weasel!
The trouble is a lot of food/drink mixtures include oils and other organics which don’t turn to dry powder.
Mol sieves, as mentioned.
Again, it depends how pure you want it. 99.9%? 99.99? I don’t have my purification guide handy.