I’ve made hard cider accidentally, in the half gallon jugs it came in. Very tasty hard cider, i may say.
I’ve also sampled truly excellent apple brandy made by an acquaintance who lives in Quebec. And that’s what this thread is about.
Speaking just to this one narrow bit:
Beer, wine, and spirits have always been treated massively differently for regulatory and tax purposes. Going back to the founding of the republic.
You may as well ask why heroin & marijuana are treated differently; they’re both about getting high.
Part of the historical basis for differing regulation comes down to the much more compact nature of hard liquor. Transporting serious dollar volumes of beer & wine was difficult, while serious dollar volumes of spirits was not. Makes it much easier and more profitable to smuggle or bootleg. A hefty fraction of the Federal government’s revenue budget before the advent of income tax came from alcohol taxes. The Feds cared a LOT about bootleg booze back then just like they care a lot now about income tax evasion and secret foreign accounts.
There are multiple causes for hangovers. Some might be caused by various impurities in the booze, but I think most are just plain dehydration. And people who drink lab-grade ethanol are probably drinking it much stronger than most boozes intended for human consumption, so dehydration would be worse.
Which is why alcohol is subject to a stamp tax– a scheme that virtually makes possession of the item in question a crime, requiring the stamp as an affirmative defense, in a total reversal of the usual presumption of innocence.
I think some is also caused by metabolites of alcohol. And your liver metabolizes alcohol different depending on how much you drank. Alcohol is metabolized through a couple of different metabolic pathways, and how much/how quickly you drink almost certainly influences how much of which metabolites are left in your system, and how much damage they do on the way out.
Fun fact: stories about derelicts who survived consuming wood alcohol are based on the fact that extreme alcoholism can deplete the metabolic enzymes that process alcohol; and methanol isn’t toxic in itself, it’s what it gets metabolized into.