I know Third Street Aleworks in Santa Rosa sells beer-in-a-bag, though it’s basically the same mechanism as boxed wine, and it won’t keep as long. It’s a little more wieldy than a growler and the tap is convenient, as well.
I had an old backpacking book that referred to powdered wine and beer- only available in Japan or Europe, though. And that was published in the late 80s.
Well, they both destroy brain cells, but you’ll find folks sniffing ether rather than drinking it. It’s really toxic compared to alcohol.
I wonder if they’re not simply trapping the alcohol in some kind of absorbant polymer and then mixing that up with some Kool-aid & sodium bicorbonate … or something.
I, too, am willing to accept that I might be some kind of idiot.
*God this place is frustrating–I start a thread in MPSIMS on Velveeta and it gets transferred to CS and then turns hostile; I start a Pit thread and it turns into a GQ. I give up, where’s my Iocane at? *
Assuming the spray drying process mentioned above is feasible, what you have is not “powdered alcohol.” What you have is a powder that contains alcohol in liquid form. In which case I imagine it would still be regulated in the states like any other product containing ethanol suitable for consumption. (regulated and taxed to the hilt)
There is one other way to have “powdered alcohol,” but I can’t see any product on a store shelf being maintained at -114deg C. Powdered water beverages are much more marketable.
Well, five minutes experimentation suggests this is bullshit. We don’t have any maltodextrin in the lab, but I grabbed some maltose, some dextrose, and a short-chain starch which should have similar properties to maltodextrin. Adding a small amount (around 10% by volume) of pure ethanol to any of these simply causes them to clump up - they don’t stay as a powder at all. Adding more ethanol (about 40% by volume) results in a slurry of poorly-dissolved stuff at the bottom, with an excess of liquid on top. Again, not much resemblance to a powder. So, my seat-of-the-pants experiment suggests that maltodextrin might be able absorb 4.8% ethanol, but that’s 4.8% of the volume of the powder, not the final drink. Assuming that the powder is mixed in roughly ten-twenty times as much liquid, that means the final drink has 0.5-0.25% alcohol. Not much to worry about.
Additionally, I don’t actually beleive that maltodextrin will encapsulate alcohol. Maltodextrin is not known to assemble into the kind of larger multi-molecule structures which could do this. When dried, it just forms rough crystals, which wouldn’t encapsulate more than the occasional random molecule. I’d have to see some more evidence than a novelty drink company’s website to be convinced of this one.
mischievous
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
The only way I see this being possible is if the liquid alcohol was actually being encased in water soluble microcapsules.
Apparently, Booz2Go’s marketing department was doing just that.
I’ve not heard of these before but I suspect they didn’t actually contain alcohol in the ‘brick’ state - they sound like they might have been a combination of dried yeast, dried fruit extracts and sugar - so you’d have to dissolve them and allow them to ferment.
The “status” of this story, according to the Museum of Hoaxes is:
I read the same Time-Life book–I had the impression that it was simply dehydrated grape juice.
Which, if it was not pastuerized before drying, would contain lots of wild yeasts. Plenty to start fermentation. I’ve made hard cider plenty of times simply by taking freshly pressed apple juice, pouring it into old wine bottles, sealing the top with a balloon, and waiting. A few weeks later, alcohol. This is the way wine was made for centuries, just squeeze the juice and wait, the natural yeasts on the grape skins did the rest.
I had to Google to see this and found this informative fellow.
When I was in rehab, I saw a videotape of this guy. IIRC, his main theme had something to do with the chemical similarity of ether and alcohol; if you doubled the chemical formula of ether, it became the chemical formula of alcohol or vice versa. The point, if there was one, was that alcohol is too a drug—that is, his spiel was to convince people that alcohol was as much of a drug as heroin, cocaine, etc., etc. I think maybe he was making the point that alcoholics were, in fact, drug addicts.
Magyarországon, tej zsákban jön is. I mean, in Hungary, milk comes in bags, too.
Milk comes in bags everywhere…fun bags! 
I agree. I should have put a smilie in there next to his name.
See here for details. Milk bag holders are sold in fretty much all groceries and houseware stores in our area (and at any Victoria’s Secrets for kidchameleon).
And mayonnaise (and tomato paste, and a bunch of things as I’m sure you know) comes in a toothpaste tube. What an odd place. (Really, not just Hungary, a good portion of Europe does this) 
Actually, the tomato paste in a toothpaste tube is brilliant. Sometimes, I just need a little tomato paste. Opening a whole can and using only a teaspoon of it is such a waste. I try to reuse it, but I only end up using tomato paste maybe once a month.