A gallon of 85% ethanol is about $3, a gallon of vodka is about $25 where I live and vodka is watered down everclear as far as I know. So 0.85 gallons of ethanol would cost about $50 if you made it from vodka or everclear.
Is the entire cost difference just due to taxes?
Certainly much of it is. The US Federal excise tax on distilled spirits is $13.50 per “proof gallon”, which means a gallon that’s 100 proof (50% alcohol). A gallon of pure ethanol would be 200 proof, and thus a tax of $27 would apply.
No, the entire cost differences aren’t just due to taxes but that is part of it. Ethanol is easy and cheap to produce in bulk but they don’t sell vodka by the barrel at least to consumers. Unflavored vodka is just ethanol and water but that doesn’t mean that all of it is the same as anyone that has bought bottom shelf rotgut vodka can attest to. It needs to be distilled multiple times to make it more palatable especially if you intend to drink it straight (I have no idea why anyone would choose to do that but some people do).
Most of it is marketing and vodka is the most blatant example of how consumers are willing to be a huge cost premium for a name brand packaged in a pretty bottle over the generic equivalent. Once you get to triple distilled vodka combined with pure water, it doesn’t matter if it came from the rarest Russian potatoes combined with purified water from a glacial stream, it is all the same compound.
The alcohol industry is rife with examples of so-called premium products produced by artisanal distillers that are anything but that. For some reason, there is a current trend for ‘authentic’ moonshine. You can buy it packaged in Mason jars and read the story about where it came from. The problem is that most of it is just repackaged bulk liquor distilled in an industrial facility in Indiana and it is all the same except for the story and the package. They same thing is largely true for vodka. There is only so much you can do with a two ingredient recipe that literally requires just dumping them into the same bottle.
If the goal was to produce really cheap vodka, you could go to many science labs and take a gallon jug of non-denatured 95% ETOH and mix it with distilled water in the appropriate quantity. Shake it up a bit and you have some of the best vodka available but that is generally frowned upon.
Federal excise tax on distilled spirits is $13.30 per gallon of 100 proof (50%) ethanol. Since fuel ethanol is about 95% alcohol, you’re looking at about $25 per gallon.
State taxes vary, but in California, the tax is about $6.60 per gallon. Total taxes, therefore, would be roughly $32 per gallon if fuel ethanol were taxed like distilled spirits.
But don’t forget that fuel ethanol isn’t aged at all. You absolutely have to put ethanol through an aging process to make it drinkable, so part of the cost of spirits includes a lot more processing and storage for some period of time.
What? Clear spirits are not aged and vodka, especially, would be unaffected by ageing.
Funny think about moonshine is how the guys talk about thier recipes. Sugar, water and yeast will give you moonshine. The flavor happens durring aging.
The same reason that carbonated water and sugar are so much cheaper than beverages containing those chemicals. Economy of scale, method of production, quality control for public health, labeling and marketing, shelf space in supermarket. Plus huge taxes in the case of anything alcoholic sold for human consumption.
I’ve tried one of these mason jar “moonshines” and it is, at 100 proof, truly nasty, nasty stuff. I have a bottle of Bacardi 151 rum, which is 75% ethanol. It has a very nice taste, but you can just feel a sensation of “I’m turning evil” even while sipping a little bit. It has a mess screen on the top to discourage nasty fires.
Okay, aging is an imprecise shorthand. Distilled spirits go through a multi-stage purification process that ethanol for fuel does not. It takes more time to make a batch of drinkable ethanol.
Not really… but the distillation process is more precise, because an engine will happily run on something that would taste and smell more like industrial solvent than a drinkable beverage.
Basically column stills let the various distillates reach a sort of equilibrium such that the lightest stuff is at the top of the still, and the heavier stuff is at the bottom, and they just tap it at the level they want. For fuel alcohol, there’s almost certainly a wider band that they can get their distillate from, while beverage alcohol is almost certainly a very, very narrow band by comparison.
(and yes, fractionating columns/column stills are what the alcohol industry uses for just about everything except for whiskies and rums that are pot-stilled)
That’s part of it, hence the existence of denatured alcohol.
Taxes are part of it. Marketing is another part of it (but you can take this part out by looking for the crappy off-brands whose low price is their main selling point). But fuel and liquor are also distributed differently.
If you could pull up to a “vodka station,” swipe your credit card and dispense your own vodka by the gallon from a giant underground tank into a container you brought with you - and those underground tanks were replenished by 10,000-gallon trucks on a weekly basis - then vodka might be a good bit cheaper than it is.
OTOH, if fuel ethanol were placed in 750-ml glass bottles with full-color glossy labels and came 12 to a cardboard box, brought into a an air-conditioned store and placed on a shelf by hand, it might be quite a bit more expensive than it is.