One of the obvious takeaways from looking at these patents is that color removal requires special methods, and that an easier way to begin is to simply leave out the color compounds from the mix. TodayРІР‚в„ўs brewer may not quite get the point of this quest, but we can learn by reading patents from the past. Many of these processes were specifically developed to remove malt colors from wort or beer, not necessarily flavor, because the inventors wanted to produce beer without color. There are numerous patents from the past related to color removal from beer using ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, and activated carbon. And producing colorless beer requires special processes. Flavorless beers have been the butt of many a joke about mainstream beers, but the truth is that producing very lightly flavored beer is not easy. The easiest way to begin this process is to start with as little color and flavor as possible by maximizing the non-malt adjunct allowed for an alcoholic beverage to be taxed as beer. The key to producing a beverage like Zima is removing malt color and flavor. Maybe it was the sweetness, the funky name, or the clear and cool package, but for whatever reason Zima floundered in the market and was officially retired in 2008. Zima, like malt-based wine coolers that were all the rage in the 1980s, was taxed as beer but had little else in common with other beverages in this tax class. Zima was arguably the first malternative to make the big leagues when Coors introduced its clear concoction to the market in 1993. So the idea of adding a shot of alcohol to these common and popular drinks has crossed the mind of many a brewer, but the taxation thing was an obstacle.Р”В«ack to the old thing with a new name topic. Most brewers cannot help doing mental math when noting that something as simple as a cup of coffee at the local cafР“В© costs about half as much as a pint of craft beer. Beer, on the other hand, is much more expensive to produce in terms of equipment, ingredients, labor, energy inputs, effluent treatment, cleaning chemicals, inventory costs related to fermentation and aging time, and taxation. Not much different than making soda, but the ingredient costs are lower because there is not much of anything in these drinks. To make a common non-alcoholic seltzer, filtered water is flavored with a dash of flavor essence, carbonated, and put into a can. The price difference between something like a can of flavored seltzer and beer is pretty staggering when the cost of production is considered. The popularity of bottled water and coffee drinks has been hard to ignore over the past decade. What does all of this have to do with hard seltzer? And when a producer does hold multiple licenses, special rules apply to how the facility is operated to help ensure that the different tax rates levied on alcoholic beverages are properly paid. For example, a licensed brewery cannot produce wine or distilled spirits without having a separate license.

Another nuance of US alcohol taxation is the different licenses, and associated restrictions, required by beverage makers to legally produce and pay tax on various alcoholic beverages. In fact, there is no difference in the federal excise tax levied on beer based on beer strength, and only 16 states collect higher tax rates on РІР‚СљstrongРІР‚Сњ beers, a distinction that varies by state.

In the United States, alcohol taxation has much more to do with the source of the ethanol in a beverage than it does strength. There is one key difference, however, between a canned vodka tonic and a canned hard seltzer tax classification. Strip away the peripherals, and what is left is a simple cocktail similar to something like a vodka tonic. In the case of hard seltzers, the new thing has more to do with process and taxation than it does with the liquid itself. Many РІР‚Сљnew thingsРІР‚Сњ are simply РІР‚Сљold thingsРІР‚Сњ that have been tweaked, repackaged, and given a new name. Popular trends are interesting to analyze when the РІР‚Сљnew thing,РІР‚Сњ be it food, music, or beverage, is looked at without the bias of a name. Hard seltzerРІР‚в„ўs popularity is a message from the market signaling demand for beverages that are lighter on the palate, skinnier on the calories, and less challenging to consume than big-bodied, highly-flavorful, calorically-rich beers. The real significance of the popularity of these products in the market may be the mere fact that they exist in a sea of big flavor and that the category has done so well by appealing to a demographic that was largely ignored by so many of the arbiters of beer style. The summer of 2019 may go down in the annals of North American beer history as The Summer of Hard Seltzer, and not because hard seltzers over-took beer volume or converted bearded beer bros into hard seltzer sippinРІР‚в„ў hipsters.

How to homebrew hard seltzer