[justin66]

Same deal with the "Scotch" and "Cognac" appellations. They're protected by law.

The thing to remember is, there's plenty of completely crappy Scotch and, presumably, Cognac. It's not mixed from pure ethanol - the countries who control the use of the appellations have laws about how the stuff can be made - but every drink industry has its bottom of the barrel stuff that it needs to get rid of somehow...

[gaadd33]

As far as I know "Scotch" and "Cognac" are only protected in the EU.

In any case, the parent claims that Frank-Lin Distillers just uses pure ethanol to produce all of it's products. Given things such as bourbon permit the addition of "neutral grain spirits" those products make sense. I was curious about the Canadian whiskey case since it is explicitly one of the few protected spirits in law and appears to at least require production and aging in Canada.

[justin66]

> As far as I know "Scotch" and "Cognac" are only protected in the EU.

That's an interesting thought. I'm aware of France fighting misuse of its wine appellations overseas but I don't know about the rest. They're pretty aggressive, though.

> In any case, the parent claims that Frank-Lin Distillers just uses pure ethanol to produce all of it's products. Given things such as bourbon permit the addition of "neutral grain spirits" those products make sense.

The "bourbon" label is protected in the United States: you need to use certain ingredients to make bourbon, or rye, or tennessee whiskey, or whatever. With bourbon, for example, an ethanol distilled all the way up to azeotrope wouldn't be legal in the United States. The limit you can use is 160 proof.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbon_whiskey#Legal_requireme...

In the parent's defense, "flavored ethanol" isn't a bad way of describing a lot of vodkas. Some of the better vodkas come out of industrial continuous distillation. The parent is just overstating his case, and in a small way, missing the point. A lot of that cheap stuff would be BETTER if it were pure ethanol and an additive...