That's the marketed, romanticized side of the booze industry. The reality is more like this:
A sizable fraction of the liquor on the US West Coast comes from Frank-Lin Distillers Products.[1] They used to be near the San Jose railyards, but now they're in Fairfield, with better rail access. They need rail access because the ethanol comes in by the trainload, in tank cars.[2] One of their major suppliers is MGP Ingredients in Illinois. They used to be called Midwest Grain Products, and before that, Midwest Solvents. MGP provides pure ethanol to both the beverage and gasoline industries.
Frank-Lin has their own water deionization and filtering plant on-site, to take all the minerals out of tap water and have just pure water. They do some additional processing on the ethanol to remove trace impurities. Then they mix ethanol, water, and flavoring to produce beverages. They have about a thousand different products - vodkas, gins, brandies, bourbons, rums, and wines, but only about a hundred different recipes.
Each brand has its own bottle design and label. The Ball bottle-making factory is conveniently next door. Frank-Lin has an advanced bottling line that can automatically change from one bottle to another without a shutdown.
Frank-Lin also does "contract bottling" - they will make your brand for you. They used to make Skyy Vodka. Skyy was a virtual company - everything was outsourced, like a app startup. Skyy was bought by a major distiller a few years ago, which pulled production in-house.
Once you get past the marketing, that's the reality.
Indeed, I've tried several MGP-sourced ryes (knowing that they came from MGP), and found them to be good products. What bugs me, though, is the marketing BS that's thick enough to lay on with a trowel.
The central problem, though, is that whiskey is an unpredictable business, compounded by the necessity of aging the product. Rye lurked in the shadows for a long time, then suddenly became trendy. The result: crazy price jumps, proof reductions (I'm looking at you, Wild Turkey), and everybody and his brother jumping on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, that results in a proliferation of me-too products, and separating what's real from what's BS can be a chore.
I'm still wishing I had gone with my gut feeling and bought a case or two of Rittenhouse Bonded rye back when it was cheap.
Are you saying all Frank Lin products are made with the same grain ethanol and just different flavourings? I'd be astounded if that's the case. I thought things labelled as for example 'wine' or 'rum' had legal definitions. Can you really sell flavoured grain ethanol as unqualified 'wine'?
If you look at their site, it's all college rot gut, and well liquor level stuff. It's the brands that you go and get a giant 1 Gallon handle for 10$. Which makes sense given their business model.
This is the stuff you'll get at a corner bar when you say "I don't care." When they ask what kind of vodka you want.
And about three seconds' thought would tell you: "GeorgeBeech, no idiot running a 'premium' liquor brand would allow their product to be featured on a bulk purveyor of flavored methanol products manufacturer website."
Brand appearances are tightly controlled. The message is as much about what you want to be known as what you want to be concealed.
Skyy Vodka was featured on the Frank-Lin web site back in 2006.[1] "One of our current contract customers is Skyy Vodka. We are very proud to mention that we bottled the first bottle of Skyy for Maurice Kambar and have bottled every single bottle for him since." That was in 2006. Campari later bought out Skyy, and moved production to a Campari facility.
It's all ethanol, water, and flavoring. Deal with it.
Coca-Cola's "Dasani" is tap water that's been run through a deionizing plant and had some minerals added.
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...
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.
> 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.
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...
Wine is fundamentally different from liquor, but he's probably referring to fortified wine, which is cheap wine with neutral grain spirits added to it.
It's an open secret in the wine industry, though, that a large quantity of grapes for California wine -- even of Napa Valley product (though I'm not sure how strict the rules are for appellations) are sourced from elsewhere in the state, much of it from near Fresno and Clovis. There simply isn't enough acreage within Napa Valley to supply production.
How much individualized production Frank-Lin does would be quite interesting to establish.
Do they do work for Diageo? It looks like the list of products, at least on their site, isn't something I really encounter in advertisements, promotions or really at any bars I've gone to.
A sizable fraction of the liquor on the US West Coast comes from Frank-Lin Distillers Products.[1] They used to be near the San Jose railyards, but now they're in Fairfield, with better rail access. They need rail access because the ethanol comes in by the trainload, in tank cars.[2] One of their major suppliers is MGP Ingredients in Illinois. They used to be called Midwest Grain Products, and before that, Midwest Solvents. MGP provides pure ethanol to both the beverage and gasoline industries.
Frank-Lin has their own water deionization and filtering plant on-site, to take all the minerals out of tap water and have just pure water. They do some additional processing on the ethanol to remove trace impurities. Then they mix ethanol, water, and flavoring to produce beverages. They have about a thousand different products - vodkas, gins, brandies, bourbons, rums, and wines, but only about a hundred different recipes.
Each brand has its own bottle design and label. The Ball bottle-making factory is conveniently next door. Frank-Lin has an advanced bottling line that can automatically change from one bottle to another without a shutdown.
Frank-Lin also does "contract bottling" - they will make your brand for you. They used to make Skyy Vodka. Skyy was a virtual company - everything was outsourced, like a app startup. Skyy was bought by a major distiller a few years ago, which pulled production in-house.
Once you get past the marketing, that's the reality.
[1] http://www.frank-lin.com/ [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.278159,-121.973672,3a,75y,11...