Walking through the aisles of an Ontario grocery store you are bound to come across cases of beer. You are impressed right up until the point where you realize that the “beer” is actually de-alcolized, and has an ABV of only 0.5%. What makes this deal just that much worse is that the price of a 24 pack of cans is about$16, much less that what you would pay for a 24 pack of alcoholic beer.
Once you get over the disappointment you weight your options, and contemplate whether it’s possible to produce something stronger with larger quantities of this cheaper “beer”.
A 24 pack of 355ml cans costs just $15.81 and contains 42.6ml of alcohol. A 24 pack of Canadian costs $37.95 and contains 462ml of alcohol. This works out to 2.69 ml of alcohol per dollar for the de-alcolized beer and 12.17mla/dollar for the Canadian. When you compare this to a bottle of Smirnoff Vodka costing $25.95, and containing 300ml of Alcohol, which works out to 11.56ml/dollar one realizes that there isn’t enough alcohol to even make distillation a viable option.
In order to produce the same amount of alcohol found in a regular 24 pack of cans (462ml), one would need to distil almost 11 24 packs of de-alcolized beer, at a cost of $171.5. So even with it being available in many grocery stores, and costing much less than traditional beer, de-alcolized beer is still not worth the time and effort it would take to make anything useful out of it.
What this analysis does show us though, it that the actual cost of production is much less than the cost of buying beer in Ontario. This is because all de-alcolized beer starts out as regular beer. So when you see beer prices in the US costing the same as your de-alcolized packs you can see what the actual cost of beer is.
