What is a malt?!
Answers: I drink smirnoff...green apple! :) My favorite. But it says on the bottle that its a malt...so It isnt really liquor? What is it. But it does have a 10% alcohol content! Which I think is high. I drink one and i can barely walk straight!
I cant give you the exact definition of a malt, but I know Smirnoff(thats not the vodka) is definitely not liquor. Some refer to it as the 'girly beer'. So its pretty much the same alcohol content of most light beers. I believe it says on the bottle its 5 %.
That means it's made with malt extract, like beer. (Beer uses other ingredients too, but the malt is where the alcohol comes from). I've made beers with high alcohol content, around 10 percent...that amounts to '20 proof'. So yeah, if you drink, say 12 ounces, that's about the same amount of alcohol as a shot of Everclear.
Basically what you have is fermented beverage vs a distilled beverage. A fermented beverage doesn't have as high an alcohol content as a distilled beverage.
Malt is a sweet liquid made from malted grains.
All alcoholic beverages start with some sweet liquid (sugary). Malt is made by germinating a grain (usually barley) and as soon as the seed starts pop open they dry it out. At this stage of the germination the grain has the most amount of sugar content. This germinated, but "dead" seed is called malt.
The next step in the process is to extract the sugar out of the malt. This is a process called "mashing". To do that you repeatedly wash the malt with water at certain temperature (around 120 degrees I think??), you go through a process of soaking the grain in water, then rinsing it off and recycling the same fluid. In the end you get a very "sweet" water.
This malted water is then "brewed" into what ever beverage you want to make. In the case of beer you boil it with some hops, cool it and add yeast and ferment it.
Vodka is made from a similar process, only with vodka they distill it after they ferment it. Your malt beverage is the first step towards vodka if you will.
Some vodka is made with potatoes (same idea, make a sweet liquid out of it an ferment it with yeast), but the majority of vodka is made from grain. All your top shelf vodka (Grey Goose etc..) is made from grain.
Wine works the same way, it's just easier to get sweet liquid - you just smash the grapes.
For scotch whiskey, they dry the sprouted grain using smoke from burning peat, which gives scotch it's distinct flavor. Difference between vodka and scotch is this one step and the fact that the scotch is aged in oak barrels, which gives it it's color and some flavor components.
Other liquors use other elements, like corn in the mashing process.
"Malt" is partially sprouted barley. Malt is one of the main ingredients in beer and such "alcopop" drinks as Smirnoff Ice, Bacardi Silver, Mike's Hard, and others. That's why they call it a "malt beverage." They don't call it beer (although it's made almost the same way) because it doesn't have hops. When it's done fermenting, they filter out all the remaining barley flavor out of it to get it tasting as neutral as possible, then add flavors like green apple, lemon, and whatever else.
It would seem to make sense that if they were going through this much trouble, then why not just add water and flavors to vodka and just be done with it. It's all about the way the US taxes booze...the vodka version (or rum, in the case of Bacardi) is exactly how they're done outside of the US. It's actually cheaper in the US to brew it and filter it to death than it is to just add spirit to a flavored drink and be done wth it.
In contrast, when you refer to "malt liquor," it's really just a high alcohol beer (think Mickey's, Schlitz, Colt 45, etc.). It's made with malted barley, hops, and whatever else they feel like...just as beer is.
2 yung 2 know