Dan Pashman:  Hey there, Dan here with another Sporkful reheat for you. This week we're sharing a special collaboration we did a little while back with our friends at the NPR Podcast, Planet Money. I teamed up with my old pal, Alex Goldmark, for this episode. Trust me, you're gonna walk away from this one knowing a lot more about vodka than when you started, and if you think that this entire episode was an elaborate ruse for Alex and I to drink vodka and charge it to NPR… 

Dan Pashman: Well, I just wanna remind you that there's an old episode of The Sporkful. You want us to pull outta the deep freezer? Let us know by sending an email or voice memo to hello@sporkful.com. Be sure to include your first name, your location, what episode you want us to hear and why. 

Dan Pashman: Now, a quick note before we get into this episode, industry City Distillery, which you hear in this episode featured, uh, has closed since the episode aired. Um, but I think you're gonna enjoy it. Pour yourself a drink and enjoy. 

Dan Pashman: Quick heads up -- there is a bit of explicit language in this episode.

Dan Pashman: A while back I went to a bar called O’Keefes, it’s a standard Irish bar in Brooklyn with my friend, Alex Goldmark.

Alex Goldmark:  Former friend because you, you basically picked an argument with me.

Alex Goldmark: Yeah, you're right. I. I am telling you, it is a real thing that happens just about every time. 

Dan Pashman: So, so wait. You're telling me when you drink cheap vodka, you have an allergic reaction, but when you drink expensive vodka, you're fine. 

Alex Goldmark: I am allergic to cheap vodka. That is my claim. When I drink cheap vodka, my, my face turns red. It gets a little hard to breathe, like just a little. It's not like it's gonna kill me. 

Dan Pashman: I don't buy it. 

Alex Goldmark: You doubted my own personal claims about my own personal health. 

Dan Pashman: Yeah, I, I know Alex look, no, no offense, but I'm just really skeptical. I mean, vodkas are pretty much all the same. In fact, I think they have to be, I. And anyone who insists otherwise is falling for one of the great sales jobs of all time.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people now to the task at hand, and I'm very excited because I have a co-host. Today, my old friend Alex Goldmark from Planet Money. Hey Alex. 

Alex Goldmark: It's an honor to be here.

Dan Pashman: So we go back Alex. I was actually counting on the years we've worked together at so many different jobs. I've lost count of that, but I know that we worked together in 2004. 

Alex Goldmark: Yeah, two different radio stations, one of which is already completely out of business. And we've had our share of after work drinks together, which is why I brought my whole little red cheek issue to you only to be shut down.

Dan Pashman: That's right. So we have a long history together. We have a history of drinking together. But let's not get too warm and fuzzy here, Alex, because we do have to maintain a… 

Alex Goldmark: Journalistic rigor?

Dan Pashman: I was gonna say pretend heated rivalry.

Dan Pashman: Speaking of which. Here it is, Alex. That's an authentic paper sound effect, which means I'm about to read a law to you. 

Alex Goldmark: Bring it on.

Dan Pashman: This is title 27, section 5.22 of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Code. This is the code, Alex, that aspiring vodka magnates read to their children at bedtime. 

Alex Goldmark: Sounds very intimidating.

Dan Pashman: It says that vodka must be distilled or treated until it is quote, without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color. 

Alex Goldmark: Okay. But vodka has a taste.

Dan Pashman: But it has no distinctive taste. 

Alex Goldmark: Okay, go on. 

Dan Pashman: Like if you're making bourbon, you're going crazy. Trying to create a unique flavor so that your product will stand out, right? Like you're gonna age it in certain barrels for a certain amount of time or whatever. 

Alex Goldmark: Right. And that's how it is. Smoky or peay, or… Other ones that I actually don't know, but I've heard. 

Dan Pashman Right, right. But if you're making vodka, there's very little you're allowed to do to make it taste different.

Alex Goldmark: Okay. 

Dan Pashman:If you add sugar or fruit or something, then it becomes flavored vodka, which the law puts in a whole other category that's not traditional vodka. It's essentially pure alcohol with just enough water at it that it doesn't kill you. The word vodka comes from the Russian and Polish words for water, and the law today reflects that history.

Dan Pashman: So to call something vodka, you have to make an industrial grade pure alcohol first. Like the stuff you would put in adhesives or fragrances or detergents. And then take that and all you do is add water and you got vodka. 

Alex Goldmark: Uh, that doesn't sound right. Uh, all right. 

Dan Pashman: Look, to figure out if there's a difference between fancy and cheap vodka. Let's just start off by finding someone to show us how vodka is made. 

Alex Goldmark: Makes sense. 

Dan Pashman: All right. Someone who can show us how it all works. Standing right in front of their vodka making machines. 

Ronak Parikh: Hey there. 

Dan Pashman: Hey, how are ya? Good. How's it going? 

Ronak Parikh: Good. 

 Dan Pashman: This is Ronak Parikh. He's one of the guys who runs Industry City Distillery in Brooklyn.

Dan Pashman: The company got an unlikely start when its founder was doing an experiment with aquaponics. Aquaponics is a system where you raise fish in tanks and use their waste to feed plants growing in the water. 

Ronak Parikh: And if you imagine plant life living an animal, oh, with fish life, uh, what you need to do is you introduce carbon dioxide artificially to that system.

Ronak Parikh: So we looked at natural ways to find CO2. One of those ways that you find CO2 is fermentation. The other product of fermentation was alcohol. Okay, well, what can you do with the alcohol? The alcohol kind of became its own business. 

Alex Goldmark: You're the founder of this company was just playing with aquaponics for fun and accidentally made vodka? 

Ronak Parikh: Um, accidentally came across alcohol and spirits and looked at various ways of monetizing as this spirit that was coming off was really, uh, damn tasty.

Dan Pashman: In those early heady aquaponics days, Ronak hadn't joined Industry City yet. He was in business school and he had his own side project. 

Ronak Parikh: We had a copper still, uh, working off of a stove. We were making, we, a friend of mine, were making gins. 

Alex Goldmark: And you just made gin, like for fun for your friends? 

Ronak Parikh: Yeah, exactly. They were great. Uh, just little things I like to experiment with, um, making various flavors. Uh, I think long term I wanted to get into the business of, uh, making a brand, making alcohol, but at that time it was just kind of recipe building and flavor creations, which is really fun. 

Dan Pashman: Eventually Ronak came to Industry City Distillery, and now he's living the dream. 

Alex Goldmark: He takes us down a long cluttered hallway, past a bar, and then unlocks this big metal door.

Ronak Parikh: You're entering our still room now. 

Alex Goldmark: There's like clear jugs all around. There's this one machine that looks kind of like where you'd go to flip a circuit breaker to turn the power back on with some tubes coming out of it. Another one looks like an angry washing machine, and the whole room is kind of cramped. Smaller than a dorm room. 

Ronak Parikh: Yeah. I mean there's like enough room for maybe two or three people to be working basically. That's it. Yeah. Which is about our team. 

Dan Pashman: So Ronak explained how to make vodka in a nutshell. First off, don't make it in a nutshell, 'cause that's very small. It's really straightforward science. You combine sugar and yeast, the yeast eats the sugar and poops out alcohol.

Ronak Parikh: Pooping alcohol. 

Dan Pashman: It poops, right? So the yeast waste product is what makes us drunk. Did you know that, Alex? 

Alex Goldmark: That's news to me.  

Ronak Parikh: One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Dan Pashman: That's right. So when you get drunk, you are essentially poisoning yourself with yeast poop to forget about your problems.

Ronak Parikh: There you go.

Dan Pashman: And when it comes to what sugars you can use, the yeast isn't picky. Neither are the standards for vodka. Like for instance, Alex, tequila has to be made with agave. For it to be tequila, whiskey has to be made with corn or grain. But with vodka…

Ronak Parikh: …Really anything can make vodka.

Dan Pashman: A Kit Kat? 

Ronak Parikh: KitKat has sugar in it. I can ferment it and therefore distill it.

Dan Pashman: So after fermentation, you've got this vat of alcohol, but it's also filled with the leftover raw materials, the sugar and yeast and junk. You gotta separate the alcohol. So you heat the mixture just to the point where the alcohol turns to steam and rises up.

Ronak Parikh: So it goes up, it rises with the gas up, and there's a condenser coal at the top there that's filled with cold water that's gonna condense it back down to a liquid. Remember, we're dealing with vapors, we're dealing with assets. I gotta get that back to a liquid state in order to make it potable so you can forget about your problems.

Dan Pashman: You do that a few times and you end up with basically pure alcohol. And every vodka, Alex, no matter how cheap, has to be distilled to that point. 

Alex Goldmark: So these machines here, the main purpose of them is to remove flavor and scent and any other characteristic except for alcohol. 

Ronak Parikh: Exactly. Now, chemical constituents of alcohol, esters, they will create flavors, but in the case of vodka, they will not be related to its raw material. By definition, that is the case. So if you ever see packaging that states, ah, this vodka's made with Northwest Pacific grains, kissed by the Colorado Rapids, that's all marketing bullshit. When it comes to vodka, your raw material cannot influence the final flavor. 

Dan Pashman: Ronak, are you ready for the lightning round?

Ronak Parikh: Sure.

Dan Pashman: I'm gonna say a claim, a term that I've seen on a vodka, not yours. And I want you to tell me what it means and whether it actually makes a difference. 

Ronak Parikh: Okay. I like this. 

Dan Pashman: All right. Here we go. Filtered through champagne limestone. That sounds fancy. 

Ronak Parikh: That does sound fancy, doesn't it? That really, oh, now what the heck does filtering to through what is champagne limestone versus limestone be my first question, and then I'd also ask what type of chemical reaction is happening when you filter through limestone. I think what we're trying to do here when we do any filtration is we want to deodorize, we wanna mask. That tells me, whenever I hear of a distillery or a brand doing that, they're trying to hide something they're not trying to add or they're adding something to hide something. Why?

Dan Pashman: Charcoal filtered. 

Ronak Parikh: That's typically what you see in a Brita water filter. It acts like a deodorizer. You're removing a scent. Does that matter? Sure, it matters as far as deodorizing, uh, some nasty odors that would ordinarily come and reach your nose in your palate. But again, you were masking something there.

Dan Pashman: Crafted in an old fashioned pot still.

Ronak Parikh: Yeah, so pot stills have been used for some time for hundreds of years, almost since the beginning. And there is something about honoring age-old techniques. I think that's really important. Honoring, age old techniques when you are, the people have been doing it. For ages. If you're a finance guy that just left to open up your own distillery and you're starting to work at a pot still, I really don't know what that means.

Ronak Parikh: Do you have, uh, the know-how and the history and the support network to really understand how that pot still works? Pot stills are not the most efficient at distillation, period. Glass and stainless steel, gentlemen, these are two inventions, two discoveries made by humans that can be, that are really, really important and are really, really good and efficient at distilling and making spirits. 

Dan Pashman: So again, Alex, the raw material doesn't matter to the final flavor. There is no flavor, 

Alex Goldmark: But he did say how you treat that raw material does affect what's in the vodka. That's because there are three stages of distilling.

Ronak Parikh: Three categories, heads, hearts, and tails. 

Alex Goldmark: Heads, hearts and tails. Okay? Ronak explained that when you start to heat the alcohol to distill it, the first part of the steam that comes up before anything else. That part is called the heads. That part is not supposed to be for drinking. 

Ronak Parikh: It's the stuff that can continue methanol, the stuff that moonshiners are getting in trouble with, going blind, even being fatally, fatally hurt by it. Uh, you don't want to drink your heads, you wanna remove that. And then the next part, that's  the good stuff. The hearts. So the stuff Ronak wants to keep is the vapor in the middle. And then the last part is your tails. Okay? That's the stuff that's potable. But stuff that's been in our industry, we know, known to, uh, give you hangovers in case some nasty smells, some aromas.

Dan Pashman: So in theory, you isolate the hearts, get rid of the heads and tails, and then when the vodkas run through the still a second time, you start with only the hearts and then isolate the hearts of the hearts. So if a vodka's distilled six times, that should mean it's only the very best part. The hearts of the hearts of the hearts of the well… You get the idea. 

Alex Goldmark: But Ronak says that if you wanted to make a super cheap vodka, you would just leave in extra tails through each run of the still, and then you just get more product to sell. The best vodkas, the ones that are sticklers for quality, they take just the hearts. So there is a difference, Dan.

Dan Pashman: Maybe.

Dan Pashman: Hey, look, I like Ronak. He seems like a great guy, but remember he's selling vodka for 40 bucks a bottle. So I don't think he's gonna say that his is just the same as the $10 stuff on the bottom shelf. 

Alex Goldmark: Ronak did tell us one other interesting thing, remember how he was one of the only distillers who we called up who actually said, yeah, sure. Come on over. Take a look around. 

Dan Pashman: Yep, yep. That's true.

Alex Goldmark: He says that is because a lot of vodka labels don't distill their own alcohol. They buy it in bulk from somebody else.

Ronak Parikh: Very often, this is not just vodka. Whiskey especially, this is the case in America where there's just a very few producers, but a lot of brands, right? So the distal is all coming from one location. Whenever I see five times distilled, six times distilled, this is a very common number I see in our industry. And that tells me, oh yeah, there are some pretty big, uh, commercial manufacturers, uh, that are manufacturing this, doing five times cystine distilled, and selling that off to other distilleries who then don't distill it, who don't do anything other than just add water to it, slap a label on it and call it whatever, vodka.

Dan Pashman: And that seems so weird to me. 'cause with every one of these vodkas, we hear this fairytale about how the craft copper still blah, blah, blah. You know. 

Alex Goldmark: Kissed by the Colorado Rapids. 

Dan Pashman: Exactly. Yeah. But I set out to find out how bulk buying works. And, and it's true. There's this one company that's huge, like everyone in the liquor industry knows them, Ultrapure, they say they have the largest selection of bulk alcohol in the world.

Dan Pashman: They sell basically pure alcohol, like vodka concentrate. It's a base. Lots of companies buy it and use it to make their own vodka brands. Some of the companies take the base and distill it further. They tweak it, they put their own spin on it. But Ultrapure told me that the more price driven companies, they just take the base, add water. They're in business, they're selling vodka. So I called 'em up and I said, Hey, can I get some of that vodka concentrate? And they said, yeah, no problem. Samples are in the mail. 

Alex Goldmark: I appreciate this. I like it. I am looking forward to our science experiment, but I do not see how a vodka concentrate from a warehouse is gonna be better than Grey Goose.

Dan Pashman: Oh yes, of course. Alex, the famous Grey Goose from France with the French flag on the bottle from the tradition of French vodka. 

Alex Goldmark: I see what you're doing. 

Dan Pashman: I mean, yeah, back of the Palace of Versailles. I hear that Vodka flowed all day and night. 

Alex Goldmark: Just keep going. The stage is yours. 

Dan Pashman: In fact, when you think of alcoholic beverages in France, is there any alcoholic beverage that would even cross your mind other than vodka? I think not. 

Alex Goldmark: Okay. 

Dan Pashman: I mean, go to the cave paintings of Lascaux and you will see murals of vodka as far as the eye can see it. It is the quintessentially French beverage. 

Alex Goldmark: You are making your point well. 

Dan Pashman: Let's get real, Alex. Grey Goose was invented in the nineties by a college dropout from Connecticut. 

Matthew Latkiewicz: Sidney Frank, he is a classic American businessman in, in almost a cliche, both in good ways and in and in bad ways. Like he came from nothing poor. He went to Brown, but he only went to Brown for one year because he couldn't afford it. 

Dan Pashman: This is Matthew Latkiewicz.

Matthew Latkiewicz: I'm a drink writer and the author of You Suck at Drinking. 

Alex Goldmark: So how many drinks do you have on a day on average? 

Matthew Latkiewicz: Uh, well, I'm trying to cut back. When I was at the height of my drink writing powers, uh oh gosh. Five to eight. 

Alex Goldmark: We are such amateurs. 

Dan Pashman: Anyway, Sidney Frank drops outta college, ends up marrying a woman from a wealthy family and her family business is liquor. So he kind of slides into the liquor business sideways.

Matthew Latkiewicz: He doesn't love liquor necessarily, he's just looking for niche products. And he stumbles on this, uh, bar where he sees these old German folks drinking Jagermeister. Which at the time, this was in the eighties, was selling like 500 cases a year. Like nothing. Nothing at all. 

Dan Pashman: So Sidney Frank buys the rights to import Jagermeister, which if you don't know it's a liqueur that's sort of herbal tastes kind of like black licorice cough syrup.

Alex Goldmark: Which probably explains the low sales. 

Dan Pashman: And he buys it precisely because it isn't well known and it doesn't really do much beyond the old German man market for a while. But then he hears about students at Louisiana State University actually liking Jagermeister. There's an article in the local paper that says, all the kids know this is what you drink when you wanna get drunk.

Matthew Latkiewicz: One of them described it as liquid Valium, and that was what kicked off. He was like college kids. And with Jagermeister, he essentially invents all of the garbage that we may know about liquor companies and their marketing practices now, he basically invents them. 

Dan Pashman: He sponsors parties, he butters up bartenders. He even sets up a team of scantily clad women to give away free shots. 

Matthew Latkiewicz: Yep. Yeah, they were called the Jagerettes. That was a Sidney Frank special right there. So he had this kind of gorilla marketing savvy. You know, he kind of didn't play by any of the normal rules. 

Dan Pashman: So just to put a button on it, Alex, in case it wasn't clear, Sidney Frank took a drink popular with old German men and turned it into the hottest drink for the party set on college campuses. And after he did that, he set his sights higher on vodka. 

Alex Goldmark: And at the time, the fanciest vodka around was absolute vodka. It had a great marketing campaign, but by today's standards, it wasn't really an expensive bottle of vodka. And that's what Sidney Frank knows is his competition. But the thing he focuses on is not the taste of absolute, of course it is the price. 

Matthew Latkiewicz: He essentially out of thin air goes, I wanna make a vodka. So Absolute’s charging 15, I'll charge 30. He didn't even have a product at this point, 

Dan Pashman: But he already knows he's gonna charge double. And in order to do that, he needs a product that screams luxury. 

Matthew Latkiewicz: It’s gotta be the best. Everything that is the best comes from France. So he goes to France and he looks around for distillers. He says, can you make vodka? He finds somebody who says, yes, of course they can make vodka. 

Alex Goldmark: And so he goes around to bars with his French vodka, making it seem special. He made a big deal that it was made of French wheat. All kinds of things designed to make Grey Goose seem different from other vodkas. 

Matthew Latkiewicz: He would give them the bottle in these wooden box with straw inside and nicely packaged. It'd be this large clear bottle with the frosted glass that when you put it up on the back bar would catch whatever light was there and it would kind of glow.

Dan Pashman: It's not that he didn't care about taste at all, it's just that he didn't start there. 

Matthew Latkiewicz: He did submit it to the BTI, which is the Beverage Tasting Institute, and it was awarded the best tasting vodka in the world in whatever 90, early nineties thing. 

Dan Pashman: And he used that in his marketing a lot. Sidney Frank's whole plan worked. Vodka is now the most popular liquor in America, and he died a very rich man. 

Alex Goldmark: He sold Grey Goose to Bacardi less than 10 years after he started it for more than $2 billion. And and before you even start on this, Dan…

Dan Pashman: I'm tempted to start, Alex.

Alex Goldmark: I see how this whole story argues that, that it's just marketing, that all vodkas are the same, that my allergy to cheap vodkas that I genuinely feel Is all just in my head, but I think we should still test this as scientifically as we can. 

Dan Pashman: I agree, Alex and I got good news. Guess what just arrived in the mail. The vodka concentrate I ordered from Ultrapure. 

Alex Goldmark: Oh boy.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Coming up, Alex and I attempt to make our own super premium vodka. Then we send it to a lab to see how it measures up against Grey Goose. Plus we'll check in at the bar to see how Alex's face is doing. 

Dan Pashman: Did you bring an EpiPen? 

Alex Goldmark: .I don't even think I even brought my inhaler. 

Dan Pashman: Stick around.

+++BREAK+++

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to a Sporkful reheat. I'm Dan Pashman. Hey, if you're not already following the Spark Full in your podcasting app, what are you waiting for? In Apple Podcast and Spotify, go to our show page and click follow. In other apps, it might be like a plus sign or a subscribe button, or a heart, whatever it is in your podcasting app, please do that thing. It's the best way to ensure you'll never miss an episode, and it's good for our show. So please go ahead and do it right now while you're listening. Thank you.

Dan Pashman: Now back to today's show and I'm here with my friend Alex Goldmark from Planet Money, and we are about to make our own vodka. 

Dan Pashman: So Alex, we got this vodka concentrate from Ultrapure and I picked out one in particular that I think you're gonna be excited about. 

Alex Goldmark: Okay.

Dan Pashman: Ultrapure cells of vodka concentrate made in France with French wheat four times distilled.

Alex Goldmark: That sounds pretty good. I'd even say it sounds like it could be the best. The best that comes from France. 

Dan Pashman: Exactly, Alex. That's right. Now, look, Ultrapure told us they don't sell to Grey Goose, but they're clearly going for something similar here. I mean, there aren't that many vodka distilleries in France. We're not talking about wineries here. Okay. 

Alex Goldmark: And four times distilled sounds good to me. Maybe even premium. 

Dan Pashman: I would go so far as to call it super premium, Alex. And that's what we're gonna do right now. We're gonna make our own super premium vodka. To clarify, Grey Goose is distilled only once, not four times.

Alex Goldmark: I dunno. This looks like a, uh, like a travel shampoo, bottle sized bottle, uh, with very clear white liquid in it. And they're wrapped in bubble wrap and taped. That's what we're taking off now. 

Dan Pashman: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: Uh, the labels look kind of homemade though, Dan. Yes. They look like they were printed on somebody's inkjet printer.

Alex Goldmark: Uh, yeah. But not even with the right alignment. 'cause alcohol sort of falls off the edge. 

Dan Pashman: Yeah. Like the label. Yeah. They're cut off. Yeah. Yeah. 

Alex Goldmark: Okay. Well our vodka company's off to a good start. We've got this very handy, fancy, highly scientific graduated cylinder that Planet Money owns going back to our story on class action lawsuits.

Dan Pashman: Now here comes the part of this entire story that I have most been dreading 

Alex Goldmark: What? 

Dan Pashman: Math. Grey Goose, and most vodkas are 80 proof, which means 40% alcohol. But these bottles are not even easy to work with number. They're 192 proof. So we gotta bring those down to 80 proof by adding water. 

Alex Goldmark: It's 192 proof. So if we have to make two, 

Dan Pashman: Ugh, this is hard because… 

Alex Goldmark: Oh we have our intern here, Aviva. 

Aviva: Happy to be here.  

Alex Goldmark: And she's got a calculator. 

Dan Pashman: This is not a hundred percent. 

Alex Goldmark: I'm gonna say, Hey, this math works. 

Dan Pashman: If this was a hundred percent.

Alex Goldmark: Then we need to have 83.333. 

Dan Pashman: No, no, no, no. 

Alex Goldmark: Oh, Kenny's a math major. Listen.

Dan Pashman: Let’s get Kenny in here.

Alex Goldmark: We… Kenny's on deadline.

Dan Pashman: So, Kenny, we heard you're a math major. We have a math question for you.

Kenny: Alright, how many milliliters is this? 

Alex Goldmark: Well, we're gonna pour it in here. 

Kenny: Okay. And what are you cutting it with again? 

Alex Goldmark: Water. That purified water we got from the drugstore.

Kenny: This isn't how you make vodka, is it?

[Pouring sounds]

Dan Pashman: So we bottled our homemade French wheat vodka in a sterilized bottle and sent it to a lab 'cause we wanted to see how it measures up. The thing is, we gotta test it against something, right Alex? 

Alex Goldmark: Sure. Naturally. 

Dan Pashman: So we also sent some Grey Goose in an unmarked bottle. And we decided to send them some of the cheap stuff. The Alex Special, bottom shelf plastic bottle. 

Alex Goldmark: We sent the whole thing to San Diego to a place called White Labs. This is a whole lab where they test different types of alcohol. 

Dan Pashman: Which I think Alex is something you and I have been doing for quite some time ourselves, especially this week for this episode. 

Dan Pashman: While the lab runs its test, please enjoy this musical interlude.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: To get our results. We called up Neva Parker. She's a vice president at White Labs. 

Alex Goldmark: Did our, did our samples, I'm just curious, did they look professional? Did like, did we look like a good vodka startup to you when you took 'em out? 

Neva Parker: They absolutely did. 

Dan Pashman: That's, that's gratifying. 

Neva Parker: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: Neva ran our vodka samples through what they call a comprehensive spirits test. It measures different chemicals in the alcohol that people might be able to taste. Also, a test for chemicals that just shouldn't be there. 

Alex Goldmark: We sent them three bottles with no labels, just a number on them. Number one was Grey Goose. Number two was our homemade French wheat vodka, and number three was the bottom shelf plastic bottle vodka.

Dan Pashman: And Neva said one of the vodkas stood out. 'cause it had more of this one specific compound. It's called 1-propanol. And that's not a good thing. You want less of it in your vodka. 

Neva Parker: Yeah. Um, typically when you taste  1-propanol, that's more of that harsher alcohol kind of grainy alcohol compound. 

Alex Goldmark: Yeah. Like nail polish remover.

Dan Pashman: Right. So the vodka that has more of that stuff is not as good according to this test. 

Neva Parker: So it's possible that that shows that maybe this product wasn't distilled as many times or distilled to, you know, the same amount of purity as the other two, which have lower levels. 

Dan Pashman: Based on that information, Neva, which of these three vodkas would you suspect should be the cheapest, least desirable Vodka?

Alex Goldmark: Okay. Remember, Grey Goose is number one. Our homemade vodka is number two, and the cheap stuff in a plastic bottle is number three. 

Neva Parker: If I had to choose based on this analysis alone, I would say number one, 

Alex Goldmark: And which would be the ultra luxury choice? 

Neva Parker: Number three. 

Alex Goldmark: Number three, wow.

Dan Pashman: So, based on number three is the best vodka that money can buy of these three.

Alex Goldmark: To be clear, Neva said that all three of these vodkas, they had less of that bad stuff than anyone was going to be able to taste. But from what she could tell, the plastic bottle vodka seemed like the best. Grey goose seemed like the cheapest and our homemade vodka held its own against both of them. 

Neva Parker: I mean, look at these. They all look very similar as well. 

Alex Goldmark: So would you say that ours is basically Grey Goose? 

Neva Parker: Yes. I would. 

Alex Goldmark: So we basically made Grey goose. 

Dan Pashman: Wow.

Dan Pashman: We did talk to Grey Goose, their global brand ambassador, Joe McCanta, took issue with our test. 

Joe McCanta: Obviously our product was decanted. And when that happens, it kind of compromises our understanding of any testing that's done on the product afterwards. 

Dan Pashman: He also argued that the odorless, tasteless law is more about distinguishing true vodka from vodkas that have stuff like fruit and sugar added. Pure vodka is its own category. 

Joe McCanta: Every vodka within the category will have its own characteristics, which would be largely attributed to the raw materials used to make the spirit or even the process used while distilling the spirit. 

Alex Goldmark: One other thing that Neva told us about the vodkas that she tested, and I especially like this part, even if you can't taste the difference, trace amounts of any compound in the vodka you're drinking could be enough to set off an allergy, like maybe making your face turn red when you're drinking cheap vodka.

Dan Pashman: But the bottom line for me, science shows that if you don't have an allergy. All vodkas are pretty much the same, 

Alex Goldmark: But if you do, there is one last test. 

Dan Pashman: All right, Alex, you've moved on to drink number two. How are you feeling? 

Alex Goldmark: I actually do feel the redness coming on. You're, you're telling me I, I don't have it?

Dan Pashman: I mean, look, Alex, you've convinced me. I think what we have learned here today is that the differences between cheap and expensive vodkas may not be tasteable for most people, maybe not even for you, but your delicate constitution may be sensitive to them on the inside.

Alex Goldmark: That was a polite way of saying a lot of mean things, but I appreciate that. And I will take it. 

Dan Pashman: Alex never did turn red that night. He can't say why. 

Alex Goldmark: I was a little red. I was a little red.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Alex Goldmark, my friend from Planet Money, you know, I, uh, always meant to take economics in college, but it always met Friday mornings at 9:30 AM and so I refused to take it. And I figured that I would pick up economics, you know, just as I went through life and most of what I know now I've learned from listening to Planet Money because it's the show that's for people like me who don't actually understand it intuitively.

Alex Goldmark: We try to have fun while talking about serious economic topics. 

Dan Pashman: Well, Alex, here's to many more good times drinking, uh, sometimes for podcasts, sometimes just for fun. Take it easy. 

Alex Goldmark: I look forward to it. Thanks a lot, Dan.