Post #340995 by The Gnomon on Mon, Oct 29, 2007 9:22 AM

On 2007-10-29 08:28, Tiki Zen wrote:
The conclusion - you can improve cheap vodka, but you can't make it top shelf. Plus, when you figure the cost of the filters, it is more economical to buy the top shelf.

So it looks like to CAN make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but you CAN'T spin straw into gold (unless, of course, you're Rumpelstiltskin). Even so, silk purses can be quite fashionable.

That test you excavated makes sense for any kind of liquor. Top shelf rums are distilled using high quality materials and processes, and are blended with care and skill. Cheap rums use cheap materials that contain a lot of crap, since it's cheaper to not bother eliminating the crap during production. It's reasonable to assume that filtering some of the crap out using an activated charcoal filter would make a noticeable improvement, but you can only do so much with a sow's ear.