Over the paset few years a controversy has been raging over the analysis of non-traditional alcoholic beverages. Scientific shenanigans are being played out by the entire craft beverage industry sector concerning the accuracy, or perceived lack thereof, of traditional analytical approaches (density with NIR, GC, distillation) to quantify alcohol levels in no- alcohol (NA) and low alcohol beverages as well as non-traditional alcoholic beverages such as kombucha, hard seltzer, hard soda, etc. The advantage of NMR spectroscopy for the complete analysis of these types of beverages will be discussed. The advantage centers around the fact that a primary analytical tool such as NMR can directly observe, identify and quantify most of the components present in these beverages allowing an unambiguous measurement of ethanol content on a weight/weight basis, a weight/volume basis and a volume/volume basis. While measuring the ethanol content the user also has a wealth of quantitative molecular information on sugars, higher alcohols, esters, amino acids, organic acids, that can be used for quality control and the development of an “almost complete” nutrition label. A quick 23Na qNMR can provide a sodium concentration. A take-home from these NMR analyses is that in the beverage world ethanol is always present at some concentration as it is typically used as a carrier solvent in many flavorants added to bring you the wonderful taste of rainbow sherbet, black cherry, mango lime, strawberry shortbread, broccoli-kale……
