NEW DELHI: The alcohol in rum, whisky and vodka is the same molecule. What separates them, and what India’s food regulator says Old Monk got wrong, is a fraction of a per cent nobody thinks to question.
Pour a rum, a whisky and a vodka side by side, and you are looking at three drinks that differ in almost nothing that matters chemically.
The alcohol in each is the same molecule, present in roughly the same amount, doing exactly the same thing to the same enzymes in your liver. Everything you can taste, everything you would swear makes them different drinks, lives in a fraction of the liquid so small it barely registers on a lab report. Often less than one per cent of what is in the glass.
That fraction is the entire subject of this article, and it is why India’s food regulator has told the Bombay High Court that Old Monk cannot be sold simply as “rum,” arguing that the addition of artificial and nature-identical rum flavouring masks the drink’s natural characteristics and alters its true identity, which the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) says makes the label misleading.
FSSAI found that only 5 per cent of the drink was actually aged rum, the rest was plain spirit. So the manufacturer agreed to drop the “7 years old” claim and relabel the product as “Flavoured Rum.”
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