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Better Drink Concentrates

Use reverse osmosis to remove water
  (+4, -1)
(+4, -1)
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The most common application of reverse osmosis is to produce drinking water from salt water, incidentally generating a wastewater stream of very salty water.

What if we used the same process, applied it to things like fruit juices, but discarded the purified water, and kept the juice concentrate? It would still need to be pasturized, but since less heat would be involved than is used in the normal method of making a concentrate, fewer nutrients would be lost.

Also, we could make concentrates of things that would be damaged by the heat involved in the normal method of boiling to make a concentrate, for example alchoholic drinks. Ethanol molecules are too large to pass through the osmotic membrane, so only water would be removed, producing a beer concentrate which could be reconstituted by mixing with water.

goldbb, Feb 08 2009

Similar http://www.freepate...ne.com/4612196.html
[Smurfsahoy, Feb 09 2009]

ATF article strongly suggesting existing beer concentrating ability http://www.ttb.gov/rulings/94-3.htm
[Smurfsahoy, Feb 09 2009]

[link]






       If this really can be done with beer you will be rich one day. As for the rest I just don't see a big enough advantage.
zeno, Feb 09 2009
  

       Not baked as far as I know, but patented it seems.
Smurfsahoy, Feb 09 2009
  

       Beer concentrate - and plausibly. But this would decarbonate the beer. A wine concentrate, on the other hand, might really work and could be sold as a beverage itself. It would be converging on cognac, wouldn't it?
bungston, Feb 09 2009
  

       wine concentrate = port. You can buy it at any grocery store. (Called port, by the way, precisely because its concentration was designed to help transport wine more easily. But then people realized it was really tasty on it's own, anyway, so it's still an end-user product)   

       As for the carbonation in beer, I would presume you could simply reconstitute it with seltzer to fix that problem. Maybe the carbonation helps keep it sanitized in storage and transit, though?
Smurfsahoy, Feb 09 2009
  

       //wine concentrate = port.// Actually, Port is made by adding wine distillate (ie, brandy) to wine, rather than by concentrating in this sense.
MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 09 2009
  

       If wine were made into a concentrate (removing only water and nothing else), instead of a distillate, it would probably have a stronger flavor.   

       Whether wine concentrate would be tasty undiluted, I don't know... but it would certainly be easier to transport.
goldbb, Feb 24 2009
  
      
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