Is Running Cheap Vodka Through A Filter A Genius Hack Or A Waste Of Time?

In college, one of my go-to alcoholic drinks for a night out was Red Bull mixed with the cheapest vodka my friends and I could get our hands on. Some lesser-known brand, vaguely Slavic swill from a gas station that kind of tasted like what was in the pumps. Even the syrupy sweet buzz of the energy drink mixer couldn't mute the potent chemical burn, and forget about our caffeine intake (next time you buy an energy drink, check out the ingredient label if you want a shock).

We'd long heard rumors that running cheap vodka through a water filter might help it go down better, but we usually drank the stuff as fast as we could just to avoid the taste. (Reading that back, perhaps it's no wonder that younger Americans are drinking less on average.) Of course, back then none of us owned our own personal water filter to try the hack out, but since the myth has now persisted through several decades, surely there must be something to it?

Turns out there is, kind of. No amount of Brita filtration will turn a handle of Kamchatka into Ketel One but, despite this, multiple taste tests have shown that filtering cheap vodka can marginally affect its quality for the better.

After decades of taste tests by boozy bloggers, social media influencers, and the cast of "Mythbusters," people often report that they can taste the difference between filtered and unfiltered cheap vodka. But they can also taste that it is not as smooth as premium vodka.

The reasons behind this are fairly simple science. Most high-end vodkas acquire their characteristic smoothness through multiple rounds of distillation, after which the liquid is filtered through activated carbon. The reason the hack sort of works is because a sufficiently low-quality vodka poured through a high-quality filter can still have some impurities caught by the at-home Brita.

But this requires many variables to align, and different combinations of vodkas, filters, and taste testers will yield different results. However, no combination of variables will make up for the purification power offered by professional distillation. A filter won't help much with hangovers, either, so we'll unfortunately have to keep searching for that cure.