September 17, 2005 Now this makes a lot of sense, particularly if you like to drink liquor and want to minimise the damage it does to your body, reduce the hangover, take the edge off your moonshine or significantly improve the quality of the liquor you drink. We’re not sure just how well it works but the press reviews so far seem very promising, and … oh, what is it? The Gray Kangaroo Personal Liquor Filter uses a carbon-based filtration system to filter out impurities – just stick an empty bottle in the bottom and a full bottle of cheap plonk in the top and voila! … Additional filtration to remove the impurities is one of the processes involved in the manufacture of expensive liquor – the idea is that by using this US$30 filter you can make cheap liquor taste as good as the top shelf stuff.
The Gray Kangaroo Personal Liquor Filter is currently in it's third design, having evolved over the last few years of testing and tasting – the story is actually a very interesting one and can be read here.
“When you pay for booze, you pay for two things: you pay for the process to make the booze, and you pay for the marketing,” says Nick Esposito, creator of the Grey Kangaroo, pointing out that the Gray Kangaroo bypasses both expenses.
The Gray Kangaroo works with all pre-packaged hard liquors: vodka, whiskey, rum gin, tequila and the general consensus seems to be that it adds the most value to a bottle of cheap vodka and Esposito claims that cheap liquor (especially vodka) filtered through the GK is competitive with brands that cost three times the price.
It takes roughly five minutes to filter a 750ml bottle of liquor with the GK and filtering more than once improves the result each time. Each GK will filter at least 50 liters of liquor.
According to the site’s FAQs, here’s how they justify the return on investment. “If you take for granted that it takes a $8 bottle of liquor and makes it roughly equivalent to a $25 bottle of liquor (GK filtered liquor beats liquors that cost much more than $30 in taste tests) then the GK pays for it's self in savings after just 2 bottles.”
And that’s about it – we’ve got a GK heading our way so we can try it and let you know what we find. Until then, caveat emptor.
We came across the story via the excellent alcoblog, LiquorSnob. Thanks Jay
