What is the difference between Beverage and Drink?

Most of us if not all of us already encountered this, ‘Would you like a drink?’  Or ‘should we order a drink?.’ Drinks and drinking are part of our social culture.  Drinking water is essential to all forms of life and without water one would not survive.  Essentially a beverage, as a form of liquid, is also a drink.  However, the rituals and the background to the two terms enable some subtle differences to be apparent.

How do we define 'drink'?

Drinks come in many different shapes and sizes.  The most common drinks are water, milk, juices, tea, coffee, soft drinks, and alcoholic drinks.  Alcoholic drinks such as wine and beer contain ethanol.  There are soft drinks or cool drinks, flavoured drinks, and carbonated drinks or fizzy drinks. Different countries have different names for their soft drinks ranging from soda, soda ‘pop’, and brand names like coco-cola, Pepsi.  The soft drink is made from refined cane syrup or corn syrup and usually very sweet because they contain more than the healthy recommended daily allocation of such sugars.

How do we make drinks?

There are several different steps taken to produce different drinks with different outcomes:

• Purification – water is the most common ingredient of most drinks. It can be filtered, chlorinated, or boiled to free it of bacteria and carrying the disease.
• Pasteurisation – this process is used mainly for milk. The liquid is heated for a short time and then cooled immediately.  The process reduces the growth of microscopic organisms.
• Juicing – fruits and vegetables can be used for extracting juices to be made into drinks. These drinks are considered to be healthy options.
• Infusion – this is the process used to extract flavours from plant material by lowering it into the water and allowing flavours to permeate the water. It is particularly used with different flavours or types of tea.
• Percolation- this type of drink is produced when the solution, water, pass through a permeable substance like coffee grounds to extract the flavour, colour, and aroma of the substance used to percolate.
• Carbonation – This occurs when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water. The water can be flavoured and the drink then becomes fizzy.
• Fermentation for wine – sugar and yeast combine to convert to ethanol in the fermentation process. When wine is made grape juice is used and the amount of fermentation time combined with the amount of sugar will determine the sweetness of the wine and the level of the alcohol.
• Fermentation and beer – beer is brewed with water, grain, hops and yeast. The germinating grain starts the process called malting.  Then it is milled and soaked and ferments.
• Distillation – is a method of separating mixtures to produce mild spirits that are alcoholic in nature and can be added to drinks for the purpose of mixing drinks.

What then is a beverage?

It is said that a beverage is also a drink because it is a liquid.  It is consumed by people on social occasions.  Generally speaking, a beverage is a hot drink or a brew of some sort.  The beverage may not necessarily have alcoholic connotations as tea and coffee are brewed and are beverages.  Beer is brewed and has an alcoholic component.  It is not served hot like tea and coffee but during the brewing, process heat plays its part in the making of beer.

How can we make beverages?

Beverages can be brewed, infused, percolated and fermented in fact everything associated with drinks can be linked to beverages except water.  A beverage has to have something added and water itself is just that – water.

To summarise:

Drink, drinks, drinking.	Beverage
A variety of liquids including water	A variety of liquids excluding water
Socialising and conversational vocabulary used to describe the act of having drinks	A more formal pretentious way of talking about having drinks.
Can be used as a verb and a noun.	Only used as a noun.
Can be used to describe drinks on a menu and to offer a drink at an event.	The formal commercial description of the refreshment offered on a menu or branded item
Many idioms, proverbs and sayings available.	Very few sayings and no known idiom available
Used to quench thirst hot or cold with or without alcohol.  Drinks can be mixed and used as cocktails.	Also used as a thirst quencher, hot or cold, with or without alcohol.  More effort needed to process a beverage.
Suitable for young and old, part of the culture of drinking for celebrations.	Suitable for all ages and the culture of drinking for celebrations but probably offered as drinks.

SOURCES: DifferenceBetween