Many of the compounds / tastes in alcoholic drinks are byproducts of the fermentation process, even if the ethanol itself is tasteless.

Most good low alcohol beers are fully fermented and just remove the ethanol via vacuum evaporation or reverse osmosis. Whilst in practice it is difficult the is no theoretical reasons it would damage the taste.

And alcohol free beer is generally made by removing the alcohol after fermentation. The problem is, the process of removing the alcohol can also affect the taste, but they're much better at it these days than they used to be.

> Alcohol by itself is tasteless though.

There seems to be disagreement over this.

To me, alcoholic beverages have a distinctive taste in common (stronger in spirits and weaker in beer or wine), which I always assumed was the taste of the alcohol itself.

Some sources describe pure ethanol as 'tasteless', albeit strongly odoured; if this is true, then I guess what I interpret as a taste is really the combination of the smell & the burning sensation.

But other sources describe it as having a taste -- e.g. CAMEO Chemicals (via PubChem) says ethanol has a 'pungent taste', and a paper I find when googling says 10% ethanol tastes bitter to everyone and sweet to some (and I know that's not exactly alcohol 'by itself' but they do attribute the taste to the ethanol).

I think if something has a strong smell it by definition has a strong taste? Most of what you taste is the smell. If you close your nose a lot of food becomes quite tasteless.

And yet coffee smells awesome but the taste is nothing like it. Not that it's tasteless but it's definitely very different.

Coffee contains many alkaloids (including caffeine), which are quite bitter but have little or no odour. Alcohol on the other hand has a very strong odour.