Malt beverages

Bear with me here, I was not raised in a home that had booze around and know little about a lot of the stuff.

Okay, at Walmart, they don't sell any hard liquor, they have beer and wine coolers. And next to the wine coolers is something that looks similar but it's called malt beverage, and over on the shelf with the mixing stuff, great big bright colored bottles of stuff called malt beverage, in flavors, strawberry, peach, Hawaii blue...what do you do with this stuff? Do you just drink it or is it for making mixed drinks, or what? And exactly what the hell IS malt beverage anyway? What does it mean? I have wondered that for several years.

Malt beverages can be either alcoholic on non alcoholic. Beer actually is a malt beverage, but they don't call it that because most companies who distribute malt drinks don't want it be associated with beer or any other alcoholic beverage. Basically, malted drinks are just prepared from malted grains. Ovaltine is an example. The other stuff that you see on the shelf are just flavorings that you can add to make a malt drink taste similar to wines and other drinks without it actually being so.