The present work deals with the study of extracting alcohol from aqueous alcohol solution and subsequently from real solutions by evaluating the effect of two different membrane phases; hexane and heptane to form liquid emulsion membrane. Liquid emulsion membrane, in the present work is made up of hexane or heptane as the membrane phase, Span 80 as the surfactant, and distilled water as the inner aqueous solution. The effect of various extraction parameters such as surfactant concentration, treatment ratio, membrane to inner aqueous phase ratio, stirring speed and stirring time on the stability of liquid emulsion membrane and on the efficiency of extraction were studied. The results obtained showed the highest extraction efficiency of 51.45% or 49.5% when hexane or heptane were used as membrane phase, respectively. Studies on swelling behavior of emulsion were conducted and results showed that swelling increases with stirring time up to a certain point. Alcohol was also extracted from grape wine at optimized extraction conditions. The repeated extraction resulted in 92.9% extraction at fourth stage. Alcohol was also extracted from color extract solutions of different sources, where 90% and more extraction were observed at fourth stage of repeated extraction from all sources. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.