High‐alcohol drinking (HAD1) and low‐alcohol drinking (LAD1) rats were trained to discriminate among 0.75 g/kg ethanol, 1.5 g/kg ethanol and saline under a fixed‐ratio 10 schedule. LAD rats learned the discrimination more rapidly than HAD rats, and asymptotic performance by LAD rats was better than that of HAD rats. The 0.75 g/kg dose of ethanol failed to control the responding of HAD rats, both when baseline responding stabilized and during the determination of an ethanol dose–response curve. These differences between LAD and HAD rats in ethanol discrimination were not observed in previous experiments using a two‐choice procedure. The three‐choice procedure may be useful for establishing strain differences in ethanol discrimination. These and previous experiments with alcohol‐preferring rats suggest that the learning of an ethanol discrimination may be dissociable from voluntary ethanol consumption in rat strains bred selectively to consume ethanol.