Last month, we went to a small distillery that was making white corn whiskey and bourbon. The white whiskey was actually very nice, but the bourbon was good, not great. We bought a bottle of each. The whiskeys they make are sold in liquor stores in the area, not just on site, but they are definitely a small, family run business.
Both the white whiskey and the bourbon had a skunky finish that the whiskeys in the tasting room did not have. The had this taste when we first cracked the seal, it’s not like we let a half finished bottle sit around for weeks (that doesn’t really happen in our house).
What could have caused this problem? Perhaps the bottles were sitting in the direct sun, or stored improperly? Like I said, I liked their white whiskey and would give it another chance if I thought it was just a one off mistake.
My immediate reaction was No, whiskey lasts for decades. I Googled it and it basically said the same thing, although the taste could go off for a variety of reasons.
As long as it is well sealed, it should be pretty much fine for decades.
I wonder if being a small family run distillery, there might be noticeable variation between batches/distilling runs? Off flavors like that in a distilled spirit make me think of product variability/bad quality control rather than improper storage.
Unopened whiskey shouldn’t go bad unless it’s improperly stored. I can think of 2 reasons offthe top of my head why your whiskey may be “bad”:
Quality control. A small distillery may have distinctive differences between batches.
They whisky you bought may not have time to breathe. An already opened bottle(your sample at the distillery?) may taste slightly different to a newly opened bottle.
Honestly the only thing I can think of is the whiskey becoming “light struck”. However that’s going to require some sort of alpha acid molecule for the light to interact with. For beer, you get it from hops but I’ve never heard of hops being added to whiskey.
I’m with bump in thinking it’s a question of quality control.
As the owner of a small distillery I’ll agree with the inconsistent product group.
My distillery just had our first bad batch after about a year of being open. We follow the same procedure on every batch but this one came out of the barrel several shades lighter then all of our other batches but it tasted fine just more Carmel flavor rather than our normal vanilla. About three months the after bottling I was delivering some to a liquor store and they noticed some sediment in the bottle. We went back and about half the bottles had developed the sediment so we delivered them “good” bottles and sent a “bad” bottle off to a lab to figure out what went wrong. There is nothing unsafe about this batch according to the lab it just had some different reactions. But if that was the your first try of our product it would be inferior and we were selling it for three months without realizing it. Now it’s all be disposed of in cocktails so the flaws don’t matter.
Thanks for the input. It’s strange that what they were serving tasted so much better, but I’ll give them another chance the next time I’m in the area (the family does some nice charity work and are friends of friends).
Sure but if you want to change your labels you’ve got to get fed approval and that takes about a month. Honestly, our margins are much better on cocktails (80% vs 260%) so “disposing” of product this way isn’t a bad thing.