Metallica probably needs no introduction being one of the biggest metal/rock bands in history. But many may not know that the band has been selling their own whiskey since 2018.
One of the selling points of their Blackened Whiskey (and subvariants that have been released over the years) is “sonic enhancement.” The Blackened website has a whole page devoted to explaining the concept:
From the time Dave was a cadet at West Point, he was fascinated with the effects of sound – the way an organ can play a note that shakes an entire building. As he honed his craft over the years, the thought of what sound could do to whiskey at a molecular level stayed with him. As it so happened, Metallica and Meyer Sound innovated a subwoofer employing that same range, harnessing the vibrations that make a Metallica concert the resonant, visceral experience their fans know and love. The convergence of these ambitions have resulted in a sonic-enhancement method that utilizes a variation of the band’s song-determined frequencies to disrupt the whiskey inside the barrel, causing increased wood interaction that kicks up the wood-flavor characteristics in the whiskey. We call this proprietary sonic-enhancement process BLACK NOISE™.
Dave in this case was master distiller Dave Pickerell who before passing away a few years ago was the man behind the whiskey.
The band just released a special batch that was sonically treated with their latest album.
This begs several questions: First and foremost, does piping music of at casks of aging booze make any difference to the final product or is this just a marketing gimmick, a modern take on Kiss putting their blood in the ink for Kiss comic books in the '70s?
If music does make a difference, would subjecting the oak casks to Barry Manilow make for a different drinking experience than Metallica?
The Venn Diagram of metal fans and alcohol consumers is damn near a circle (pit) so this is a very important question.
If it is being stored in charred oak barrels I can see sound playing a role. If loud enough it might cause the wood to vibrate the liquor and perhaps exchange flavonoids quicker.
Sound absolutely can cause alcohol to interact with the wood. There is a whole genre of “rapid-aged” whiskey (or whiskey-like products) that use ultrasonic methods to speed up the aging process. The problem is that it tends to pull out the less desirable wood flavors and leave behind the good ones.
Here is the Whiskey Tribe experimenting with it.
How that translates to playing Metallica at an aging cask, I don’t know.
With the disclaimer that I have no particular scientific expertise, I could buy into the idea that the vibrations from sound could have an effect. Playing Metallica specifically is obviously nothing more than a gimmick, but if, for the sake of argument, the choice of music were shown to make a difference, I’d be very curious to try some Captain Beefheart whiskey. Probably just one of those little “nip” bottles, though, just to get the idea. More than that could be dangerous.
There are several non-crazy ideas for how that could make a difference in the final product. It’s well known that climate affects the results of aging, so a moving ship gives the whiskey a varied climate over the course of it’s life (I believe they typically sail north/south). Also, the rocking of the ocean makes the whiskey slosh around in the barrel, giving it contact with more of the wood.
Whether this produces results worth the effort is…more difficult to determine, but it’s not pure marketing.