Another trend that has caught on is ageing of single malt scotches in casks or barrels that have been used to previously age port wine or sherry.
Glenmorangie’s Port Wood Finish is pretty tasty, although many single-malt lovers disdain such flavor-infusions as heretical.
And yet another (highly unfortunate) trend is the use of a stainless-steel aging vessel with oak chips in it. Many of the mid- and low-grade tequilas do this rather than using wooden casks or barrels. The cheap “gold” tequilas are now using artificial coloring because they don’t spend long enough on the oak chips to pick up any coloration (or much flavor, for that matter).
If aging/maturing is a chemical reaction, you ought to be able to speed it up, by heating the liquor. Why pay to have scotch sit around for 15 years, if you can age it in a few weeks 9at 100 C?)
Better yet, turn the barrel into sawdust, extract the chemicals from the wood with a hot ethanol wash and simply add measured amounts of the extract to the barrel and be done with the aging process once and for all. Or you could run the finished product through a reverse phase column to an electrospray mass spectrometer, analyze the components and place an order with Aldrich. Mmmmm chemicals.
The truth is that heating does not increase the rate of all chemical reactions proportionally. Also, part of the process is the slow cooling and heating of the barrel making it breath the barrel. You would not accurately reproduce the flavor of aging long term simply by heating it.
What **Warm and Prickly ** said. Plus some/all of the flavors would be off and the liquor would likely pick up a “burnt”, oxidized, maderized flavor(s).
Yeah. Wineries that crank out oceans of cheap, non-vintage wines (like Yellowtail Chardonnay, or any of the plethora of California giant wineries) have been chipping their wines for years. It’s just a cost-cutting measure, but it does produce an inferior (but often not entirely undrinkable) product.
Most of the used barrels go to the distilleries in Scotland, where they reuse them again and again to age Scotch. After they scrape and rechar them, of course.
Jinx, if all you have is an old bottle, instead of an old scotch, then buy a new bottle. Once out of the cask, age means nothing but bad. Unless you find a sealed 60 year old bottle of 20 year old single malt. Then what you have is an Abomination, and you must send it to me immediately for proper disposal.
That makes sense. I think is might also be the case that what’s going on inside the barrel is not just a straightforward set of chemical reactions with X amount of generic wood - some components of the wood will be more readily leached out into the alcohol than others - which could amount to a real difference between alcohol matured in contact with the surface area of the inside of a barrel vs a pile of sawdust (even if the surface area of the dust is equivalent)
-I’m thinking of chromatography - where some things travel further than others - in sawdust, there’s no significant distance to travel, so everything would come out proportionally.
I am a Chemical Engineer and this is what I learnt (or whatever I think I remember) during my course on Biochemical Engineering (aka Beer/drug making) course long back :
Alcohol : No taste (we are taling pure alcohol here)
Acids (Organic acids) : Pungent Taste / smell
Alcohol + Acids —> Esters : Very sweet smelling and great tasting.
So you get the idea. Aging is mostly to do with converting a lot of the acids that were formed during the fermentation process (fermentation is an anaerobic process and the yeast cells literally die from their excretion - aka alcohol and acids )
The problem is that Alcohol + Acids reacting to form esters is a slow reaction. Using different woods contribute to adding different acids and hence the different esters aka taste
Exactly. It’s like coffee. Weak coffee tastes more bitter than strong coffee, because the bitter notes are more easily extracted during the brewing process and without the other flavors to mask them it just tastes nasty. It’s hard for people to understand that, but it’s true. There’s also an equilibrium while aging whisky where less desireable flavors in the whisky are absorbed and mellowed by the barrel.
I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to age whisky at home. Buy some oak barrels, maybe some used bourbon barrels or sherry barrels, fill them with decent but young whisky, and wait it out. Of course, without the sea air of Islay you’ll never reproduce the quarter cask Laphroaig aging, but it would be an interesting hobby. Lay down 10 gallons or so every year, and after five years or so you’d have a constant supply.
You’d have 50 gallons of whisky and five years invested before you found out if it was working, which is kind of a drawback.
What’s really crazy is the solera system of aging for sherries.
Link: Solera - Wikipedia
A few months ago I was able to attend a bourbon seminar (if college were like that I would have never skipped class) given by Tom Bulleit, the guy who makes Bulleit Bourbon.
From what I remember (there was a great deal of lab work, followed by extensive take-home study):
While wines continue to age in their bottles, bourbons and whiskies only age inside the barrel. That means that a bottle of 12-year-old scotch purchased five years ago will not be the same as a newly-bought 17-year-old scotch.
Bourbon must be aged in new barrels, while whisky typically uses barrels that have been used for other alcohols. Distilleries in Scotland typically use sherry casks from Spain and bourbon barrels from America. The barrels from Bulleit bourbon get used in Johnnie Walker.
The aging process for bourbon and whisky comes from the gradual expansions and contractions as the temperature changes, which force the liquid into the wood and out again. According to Tom, bourbon can be aged less than whisky and still have a similar depth and richness (he compared a 7-year bourbon to a 12-year whisky) because the seasonal temperature range is so much greater in Kentucky than in Scotland.
And just my own WAG, but I’d guess that using high temperature treatment to speed aging would be likely to break up the aromatic molecules. What you’d get would probably be drinkable, but it would taste a lot different than good whisky. There may be other ways, however, at least with wine:
Thank you for the correction, and I apologise for shooting from the hip of memory which anymore is served by a random access system more akin to dusty bookshelves.
The Wikipedia cite had me scratching for WTF I had gotten the reference, made clear by Sublight's excellent post.
Sake brewing is a whole 'nother bag of worms, but IIRC aging after bottling only makes it worse.
No, that’s cheap Tequila, not Sake.
If there are worms, then it’s Mezcal, not Tequila.
Oh, for Christ’s Sake!
Well, if it’s for Christ, then I’d recommend a good red wine and skip the tequila entirely 
I believe you mean from Christ.