Sure, here are several:
https://whiskyadvocate.com/Cask-Away-The-Voyages-of-Ship-Aged-Whiskies
Also, and this is just personal experience: I have had at least samples of most of the boat-aged liquors which my friend’s company makes (and have bought and enjoyed several bottles). They are very flavorful and smooth, much moreso than one would imagine for whiskies and bourbons which have only been aged for a relatively short time.
What it if were on a rocker mechanism in a warehouse? What if the rocker was outdoors or near the coast?
Edit: I don’t know shit about liquor. I don’t like any of it. This is just interesting to me.
Might work similarly? I am not a distiller; I’m just sharing what knowledge I do have on the subject.
Both of those are claims, rather than proof.
There’s a theory if action which makes sense, but no testing if the theory. I don’t even mean like chemical analysis, anyone taken a 2 barrels with the same mashbill from the same rickhouse, sent one on a boat while leaving the other home, and don’t a double-blind taste test? Chemical analysis?
OK, fine. You win. It’s not fucking scientifically double-blind tested fucking proof. It’s clearly just marketing bullshit.
Touchy.
I didn’t say it was bullshit.
Sorry, man. I’ve had a bad day, in the midst of a bad year.
Not in so many words, but your replies to me came across that way:
I understand skepticism, but I think I need to be done with this thread.
This has been part of how Norwegian aquavit (caraway-infused grain spirit) has been aged for centuries.
Peculiar to the Norwegian tradition are Linje Aquavits (such as “Løiten Linie” and “Lysholm Linie”). Linje Aquavit is named after the tradition of sending oak barrels of aquavit with ships from Norway to Australia and back again, thereby passing the equator (“linje”) twice before being bottled. The constant movement, high humidity, and fluctuating temperature cause the spirit to extract more flavour and contribute to accelerated maturation.
FWIW, I tried some about 5 years ago and was underwhelmed.
Seems logical that getting sloshed around with wide temp variations for 6 months will have an effect. The question, however, is that effect good or bad on the whiskey???
There’s an Oregon distillery that ages one of their whiskeys on local fishing boats.. I recently visited and did a side-by-side tasting of the same batch that was sent on two different boats. On one boat it was on deck, on the other it was in a hold.
The taste of each was distinctly different, like easily detectible by a novice at first sip. At a $75 price point, one of the whiskeys was decent, the other was very good.
Whatever your opinion of the finished product, it most definitely affects the flavor profile and is not simply a gimmick.
That’s an interesting data point. I’m more curious about comparing the on deck one with an outdoor contraption that rolls that barrell around similar to how a fishing boat would.
This reminds me of a pretty bad joke about a blind lumberjack…
I was curious too, but couldn’t find any examples of distilleries that do this; although there are discussions about the idea.
I did find that both Rogue (now out of business) and Talisker expose their barrels to coastal conditions to improve the flavor. On Rogue’s site they claim that the changing barometric pressure changes the absorption of whiskey into the barrel.
I also saw an AI reference to Copper & Kings using sonic agitation, but I didn’t follow up on it.
FWIW, I don’t drink or follow whiskey. This is just what I found web searching.
I’m happy to help fund such research and be part of the study group. Let’s make it happen!
You’re going to need peer review for that…
Aging at sea used to be common for Madeira (a type of fortified wine). I don’t think they do it that way any more. I’d never heard of whiskey being aged this way until now.
For barrels of Madeira wine, it is desirable that they be exposed to tropical heat, whether in the hold of a ship or otherwise. I am not sure that whiskey is supposed to get as hot.
According to a Scottish friend who has since passed away, this is true. Islay whiskies are aged in barrels in warehouses, but warehouses that are right by the sea. Over the years, the sea air, and the occasional sea wave, has permeated the concrete walls of the warehouse, to the point where it affects the whisky as it ages.
Islays are an acquired taste. My Scottish friend loved them, and was often glad to teach the gang at the local pub, including me, about them. Now, I rather like them, but they are most certainly not the place to start if you have never had Scotch whiskey before.
Curious as to how my favourite Islays would stack up against the whiskies aging at sea.
I’m curious to how a blind taste test of “sea aged” or “sea adjacent aged” whiskeys would fare against regularly aged varieties in a blind taste test. Other than temp and pressure, I have a difficult time with the notion that what’s going on environmentally outside of a thick water-tight casket has any effect on the contents inside.
The casks are not exactly water tight. The oak has microscopic pores that allow the exchange of vapors with the surrounding environment. And that environment has a major impact on the finished product. It’s not just absolute temperature and pressure; it’s the fluctuations in those plus factors like the humidity and other compounds in the air. And motion accelerates everything.
A whiskey barrel looks solid, but at a microscopic level it’s full of tiny channels running through the wood grain. As temperature and pressure shift, the liquid inside the cask expands and contracts, pushing into those channels and pulling back out again. Some of that liquid, as both alcohol vapor and water vapor, escapes straight through the wood and into the warehouse air. It’s a slow, continuous exchange, not a single event, and it never fully stops for as long as the whiskey sits in wood.