Since the point of aging in porous barrels is to expose the whiskey to oxygen in order to cure the various congeners, would it speed up the process to actually continually bubble oxygen gas through the whiskey?
The oxygen is only one part of the aging. Evaporation and extracting flavors and aromas from the wood are also major components. Bubbling oxygen would throw off the balance of those processes.
I don’t know if it would be bad, but it would certainly be different.
this is the crux of the issue. It seems like, anecdotally at least, people can taste the difference that this aging imparts. Whether that is universally true, confirmation bias, or something else entirely is unclear. As others have noted in this thread, I would like to see a double blind tasting experiment with identical whiskeys, one aged entirely in a rickhouse and one aged partly on board a ship, but of course we’ll never get that from distillers who can charge more for ship aged whiskeys.
The distiller I mentioned above, Pilot House Distilling in Astoria, OR, uses the same base whiskey for “Barrel & Tide”, aged for 2 to 5 years in their warehouse, and “A-O Come Hell or High Water”, which is aged 2 years on land and 6 months to a year on a boat. I didn’t do a blind taste test, but I did taste all three side by side. They’d be happy to let you taste them blind (and I’m sure many people do) if you visit their tasting rooms in Astoria or Cannon Beach.
I’d rank one of the boat whiskey’s #1 of the three I tried, the land version #2, and the other boat version as third. Of course, that says more about my preferences than any objective quality measure.
It isn’t some controversial statement to say that the aging methods and environment have an enormous impact on a finished whiskey. It’s fair to question if aging on a boat makes it better, but it’s ridiculous to question if it changes it at all.
Yes, and a few years ago at a ACAMs convention, I won a bottle of it. pretty damn good, but not that special.
To be a more proper experiment, you’d need two barrels with the same treatment and one with the different treatment. Maybe there is a normal difference from barrel to barrel under identical conditions.
I’ll say again, I am not a drinker and don’t like the taste of any kind of liquor. I still find this discussion interesting.
In general, barrels from the same batch can have quite different characteristics, hence the role of the master distiller or blender in the process. I believe that location in the rickhouse is thought to be a major factor (hottest point being high up on the sun-side, coolest point being low on the side opposite the sun) and the variability of the wood as the cooper works through the available boards from different trees.
So just having two barrels of with the same new-make contained within would be expected to have some difference in flavor.
That’s interesting. So there probably isn’t a good way of knowing if barrels on a ship versus not on a ship is just normal barrel to barrel variation. If I liked the taste of liquor I’d be such a nerd about all of this.
Not a consumer of whiskey myself, but as the resident pedant here, wouldn’t a more appropriate thread title be “Whiskey aged on ships at sea”? Especially because “ships at sea” is such an evocative literary expression. These little nuances bug me, but fine, I’ll show myself out!
It’s a bad rabbit hole, but I eventually got tired of the whole thing once it became a battle among influencers to get the ‘good’ bottles. At this point I only drink a handful of times a year so I’ve given up paying any attention to the hype.
For a while in the 2008-2010 range (I think) I was involved in a sample exchange program where we were trying to comparatively taste all the bottles in the Buffalo Trace Single Oak project…
Single Oak Project embodies Buffalo Trace Distillery’s spirit of curiosity and craftsmanship. It began with 96 hand-selected American oak trees, each chosen for its unique growth rings and origin. Every tree was divided into top and bottom halves, yielding 192 sections, each made into a single barrel.
Before filling, the staves were seasoned and charred differently, then paired with varying whiskey recipes, entry proofs and aging environments. The result: 192 distinct bourbons, revealing the impact of seven critical variables and 1,396 possible taste combinations. No two bottles are alike – a true reflection of the art and science of bourbon making.
good point. Because…
there absolutely is. Otherwise identical single barrel bourbons can vary from bottle to bottle because, although they have the same mash bill and are aged the same, they can come from different barrels.
I think @TroutMan’s side-by-side is the best comparison you can get unless you are the master distiller.
The batch is aged on land, then split with some going to sea. The remaining barrels on land are the control for the master distiller to assess what the sea aging did.
Then as @Pork_Rind said, it all gets blended to taste, both the land and sea barrels. The blending adds too many unknowns to really assess the sea aging process.
I remember reading an interview with a master distiller mentioning tasting outstanding whisky then weeping as it was blended with others not as good. It had to be done or the quality of the blended stuff would suffer.
To be called an Islay whisky, it has to be distilled on Islay. Caol Ila ships almost all of their new spirit to warehouses in Glasgow.
Blending or vatting? There are certainly enough bottlers selling bottles from individual casks, but I could understand that a master distiller can’t reserve all the casks for special bottling.
Technically vatting. In the bourbon world there really isn’t much blending in the sense that applies to Scotch, so it’s common to hear of the master distilling ‘blending’ the good and the bad barrels of a particular make to get the final consistent bottled product.
Aren’t many of them? Metallica marketed whiskey aged in a barn
… where they blasted Metallica all day every day for five years.