Reminds me of Peter Norvig's whiskey story:<p><a href="http://www.norvig.com/speech.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.norvig.com/speech.html</a><p>"Before I answer that, let me return for the moment to Dewey Decimal 663: beverage technology. It turns out that in my very first professional job, as an intern thirty years ago, I had a colleague, a chemist, who had worked in beverage technology. The summer before he had been an intern and was given the task of figuring out if there was a particular chemical that gave whisky the distinctive taste of being aged in an oak cask. The company figured if they could isolate the chemical maybe they could just mix it in, and skip five or ten years of aging. So my friend went into the lab and isolated what he thought might be the right compound. He ordered a small vial from a chemical supply company (remember, this was before online shopping and email, so they had to actually write words on paper) and mixed up a batch. It tasted pretty good. (Why can't we computer scientists get research projects that involve consuming alcohol?) My friend was duly congratulated, and he wrote to the chemical supply company and asked for a 55 gallon drum of the stuff. They wrote back, saying "we regret that we can not fill your order because we are currently low on stock and, as I'm sure you know, to produce this chemical we need to age it in oak casks for five years."
I'm surprised that this is the state of the art. Compare this to the manufacture of, say, orange juice: from the input oranges, the chemicals are all individually distilled out, put into separate bioreactors at exact concentrations along with additives and catalysts, each reaction product is filtered to remove waste products, and then the results are mixed back together in prescribed concentrations. Effectively, they're making a completely synthetic product, like a plastic or a mouthwash, except that (almost) all the input chemicals happen to be extracted from the same source.
There is an apparently not apocryphal story about a Scottish University that was charged with helping develop a synthetic "scotch whiskey taste". The labs identified the complex molecules and started looking for ways to synthesise them. Amazingly one day they found someone able to supply just the chemicals - they ordered a large supply and it worked. The new additive gave a rich full body to poor scotch. They were about to tell the distilleries the good news when they decided to ask how fast the supplier could provide this - "oh about twenty years, you see we buy barrels from these distilleries in the Highlands and then ..."<p>Cannot at all remember who told me that, but it seemed apt.
I'm really looking forward to trying a product of this system. As a fan of complex whiskies (mostly Scotch) and wild, chaotic rums, I'm wondering how close it can get to the myriad of flavors and textures those aged drinks provide. Differences in barrel types are immediately obvious in whisky - try Balvenie or other distilleries that offer different barrel-aging options.<p>I worry some, because as a musician, I'm all too familiar with the shortcomings of digital emulations of classic sounds. They can get 98%, but that last two percent is really bothersome and weak. I hope these new whiskies aren't like that!
There's a little more on the chemistry from this story in an email sent to K&L (bay area liquor store) by the distiller: <a href="http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/klwinescom-spirits-blog/2014/2/5/rum-super-geekdom.html" rel="nofollow">http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/klwinescom-spirits-blog/20...</a><p>FWIW, I'm a bit of a rum nerd and have been super impressed by the Lost Spirits Navy and Polynesian rums. I also noticed Longitude, a newish upscale Oakland bar by a veteran Tiki bartender, was using the Navy rum in a drink, so there are at least a few folks in industry who are believers as well.
Man has been trying to do this for decades. There's this AMAZING old movie called Gizmo! from the 60s (I think) with some guys running wine through a series of tubes and declaring it aged...<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVwqraUKxA&feature=youtu.be&t=2267" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVwqraUKxA&feature=youtu.be...</a><p>I found the clip! Must watch.
Doubt it, but these experiments are interesting because they let us discover the unknown unknowns in these chemical reactions.<p>If laboratory-aged whiskey is, to the best of our understanding, identical to normally-aged whiskey, what are the odds that it's actually identical? Pretty low, but it's how we expand our knowledge.<p>Also, it often trickles down and makes low-end products way better.
Can we assume that the big spirit producers would embrace this kind of process, or instead, seek to tighten laws as to what can actually be called X or Y spirits, in order to specifically exclude these new processes?
Good luck to him. There have been tricks to fake aged flavors wine, whiskey, and other aged alcohols for centuries. In CA mass-produced Chardonnay is aged in giant stainless steel with wood chips. Others make Bourbon with charred wood chips. There are tricks with pressure and temperature, wood, and other things that I'm sure that is secret and proprietary. It's not always clear where tradition ends and modern tricks begin because they've been doing some of these things for a long time.<p>But in the end these 'tricks' always produces an inferior product and are really only good for mass-produced wine/alcohol on the cheaper end.<p>As an aside, two things, there are some excellent aged rums out there. The complexity can be almost as good as aged whiskey and the texture/mouth-feel (don't know the proper word) can be like a 20-year+ scotch for something not aged as long.<p>Second, I see that he produced Absinthe in Spain which has similar thujone levels to absinthe that is legal in the u.s. USA absinthe is nothing like the real thing - it is more like drinking Pernod. In Switzerland, where Absinthe originates, the thujone level is 100x (?) what you get in the u.s. When you drink a fair amount of it it is like you have a high-contrast filter on your eyes. Further, modern absinthe is clear although I still prefer the green.