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Ultrasound Machine Ages Wine
Inventor Casey Jones says his creation uses ultrasound technology to recreate the effects of decades of aging by colliding alcohol molecules inside the bottle. Mr. Jones said, "This machine can take your run-of-the-mill £3.99 bottle of plonk and turn it into a finest bottle of vintage tasting like it costs hundreds. It works on any alcohol that tastes better aged, even a bottle of paintstripper whisky can taste like an 8-year-aged single malt." The Ultrasonic Wine Ager, which looks like a Dr. Who ice bucket, takes 30 minutes to work and has already been given the thumbs up by an English winemaker. I know a certain special lady who is about to have the best bottle of Boone's Farm in the world.
Yup indeedy. Whisky "ages" by leeching oils from the wood it's casked in.
Also, making a blend taste like a single malt is a ridiculous claim. It's akin to claiming a device can turn fruit-punch into pineapple juice. Where do the other flavours go?
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If you put in some oak chips. Some home brewers and small wineries age their wine
Not to mention Budweiser. Google "Beechwood aged."
They did that on Mythbusters once, but it was with vodka, not wine.
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Most celebrated distilleries that do blends try very hard to maintain consistency in the taste and so all years bottlings should be very similar. I know a similar show I watched showed a distillery where they kept a bunch of ~100 year old samples around as a reference so they could maintain their classic taste.
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Whisky ages by evaporating bad alcohols while retaining tasty ones. Flavours from the barrel wood and the sea air are a secondary effect. This cannot happen through a glass bottle, so bottling indeed stops the aging process. This explains why all whisky isn't 25 years old. Slashdot readers have surely wondered why we can't fill the pipeline and always have 25 year old whisky. The answer is that about 2% of the alcohols evaporate each year. Waiting 25 years means you lose about half the alcohol.
Whiskey most definitely is aged in oak casks, for quite a long time at that. Some distillers use fresh casks while others use casks that had been previously used for sherry. Some may use a sequence of casks even, or may have different types/lines that require certain types of casks. I know the scotch I drink has several different vintages. They age for a various number of years, again for the Glenlivet, that can be 12, 15, 16, 18, 21 years or more. The difference between each vintage is noticeable, primarily in the smoothness and variety in tastes.
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Oxidization is generally pretty bad for most alcoholic drinks (oxidization is the main component in bottle aging in wine, but much of this has to do with the interaction of the oxygen with tannins and other stuff in the wine - http://www.allbusiness.com/trends-events/trends/11429124-1.html). The oak or whatever wood being used is porous, and this allows some of the alcohol to evaporate (particularly with distilled stuff, wine doesnt spend as much time in the barrel, so it doesn't lose as much in the way of alcohol) . Good stuff does stay in a cask for a long time for just this reason, not only does it pick up more of the good flavor, but the "angel's share" is greater, which mellows the alcohol. New casks are required in America, where it is law that no barrel be used twice, in Europe however, there is no such law, and barrels are used multiple times because this imparts different flavors, which is how you can get a sherry-wood scotch, its literally a scotch aged in a barrel once used for sherry.
Er, there are a lot of different kinds of whiskey. Bourbon is aged in new, charred oak casks. Most of the flavor in bourbon comes from the barrel. These barrels are used once. Used bourbon barrels are then sold to other spirit makers, and sometimes beer brewers. (Samuel adams uses barrels from the Buffalo Trace distillery in Kentucky.)
Scotch whiskey does NOT use fresh charred barrels. When aging Scotch, it is very important NOT to impart too much flavor from the barrel as this overpowers the natural flavors in the whiskey itself. Scotch is aged in a variety of barrels, including used sherry barrels, used bourbon barrels, etc.
And yes, whiskey does indeed stop aging once it is bottled.
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Yes, the other alcohols are toxic (to varying degrees), but no, ethanol isn't the only alcohol present in fermented beverages. For that matter, ethanol is toxic by itself, if you take enough of it. It's the dose that makes the poison.
Small amounts of methanol can be produced in fermentation, as well as a number of heavier alcohols. These heavier alcohols are collectively called fusel alcohols or fusel oils, and may impart significant flavour to the final beverage. Whiskeys are generally fairly high in fusel oils; these heavier alcohols contribute some 'spiciness' or 'heat' to the drink.
That said, I agree with part of the parent post. The idea that fusel oils are lost to evaporation during aging is indeed nonsense. If anything, these higher-mass alcohols will have a lower vapour pressure than ethanol, and will be concentrated relative to ethanol. (Fusel oils are - partly - removed during the distillation process, not during aging.)
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So there is a good chance that there is a bit of Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, or maybe even Jack Daniels (even though it is actually Tennessee whiskey not bourbon) in your favorite scotch.
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Obligatory: I like my women like my scotch; 12 years old and mixed up with coke.
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My family has been distilling for generations, and finding ways to "age" things has been around forever. "Aging" is a nice ancient technique to make up for not having advanced technology at their disposal.
As far as cask aging, which I saw a few posts on, it has nothing to do with evaporating heavier alcohols (where would they go, and, there's is only one alcohol, ethanol).
Many distilleries use white oak casks, which receive a 1200 degree firing of the interior to charcoal the insides before the product is added. This is one of the causes of the "brown" color of those liquors that use this method as well as the "smoke" flavor, and is used to basically create an activated charcoal filter that the product lives in for "years".
When the barrel is fired (and then extinguished with steam blasted in) the char has all these nice little pathways and tiny cracks whose job is to grab all these taste screwing large molecules that give a harsh taste to the product. Just like activated charcoal is used in a water filter for drinking water, the same technique mellows the flavor of the liquor. The "aging" is the act of, as summers and winters went by, the casks would "breath" due to the contraction and expansion of the cask due to temperature variation which would circulate the product in a fashion to get the filtering going with pressure changes. The more that occurs, the more it is filtered, the cleaner the taste.
These molecules that we're trying to get rid of are some of the products of the distillation. When you distill your mash or beer, you have a variety of products separated from the water, the heads (where the majority of your flavors come from), the ethanol, and the tails (fuseoils, which are the disgusting taste). When distilling you carefully test the product coming out and separate it into the various products (if using reflux distillation with plates). The heads are high volatility and the tails are high weight. The tails are smelly and screw up your taste so you have to be careful distilling to get the correct balance of the middle of the distillate, but not losing the flavoring agents of the heads or tails from the heart of the product.
If you distill and filter over and over, you get "pure" ethanol or the basis of vodka. The ethanol purity is only about 95.6% as the distillate reaches azetrope, meaning you can't really separate it from what it's being boiled off of. There are methods to get beyond this such as vaccuum distillation to separate your distillates or post distillation methods (steam blasting through oeatmeal for example or even using gasoline) to use adsorption to remove the last remaining bits of stuff you don't want. Of course, if you leave a bottle of 100% ethanol out, it'll go back to 95.6% as it exchanges water from the air.
Aging has no real meaning these days. The point of aging is to use activated charcoal to remove things you don't want. You don't want the big molecules that cause bad taste, you want it filtered from the product. You do want to keep some though, which are in the "heads" because they have the specific flavors you want to distinguish your liquor. You can't use a perfectly pure vodka base, because then you've gotten rid of all those
Today, as part of your distillation process, after the product has gone through fractional (reflux) distillation through your column, it is common to "force" it through several packs of activated charcoal, in order to quick filter it. This is used to get the purest base ethanol in vodka creation, and why you see different marketing of "triple filtered" or "6 filtered" vodka, claiming how many filter processes it goes through to remove taste impurities.
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