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.

Comments

Whiskey?

[fiannaFailMan]

You can age Whiskey in a bottle? I thought it stopped aging as soon as it goes into a glass container. It's one of the differences between itself and wine.

Re:Whiskey?

[Half-pint HAL]

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?

HAL.

Re:Whiskey?

[xgr3gx]

I think you're right. It's the barrel the does the aging.
I saw a "Modern Marvels" episode about Whiskey. I recall them saying that aging a bottle of whiskey is pointless.
If you age a bottle 8 year old whiskey for 2 years, you don't get 10 year old whiskey, you get a 2 year old bottle of 8 year whiskey.

Re:Whiskey?

[kaaona]

You're right. Whiskey can't age in the bottle because it's absolutely sealed. Wine, on the other hand, has a cork through which air can seep oh so slowly. I'm thinking Mr. Jones' "invention" is nothing more than an ultrasonic bottle cleaner.

Re:Whiskey?

[pete-classic]

It's an ultrasonic wallet-opener.

-Peter

Re:Whiskey?

[tmosley]

If you put in some oak chips. Some home brewers and small wineries age their wine this way since they can't afford a full sized oak barrel.

Re:Whiskey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the quack scientist who "discovered" this doesn't know the first thing about whisky, or wine for that matter.

What separates four-dollar (yes, the article says pounds, but in case you didn't realize, the UK has enormous alcohol excises that more than make up for the lousy exchange rate) wine from hundred dollar wine isn't that the more expensive is aged, it's that it's better made to begin with. Most cheap wine, if you age it, just gets worse over time. The region it's made in, the type of grape used, and the climate of particular vintage are what makes the biggest difference, an unaged bottle from a good vintage is usually far better than an aged bottle from a lousy one.

tl;dr Dude doesn't know what he's talking about.

Re:Whiskey?

[camperdave]

Sure you can. Just ask Herb Tarlek. All you need is a funnel and an empty bottle of 40 year old scotch.

Re:Whiskey?

[pdhenry]

If you put in some oak chips. Some home brewers and small wineries age their wine

Not to mention Budweiser. Google "Beechwood aged."

Re:Whiskey?

[afidel]

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.

Re:Whiskey?

[lamaleader]

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.

Re:Whiskey?

[Colin Smith]

Also... 8 year old malts *are* paintstripper. You need 12 years at an absolute minimum for something drinkable. Preferrably 15 or more years.

Adding a few ml of warm water will reduce the catch at the back of the throat for those lesser beverages.
Also, try with crystalised ginger to complement.

Ice? Coke? Go on, get off my lawn.

Re:Whiskey?

[Kemanorel]

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.

Re:Whiskey?

[TyrWanJo]

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.

Re:Whiskey?

[Chris Mattern]

Whisky ages by evaporating bad alcohols while retaining tasty ones.

This statement is nonsensical. Whisky, and any other alcoholic drink for that matter, has one and only one alcohol, ethanol, C2H5OH. At least, it better, since any other form of alcohol is quite poisonous.

Re:Whiskey?

[Idarubicin]

Whisky, and any other alcoholic drink for that matter, has one and only one alcohol, ethanol, C2H5OH. At least, it better, since any other form of alcohol is quite poisonous.

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.)

Re:Whiskey?

[NekSnappa]

Scotch is aged in used oak casks which they buy mainly from American bourbon makers. As one of the criteria for a whiskey to be called "bourbon" (along with the percentage of corn in the mash, where it is made etc.) is that in be aged in new charred oak barrels. Since the bourbon makers can't reuse their casks they sell them to scotch makers.

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.

Re:Whiskey?

[doti]

Like Earth is mostly harmless?

Re:Whiskey?

[Gilmoure]

Obligatory: I like my women like my scotch; 12 years old and mixed up with coke.

Re:Whiskey?

[clam666]

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.

Re:Whiskey?

[retchdog]

I didn't know they made urinals out of beechwood.

Re:Whiskey?

[Markspark]

why not? in china they put melamine in the milk.

Re:Oh Fun!

[TinFoilMan]

It'll be OLD mad dog and it won't be 20/20 anymore, more like 20/200

It would be cool

[InlawBiker]

Were it true. But unfortunately you can't make bad wine into good wine just by aging it. It just becomes older bad wine.

Typically the 'age-worthy' wines are made with the choice fruit, and are designed to age by balancing the acid content with the fruit content. As the fruit mellows over time so do the acids (tannins). It is an art as much as as it is a science.

So call me a wine snob if you want, but I've tasted plenty of aged cheap wine and it's really not very good.

Re:It would be cool

[Lord Ender]

Have you tasted it in a blind taste test? Or are you, like most if not all "wine snobs," simply fooling yourself into thinking expensive==good?

Re:It would be cool

[dreamchaser]

I forget where I saw it on TV in the last six months or a year, but they did a test like that in a wine shop. Almost every single vinophile picked the cheap bottle of wine that they were told was more expensive over the aged bottled that was in reality the more expensive bottle.

Re:It would be cool

[camperdave]

They did that on Mythbusters once, but it was with vodka, not wine.

Yeah but...

[Entropy98]

Can it make regular snake oil taste like 30 year old snake oil?
--
  Blackshot

Re:Yeah but...

[Fred_A]

I call shenanigans, the machine isn't even pyramid shaped !

I know a certain special lady

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a certain special lady who is about to have the best bottle of Boone's Farm in the world.

Only after she finishes the debate tonight.

English winemaker?

[thedonger]

When it gets the nod of a French winemaker or a vintner from California I'll be a little more intrigued.

Re:English winemaker?

[fiannaFailMan]

When it gets the nod of a French winemaker or a vintner from California I'll be a little more intrigued.

Global warming will probably give English winemakers some credibility in years to come. (No 'funny' mod points please, I'm being serious.)

As a bonus, it ages snake oil too...

[nweaver]

As an extra special bonus, it acts to rapidly age cheap snake-oil from the rancid dead rattler-junk it started out as to something equivelent to the finest age tawny boa extract.

1963: American Society for Enology and Viticulture

[slashkitty]

They didn't like the effects of ultrasound.. http://www.ajevonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/14/1/23

Ultrasonic waves are the new magnets

[jandrese]

Oh ultrasonic waves, is there anything people won't claim you can do? Had this device come out 5 or 10 years ago, it would have been exactly the same except the "ultrasonic waves" would have been replaced by magnets, because that was the in thing at the time. Colliding alcohol molecules? What in the world are they talking about?

If this thing actually works as advertised I'll eat my hat.

Suspicious...

[D'Eyncourt]

He said: "Casey took one of our bottles and brought it back for us to try after it had been in the machine. I was amazed, it had definitely aged.

Hmm...odd that the bottle would have to leave and come back considering the "aging" device looks like it can be easily moved and takes only 30 minutes to perform its magic.

From TFA

[meiocyte]

"He said: "Casey took one of our bottles and brought it back for us to try after it had been in the machine. I was amazed, it had definitely aged."

..my continuation:

"..now that I remember it, he insisted that we not be actually present when the machine was in operation. It had to do with the molecules and such, he said."

At least one physically impossible bogus claim

[philspear]

"The look and bouquet of the drink is improved and because of the chemical changes, the alcohol is easier to absorb by the kidneys and therefore, hangovers are virtually eliminated.

After reading that, I'm inclined to think this guy is clearly a con. This makes no sense, I don't believe it's possible to chemically modify the alchohol to make it easier to be cleaned out of the system, if it were chemically modified it wouldnt' be ethanol anymore. I could be wrong but I think the liver, not the kidneys, are the limiting step here. And hangovers aren't caused by leftover alchohol, a lot of the effects are due to dehydration, as alchohol acts as a diuretic to increase your urine output.

This guy is full of shit.

Re:At least one physically impossible bogus claim

[canajin56]

He may be full of shit, but 30 minutes in his miracle machine will make his cheap claim as persuasive as a well aged, high-end claim, by using ultrasonic waves to collide the bullshit nano-molecules.

Re:Whiskey == Burnt Oak Juice.

[GeckoX]

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.