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Nuclear Testing Helps Identify Fake Vintage Whiskey
Hugh Pickens writes "Industry experts claim the market for vintage whiskey has been flooded with fakes that purport to be several hundred years old but instead contain worthless spirit made just a few years ago. Now researchers at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit have developed a method that can pinpoint the date a whiskey was made by detecting traces of radioactive particles created by nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. '"It is easy to tell if whiskey is fake as if it has been produced since the middle of the twentieth century, it has a very distinctive signature," says Dr. Tom Higham, deputy director of the facility. Nuclear bomb testing in the 1950s saw levels of carbon-14 in the atmosphere rise around the world so the amount of isotope absorbed by living organisms since this time has been artificially elevated. Whiskey extracted from antique bottles is sent to the laboratory where scientists burn the liquid and bombard the resulting gas with electrically charged particles so they can measure the carbon-14 in the sample. In one recent case, a bottle of 1856 Macallan Rare Reserve was withdrawn from auction at Christies, where it was expected to sell for up to £20,000, after the scientists found it had actually been produced in 1950. "So far there have probably been more fakes among the samples we've tested than real examples of old whiskey," says Higham.'"
And I turned into Whiskeyman. My powers include slurred speech, a drunken lurch, and blackouts.
What? They can't tell the difference by tasting it?
I never would have expected fakes to outnumber genuine articles in a status driven market with poor verification.
It sounds like "real" old whiskies are set to see a dramatic increase in price. Imagine if a rare collectible that fetched thousands of dollars at auction were about to become 50 or even 80 percent rarer. The intersection of the good old supply and demand curve sounds like it's about to jump....
But really, who needs anything better than a 16 y.o. Lagavulin, anyway? F'ing Snobs.
was used to detect heart stem cell regeneration.
Yours In Medicine,
Comrade Kilgore Trout
If a bottle of whiskey is supposedly worth $20,000, assuming its a 26oz bottle and they take even 1oz out for burning that drops the value almost a grand.
Seems like an expensive waste to me.
Not because its so recent, but because its been contaminated by nukes. On the other hand,t he 2nd half of the 20th century will have a very distinctive stratigraphic signature in the far future from the atmospheric nuke tests.
Hopefully the test doesn't require burning too much of the purchase ;)
I'm not that experienced when it comes to whiskey, but is there a huge difference (a £20,000 difference) between a 50 year old bottle and a 150 year old bottle in terms of the actual quality of the whiskey or does the price simply reflect the rarity and status? Is there ever a point where the whiskey doesn't get better after more time?
I think I'll stick with J&B.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
They opened the bottle to test the whiskey and my cat disappeared.. where d he go????
Subject says it all, really. After all, alcohol abuse is bad.
I seem to recall a bunch of other tests (fbi bullet matching, dna identification) which were assumed to work for decades. So how do you attempt to disprove this one? Test hundreds of bottles of "known" 150 year old whiskeys?
I gotta make sure my Budweiser is fresh!
Just kidding, all Budweiser is crap that I would never let past my lips.
No spirit is worthless if it contains alcohol of the appropriate kind.
Finally! After all these years we've found a useful application of science.
Sales of "fake" vintage whiskey at low prices have skyrocketted among the "scientists" involved.
If you're going to shovel over a truck full of money for a single bottle of hooch, maybe it's time to consider what kind of ego problems you have and whether the money is better spent on therapy.
Do you really think there are $90,000 worth of parts and labor in an S-Class Mercedes (does the S stand for stupid, or stinking rich, or both)? Also, when I go to a restaurant and order a $60 bottle of wine, it makes me feel bad when I see that same bottle in Bottle King for $12...
1. The older a whiskey is the more expensive it gets due to rarity, not quality. Many people have a bias toward older whiskeys (whiskies) because they think they are better. Like wine, some whiskeys age well, others don't.
2. Whiskey must be stored in oak barrels to age. Once it is out of the barrel, and in a bottle or steel vat, it no longer ages. So a 10 year old whiskey sitting in a bottle for 50 years is still a 10 year old whiskey.
3. Whiskeys in barrels lose about 2% a year due to evaporation, known as the angel's share. That 2% is mostly water in hotter climates, but in cooler ones, like Scotland, what is lost is mostly alcohol. Thus a spirit which is put into a barrel at 60% alcohol by volume (ABV) will be reduced to 50% ABV then 40% ABV as time goes one. This is important because once the produce drops below 40% ABV, it can no longer legally be named whiskey. Thus whiskeys are usually never older than 40 years of age to due the angle's share.
4. Whiskey is how it's spelled in the USA (where I am writing this.) In Britain and Canada it is spelled whisky. Since the article discusses whisky from The Macallan distillery (yes the "T" is capitalized), the article's title and summary misspelled "whisky."
Another clue to the growing problem of fakes is the supply of hyper-aged whiskey _increasing_. Just a layman's observation.
Creationists, however, deny the accuracy of carbon dating. Therefore, all the fake whiskey will be sold to them at full price.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The brown spirit made in other countries (including Ireland, Japan, Canada and the country to the South of Canada) is called "whiskey". This is quite different.
Only whisky attracts idiots to put silly values on bottles of the stuff they are never going to drink.
The only proper thing to do to a bottle of whisky is drink it (not all at once ;-). The same applies to a bottle of whiskey, and after a few, you will no longer mind you don't actually have a bottle of whisky to drink.
A
Atmospheric contaminants are routinely used to date the age of groundwater (e.g., in wells) and even to measure the residence time for water in the watershed of rivers. The most commonly used radioactive element is the hydrogen isotope, tritium. You can see a curve for it here, where the tritium level peaks in 1964 or so. You measure how much tritium is in the groundwater, then you compare it to that curve to which I linked after accounting for the decay of the tritium (half-life = 12.32 years), the match shows when that water fell as rainfall. Lot's of different contaminants are that way: CFC's used in air conditioners were useful until they were banned, SF6 is used in industrial transformers and does the same job.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
scientists burn the liquid and bombard the resulting gas with electrically charged particles
After the lab test :
Yes, it was a real one !
Hell, a bottle of whisky from the 1950's still is a nice old whisky!! The scottish single malts i usually buy are only around 15-20 years old.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
I prefer my booze radioactive. The buzz is zippier, and my dates glow.
A quick "age" in the hot pile does the trick.
- js.
The Macallan is a Scottish single malt whisky, not an Irish or American Whiskey.
I know return you to your scheduled Mountain Dew and Cheetos.
You insensitive clod!
"Ahhhh, best laid plans of mice and men... and Cookie Monster." -- Cookie Monster, Sesame Street
So.. if one were to produce the fake whisky using bottled water which is collected from glaciers and is 10000 years old, what does the c-14 test say then?
People pay how much for old whiskey? Wow, and there are starving babies in the world. God is going to judge us and no amount of good will erase the black marks people keep getting for humanity.
It tastes like whatever you convince yourself that it should taste like.
Probably a better example would be a better documented breed of self-deluded puppies: the kind of audiophiles who'd buy an audiophile-grade ethernet (i.e., digital!) cable for $500 and swear that they hear whatever difference you tell them they should hear, when they play MP3's (again: digital!) over that network. As if a 1 weren't just as much a 1 or a 0 as much a 0 over it. But no, if you tell them they should hear a fuller and richer bass, they'll actually hear it.
There are wooden volume knobs sold out there as doing this or that magic for the music, and (the right kind of) people will actually hear that magic. Even though that volume knob isn't even part of the signal chain at all. It's just a wooden disc on the outside. The potentiometer (variable resistor) that actually controls the volume is something else on the same shaft. But they'll swear they hear the difference.
Someone on another forum at one time actually heard the difference between MP3's played off different brands of hard drives. Once it got into his head that a magnetic disc is really coated in a magnetic layer like a cassette, and that there was this different between sound reproduction between different cassette coatings (e.g., iron versus chrome), he actually started hearing that one hard drive gives better bass and another gives better trebble. And he can hear that difference.
So basically my bet is that it works just the same with anything. Sound, image, taste (since we're at whiskey), or whatever you wish. If the Grimm Brothers' "The Emperor's New Clothes" had happened IRL, people would have actually seen whatever clothes they got it into their head that really smart and superior people see. And no amount of children screaming "the emperor is naked" would change that. And even if you got the emperor and his guards out of the equation, if a hundred years later the country were a republic and the non-existent clothes were in an (empty) glass box at a museum, some people would still go and congratulate each other for being so superior as to see the fabulous clothes in the box.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Fake "vintage" wines have been exposed by detecting Cs-137 (from all the post-war nuclear testing, and a little from Chernobyl) in a wine that should be older than that. This can be done non-destructively (just put the bottle in a rather sensitive Ge calorimeter, and detect the gamma peak). Philippe Hubert from CENBG Bordeaux is the expert (and has put several people in jail...)
They dropped the other letters.
I will spend a few bucks more for a good beer. I love a good beer. In fact, I rather dislike beers like Coors, Miller and Budweiser and would rather drink plain tap water. But when it comes to spending ridiculous amounts of money on alcoholic drinks, there are limits. I am sure as hell not interested in spending R&D dollars to ensure that $200 bottles of something is actually as old as it's claimed to be. (I might have said "...that $200 bottles of something are actually worth $200" but no drink is worth that to me.)
Very simple: grow your grain with the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels. Oil or coal that are millions of years old have very little C-14.
NUKE THE WHALES!
Sure, it's not what I'd drink here in San Francisco weather, but Budweiser comes from St. Louis Missouri (though it's also bottled other places, like next to Newark NJ airport.) If you've ever been through a midwestern summer, and you've been out mowing your lawn in 100-degree weather with 99% humidity, a cold Budweiser is *exactly* the right thing to drink, and even an oilcan of Foster's works ok. Save the Guinness for more civilized conditions....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In other news, representatives of whiskey maker, Jim Bean Corp. were arrested Monday trying to buy radioactive materials from radical elements in Darfur. Experts disagree whether this was a plot to produce counterfeit whiskey or to produce a nuclear bomb as part of some plan for world domination. Dr. Evil was unavailable for comment by press time.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
As a gift for newgrouping a Usenet group (alt.archery.traditional, if I remember correctly), I was once sent a scotch whisky care package. In it were twelve baby food jars that were numbered but otherwise not labeled. Only after I had sampled each and given my opinion was I told what each one was. I do not know that you have twelve varieties at your disposal, but this was an enlightening experience for me and could possibly be for some of your friends as well.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I'll drink to that!
...is if some idiot spelled it with an "e".
"Whiskey" is American, Irish or Japanese.
1. Tell Whiskey Snob you need to verify his $20,000 bottle's value.
2. Tell Whiskey Snob the bottle was brewed in the 80's, and you have since disposed of the "worthless spirits" after the intensive testing, but offer to buy him a bottle of Johnny Walker if it will be any condolence.
3. Sell $20,000 bottle of whiskey to 3rd party.
4. ?????
5. Profit!
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
This basically means there is no way to distinguish whiskey age by taste, right? So, other than being an antiquity, there is no actual "gourmet" value associated with old whsikey - contrary to what many claim...
The people that pay that much for a bottle of booze must be the same people buying cables from Monster.
Dang. And me with no mod points.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Personally I find that Half Life and Whisky make a good combination, up to a point, then I start fumbling the weapon reloads, missing the enemy, and eventually fall off my chair.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
I find this newsstory's title (and surely the news itself) sad on many, many levels...
...knowing that some pinheads willing to drop 20 grand on a bottle of hooch aren't getting ripped off.
If nobody can tell and the price is based on age....hold a bic pen up to the back of your bottle label to brown it. Slap it on and there you have it.
thank goodness the atomic bomb was invented, so that we could accurately tell the age of whiskey.
All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come. Matthew 12:31-32
important to know
And that was in the time all those superflavoured drinks weren't available.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
What Iran is doing...they just want to test their whiskey
So just leave them alone!
The lunatic is in my head
This is also used for determining fake paintings as the organic material making up the pigments contain higher radiation since 1945. So if you are going to fake a painting, try to find some older pigments to use.
This is one of the reasons I stick to a few trusted favorites. Glenlivet Nadura being top of the list.
XML - A clever joke would be here if