Slashdot Mirror
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 In one recent case, a bottle of 1856 Macallan Rare Reserve was withdrawn from auction at Christies, where it was expected to sell for up to £20,000, after the scientists found it had actually been produced in 1950.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.
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.
And of course assuming that Carbon-14 had never spiked for any reason in the past before we knew what it was and measured it regularly.
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.
No spirit is worthless if it contains alcohol of the appropriate kind.
Yes, the 'real' applications for this technique are much more interesting, possibly even to whisky drinkers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02cell.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/science/03heart.html
The nuclear powers helpfully performed a gigantic pulse labelling experiment on the DNA of the entire biosphere back in the 50s, which allows the cell 'birthdays' in various tissues of people born in that era to be determined. The measurements can be calibrated by the C-14 content in tree rings, so you can work out if the cells are (e.g.) as old as the person (certain brain cells) or renewed more recently (like heart muscle).
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!
Whiskey (or any liquor that is aged for flavor) only ages "in the barrel". Once it is bottled, it does not age anymore, because glass is inert. So if your grandfather bought a bottle of 12 year old Chivas in 1960 and left it gathering dust in his liquor cabinet for the next 49 years, you do not have 61-year old scotch, you have 12 year old scotch that's been in the bottle for 49 years. The value in these old bottles is not necessarily in their age per se, it's in their rarity - many of these old distilleries have long since ceased production and gone out of business, their recipes are lost, and the old bottles represent a legacy of sorts for the regional producers who thrived before giant corporations took over the production of spirits. It's kind of like buying NOS (new old stock) stickers for your MAME cabinet or arcade build. Only in this case, the "relics", such as they are, are a link to the past that simply can't be recreated once they're gone. The process that's descibed in the article ensure that the unscrupulous among us don't try to take advantage of people's desire to connect with that which came before.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
We can compare C-14 dating to other known dates. For example, C-14 dating agrees with dating from dendrochronology(the fancy word for counting tree rings). C-14 dating also agrees with other forms of radioactive dating and known historical data. We can be very sure there hasn't been any spike in the last 9000 years or so. Sudden spikes would also show and make a lot of archaeology just not look like it made any sense. And if there were any form of spike we'd likely see an impact in the ratios of other isotopes. If there had been substantial nuclear detonations for example, we'd be able to tell.
A spike won't add a uniform extension or contraction to dates. For most forms of spiking, you'll get a lot of stuff looking like it is from a very short time period or you'll get a very large period where you don't see almost anything (depending on whether you have a process adding too much C-14 or reducing C-14 levels). We can be pretty sure that C-14 dating is accurate.
Perhaps you need to hang out at a different bar...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You insensitive clod!
"Ahhhh, best laid plans of mice and men... and Cookie Monster." -- Cookie Monster, Sesame Street
Do you really think there are $90,000 worth of parts and labor in an S-Class Mercedes...
For someone that likes to call others stupid, you don't know anything about cars, do you? You really think that a Ford Festiva and a Mercedes have the same performance and quality of parts? This isn't a case of "I THINK my car has better parts/performance". You can actually buy mechanical parts that have higher tolerances, better engineering and longer lasting materials. And you can prove it with testing methods.
Blended scotch isn't necessarily bad. It gets the reputation because it's much easier to hide cheap scotch by blending it. But if you start out with good scotch you can make very nice blended scotch, and you can make blends with attributes that are all but impossible to obtain in a single-malt. I prefer The Macallan myself, but to dismiss all blended scotch as second-rate is pure snobbery.
Also note that many single-malt distilleries are now selling their stock to other labels, and are intentionally "blending" it by adding a trivial amount of some other stock for no reason other than to prevent labeling of the end product as single-malt -- the perception of the single-malt label is much more valuable than any pragmatic product difference.
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.
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.
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.
It is better for society if there isn't $90,000 worth of parts and labor in an S-Class Mercedes. The whole point of luxury items is to take a rich person's money and put it back into circulation, in the process reducing the concentration of power that his bankroll represents. The only question is, how much wealth will be consumed in the process?
Selling him a $80,000 Rolex burns about $4,000 in actual wealth to liberate the $80,000. That's efficient.
Him hiring a butler for $80,000 a year burns about $40,000 in actual wealth -- this is the wealth the butler could've created elsewhere, rather than scurrying around making the rich guy feel special. That's not efficient.
So, never criticize super-expensive trinkets; they are far far better for society's total net wealth than servants.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
The oldest trees aren't that old. However, we can match up tree rings from different trees to extend the data past that. The primary way of doing this is that temperature and water levels effect how much growth occurs and thus alters ring thickness. So if for example we have a tree that goes back back say a thousand years and then we have at the end a big ring, 22 big rings, a short ring, 4 big rings and then 2 short rings. If we find a dead tree that has that pattern at one point we can tentatively match the two segments up as corresponding to the same years. We can also cross confirm this with multiple tree lines and agreement in levels of various isotopes in the individual ring or sets of rings (this agreement is independent of any concern about spikes or similar issues since we are just looking for agrement of current levels, not trying to figure out the initial levels). The Wikipedia article on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology provides a good summary of the basics.
Beers and wines have yeasts in them that react with sugars remaining from the liquid's previous life as wort / fruit juice. "Aging" in these products refer to flavor changes resulting from the actions of these yeasts. Hard liquor has been distilled, possibly filtered, and the alcohol content is high enough to kill the hardiest yeast. Whiskey is "aged" by storing in charred casks and allowing tannins from the wood to impart flavors to the liquor - the longer the whiskey is in the wood, the more tannins. Put the whiskey into glass bottles, and the aging stops. I stand by my original comment.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
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.