I was listening to an episode of the WhiskyCast in which Fred Minnick made an off-the-cuff comment about "artificial aging."
I hadn't heard of this before and did some Googling. Turns out artificial aging, or "rapid-aging," is a technology allowing distillers to quickly "age" whisky by degrading polymers and doing other way-too-complex-for-me stuff in order to match the chemical composition of a 4-6 years old whisky.
For me, my gut feeling about all this is that it's just... wrong. I'll take my whisky naturally aged, thank you very much. But then I came across a few points made by a couple of different people, which is somewhat making me reconsider that initial reaction.
Here's a quote by Bryan Davis of Lost Spirits, a company working with this technology:
The real advantage is that you can take risks that you couldn’t take in a traditional distillery setting...
You could never in a normal distillery setting say OK I’m going to go lay down $10 million worth of barrels from this wacky grain... If it doesn’t work, we’ll throw it away. Right? That’s never gonna happen. Whereas here in my lab, I can go and do that with only one bottle. And we can sit down drink it, evaluate it, and decide where it goes into the trash can or what.
And then Fred Minnick makes the point that whisky people have always been suspicious and critical of new technology:
Before he passed away, Elmer T. Lee criticized automation used in the distilleries. The former Old Fitzgerald master distiller Edwin Foote agreed, saying the human senses are more acute than computers. And before them, Stitzel-Weller master distiller Will McGill and Seagram’s research director Dr. E. H. Scofield often debated about the use of science in the 1940s... And before them, early 1900s distillers debated the use of heat cycling in warehouses.
Just in the interest of connecting dots—rather than cutting off conversation here—I'll point out that the following discussion also covered this topic:
I was listening to an episode of the WhiskyCast in which Fred Minnick made an off-the-cuff comment about "artificial aging."
I hadn't heard of this before and did some Googling. Turns out artificial aging, or "rapid-aging," is a technology allowing distillers to quickly "age" whisky by degrading polymers and doing other way-too-complex-for-me stuff in order to match the chemical composition of a 4-6 years old whisky.
For me, my gut feeling about all this is that it's just... wrong. I'll take my whisky naturally aged, thank you very much.
But then I came across a few points made by a couple of different people, which is somewhat making me reconsider that initial reaction.
Here's a quote by Bryan Davis of Lost Spirits, a company working with this technology:
That's from a write-up about rapid-aging over at The Whiskey Wash: thewhiskeywash.com/american-whiskey/…
And then Fred Minnick makes the point that whisky people have always been suspicious and critical of new technology:
That's from the blog on his site: fredminnick.com/2015/04/…
So... any thoughts? Has anyone tried any of the rapid-aged whiskies on the market?