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This must be the original story picked up by others? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/us/whiskey-fungus-jack-daniels-tennessee.html https://www.nytimes.com/2
by melling 4y ago
This must be the original story picked up by others?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/us/whiskey-fungus-jack-daniels-tennessee.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/us/whiskey-fungus-jack-da...
- wilkystyle 4y agoHere's the non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/g6NHM https://archive.is/g6NHM
- ceejayoz 4y ago> Ms. Willis also said that air filters could hurt the flavor that Jack Daniel’s whiskey acquires during the aging process. Distillers refer poetically to the liquor that evaporates during that process as “the angel’s share.” This seems like an odd claim by the company.
- tzs 4y agoThey also refer to the liquor that is absorbed by the barrel as the Devil's cut.
- kodt 4y agoI know some people believe the fungus growing in the barrels lends some flavor to the whiskey and therefore killing it would have a potentially negative effect on the product.
- ceejayoz 4y agoNo one's asking them to eradicate the fungus. They're being asked to filter the outgoing air ventilation on the barrelhouses so it doesn't spray fungus (and fungus food, in the form of ethanol fumes) over the nearby community.
- ipaddr 4y agoDone at a small scale nature can handle some excess fungus overgrowth. Done at a large scale and it becomes too toxic and destroys life. It reminds me of the fisheries. Catch too many and the fish never return
- fbdab103 4y agoStrikes me as an industry run mostly be ad hoc rules and this-is-how-it-has-always-been-done. Which, for a historical product that people enjoy is a fair enough stance. Especially if it takes four years (!!!) before you see the outcome of an experiment. I have no doubt they employ plenty of food scientists and specialized analytical techniques to monitor the product, but at the end of the day, making a change has got to be scary.
- reportingsjr 4y agoThis past summer I visited a cognac distillery, and when in an aging room the same thing was mentioned (also called the angel's share). You can actually tell which buildings hold aging barrels, because you can see this black fungus growing on the outside of those buildings.
- anon84873628 4y agoOdd, and downright disingenuous. Scrubbing the air won't stop evaporation from the barrels. I guess you could make an argument about how changing partial pressure causes a change in equilibrium vapor pressure. But if such a subtle effect is so important, there would already be much more tight controls on the warehouse environment. Just another penny pinching company with externalized consequences...
- fwlr 4y ago“If stuff can get out, stuff can get in”. A filter setup that stops ethanol vapors from escaping is more precisely “a setup that applies the installed filters to all incoming and outgoing air”, if those filters block more than just ethanol vapor, you’re losing out on whatever those filters do block. Maybe it turns out some important bacteria can’t get in and so the whiskey doesn’t develop right. That spoils roughly four years of the warehouse’s capacity which is a lot.
- kerpotgh 4y agoThere no reason incoming and outgoing air have to have the same pathways. Fans that suck out inside air will not bring in outside air. This is pretty basic stuff. Your inlets can have absolutely no filters on them and the fans sucking out the air will maintain a pressure differential that makes sure the inlets will mostly only let air in.
- fwlr 4y agoTo clarify, I don’t think much of their excuse, this is obviously a situation the distilleries should be trying to fix, and so on. Mostly just a caution not to assume the solution is simple, obvious, and risk-free. Making spirits is not a science, nor even an art - it’s luck, and mass-producing spirits is like trying to crystallize that luck and replicate it. It’s like being told to fix a legacy codebase to stop throwing errors, except nobody understands the codebase, not even the people who wrote it. Oh and any subtle change you make can destroy the current production database as well as four years of backups.
- jemmyw 4y agoMaking spirits is a science. Chemistry and biology.
- fwlr 4y agoJack Daniels isn’t meth. It is a complex and specific flavor profile that is enormously successful commercially. This profile was not arrived at via chemistry and biology, and it’s currently infeasible to apply chemistry and biology in a lab to replicate this flavor profile. The same is true of the overwhelming majority of other spirits, too. The only method we have to find your way to these extremely precise locations in high-dimensional flavorspace is to religiously follow the ritual that gets us there. On the road to mass production, spirit distillers have run across many pitfalls that look innocuous, minor changes that seem like they couldn’t possibly affect the outcome but nevertheless do. That’s what I mean by trying to crystallize luck. (Yes, chemistry and biology are the fields of science that _would_ describe this process…)
- jvanderbot 4y agoLooking at the NYT vs Daily Mail reminds me of why I shell out a coffee a month to avoid ads.
- psychphysic 4y agoIt's hard to explain to a non Brit just how lowly most of society thinks of the Daily mail. While simultaneously being the most circuited paper heavily driven by women readers. The ads are likely the good bit of the website.
- Ntrails 4y ago> just how lowly most of society thinks of the Daily mail. This is really just a perfect example of how society splinters on certain lines. I give my mother endless shit for reading the daily mail, it is a pre-clickbait indignation generation machine and the website is probably worse. However, "most of society" does not ring true to me. I am the outlier not the default.
- psychphysic 4y agoAs a percentage of the population daily mail readers are miniscule. And aging. If you asked a hypothetical 100 people their thoughts on the Daily Mail the number who report reading it would be dwarfed by the number calling it trash.