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Man Says He Can Make 20-Year-Old Rum in 6 Days

119 points by rockdiesel 12y ago

Splendor 12y ago
I'm sure traditionally aged sprits would remain with luxury-pricing if this took hold, but this is fascinating from a scientific perspective.
cshotwell 12y ago
Cleveland Whiskey is using what I must assume is a similar process. I've had it several times, and rather enjoy it.
- faehnrich 12y ago
  Cleveland Whiskey says they do something like use pressure to force it through the wood I think, where this says he, "forces the creation of the same key chemical compounds." If those in the end mean the same thing, I don't know. Friends snobbier than me say it's ok but not at the price it was originally going at, but I liked it.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
There is an apparently not apocryphal story about a Scottish University that was charged with helping develop a synthetic "scotch whiskey taste". The labs identified the complex molecules and started looking for ways to synthesise them. Amazingly one day they found someone able to supply just the chemicals - they ordered a large supply and it worked. The new additive gave a rich full body to poor scotch. They were about to tell the distilleries the good news when they decided to ask how fast the supplier could provide this - "oh about twenty years, you see we buy barrels from these distilleries in the Highlands and then ..." Cannot at all remember who told me that, but it seemed apt.
- paulannesley 12y ago
  Sounds similar to http://www.norvig.com/speech.html http://www.norvig.com/speech.html which mdonahoe quoted shortly after your post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371086
no_wave 12y ago
Doubt it, but these experiments are interesting because they let us discover the unknown unknowns in these chemical reactions. If laboratory-aged whiskey is, to the best of our understanding, identical to normally-aged whiskey, what are the odds that it's actually identical? Pretty low, but it's how we expand our knowledge. Also, it often trickles down and makes low-end products way better.
mdonahoe 12y ago
Reminds me of Peter Norvig's whiskey story: http://www.norvig.com/speech.html http://www.norvig.com/speech.html "Before I answer that, let me return for the moment to Dewey Decimal 663: beverage technology. It turns out that in my very first professional job, as an intern thirty years ago, I had a colleague, a chemist, who had worked in beverage technology. The summer before he had been an intern and was given the task of figuring out if there was a particular chemical that gave whisky the distinctive taste of being aged in an oak cask. The company figured if they could isolate the chemical maybe they could just mix it in, and skip five or ten years of aging. So my friend went into the lab and isolated what he thought might be the right compound. He ordered a small vial from a chemical supply company (remember, this was before online shopping and email, so they had to actually write words on paper) and mixed up a batch. It tasted pretty good. (Why can't we computer scientists get research projects that involve consuming alcohol?) My friend was duly congratulated, and he wrote to the chemical supply company and asked for a 55 gallon drum of the stuff. They wrote back, saying "we regret that we can not fill your order because we are currently low on stock and, as I'm sure you know, to produce this chemical we need to age it in oak casks for five years."
- dalke 12y ago
  That sounds like malarkey. (Academic) organic chemists love to synthesize compounds that previously could only be done in nature. Novig is not a chemist, and the recollection is 30 years old. It could be that he misremembered the story, or the original chemist was telling him a tall tale. Instead, this sounds like a just-so story that people tell to impart truthiness. To be more concrete, what's the compound? As this Wired piece says: > Much as it sounds, extraction involves the pulling of new chemicals from the oak, including phenol, benzoic acid, and vanillin. When you taste notes of sawed wood, burnt toast, smoke, or vanilla in a whiskey, it’s largely due to extraction of these compounds from the barrel, literally aldehydes and phenols leaching into your drink Quoting now from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-new-science-of-old-whiskey/309522/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-new-... : > He says the company’s chemists have found about 300 different compounds, and have identified some 200 of them. Once all elements are ascertained and understood, some fear it may be a short step to producing synthetic aged bourbon. “You could go to the lab and say, ‘I’m going to take one part per billion of this and one part per billion of this and three parts per billion of that, I’m going to put it all in a test tube, and I’m going to make the perfect bourbon based on our research,’ ” says Brown. He hastens to add, “I don’t think we’ll ever be looking to make a synthetic bourbon.”
hoopism 12y ago
Man has been trying to do this for decades. There's this AMAZING old movie called Gizmo! from the 60s (I think) with some guys running wine through a series of tubes and declaring it aged... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVwqraUKxA&feature=youtu.be&t=2267 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVwqraUKxA&feature=youtu.be... I found the clip! Must watch.
beat 12y ago
I'm really looking forward to trying a product of this system. As a fan of complex whiskies (mostly Scotch) and wild, chaotic rums, I'm wondering how close it can get to the myriad of flavors and textures those aged drinks provide. Differences in barrel types are immediately obvious in whisky - try Balvenie or other distilleries that offer different barrel-aging options. I worry some, because as a musician, I'm all too familiar with the shortcomings of digital emulations of classic sounds. They can get 98%, but that last two percent is really bothersome and weak. I hope these new whiskies aren't like that!
- bweitzman 12y ago
  Off topic, but I'm always bothered when people say something like "It's the last 1% that counts the most". It's misleading to say that any single percentage point is more important than any other. If the last 1% is the most important, doesn't it make more sense to call it the last 99%? I suppose if you are considering only the top percentiles of whatever you're talking about, it makes more sense. If you're only looking at the 95th-100th percentiles, then 1% of total quality is actually more like a 20% change in the space you're considering. But at that the same, to arbitrarily say that only things in the top 5 percent are worth considering is, well, arbitrary. /rant
  - vacri 12y ago
    Not quite the same thing, but when I see low fat "2% fat milk", it sounds to me that there should be 2% by volume of visible fat spheroids... :)
    - auxym 12y ago
      Your milk also likely is labeled "homogenized", otherwise the fatty cream would indeed separate and float on top.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Off topic, but I'm always bothered when people say something like "It's the last 1% that counts the most". It's misleading to say that any single percentage point is more important than any other. Its actually valid when its related to something like the Pareto principle, when you are talking about which percent by one measure is important in consideration of some other measure.
beat 12y ago
I'm really looking forward to trying a product of this system. As a fan of complex whiskies (mostly Scotch) and wild, chaotic rums, I'm wondering how close it can get to the myriad of flavors and textures those aged drinks provide. Differences in barrel types are immediately obvious in whisky - try Balvenie or other distilleries that offer different barrel-aging options. I worry some, because as a musician, I'm all too familiar with the shortcomings of digital emulations of classic sounds. They can get 98%, but that last two percent is really bothersome and weak. I hope these new whiskies aren't like that!
comrade1 12y ago
Good luck to him. There have been tricks to fake aged flavors wine, whiskey, and other aged alcohols for centuries. In CA mass-produced Chardonnay is aged in giant stainless steel with wood chips. Others make Bourbon with charred wood chips. There are tricks with pressure and temperature, wood, and other things that I'm sure that is secret and proprietary. It's not always clear where tradition ends and modern tricks begin because they've been doing some of these things for a long time. But in the end these 'tricks' always produces an inferior product and are really only good for mass-produced wine/alcohol on the cheaper end. As an aside, two things, there are some excellent aged rums out there. The complexity can be almost as good as aged whiskey and the texture/mouth-feel (don't know the proper word) can be like a 20-year+ scotch for something not aged as long. Second, I see that he produced Absinthe in Spain which has similar thujone levels to absinthe that is legal in the u.s. USA absinthe is nothing like the real thing - it is more like drinking Pernod. In Switzerland, where Absinthe originates, the thujone level is 100x (?) what you get in the u.s. When you drink a fair amount of it it is like you have a high-contrast filter on your eyes. Further, modern absinthe is clear although I still prefer the green.
- dangerlibrary 12y ago
  It could be substantially less than 100x. The maximum amount of thujone in the EU is 35mg/L. The US requires that absinthe be "thujone free" but defines that as less than 10mg/L. Old recipes (from 1899) have been recreated and measured at 4.3mg/L. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thujone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thujone
  - girvo 12y ago
    And in the same article, absinthe from the same time period of those recipes were shown to have > between 0.5 mg/L and 48.3 mg/L and averaged 25.4 mg/L via GC-MS. Interesting stuff!
- DannoHung 12y ago
  > But in the end these 'tricks' always produces an inferior product and are really only good for mass-produced wine/alcohol on the cheaper end. Double blind proven or asserted by experts?
noarchy 12y ago
Can we assume that the big spirit producers would embrace this kind of process, or instead, seek to tighten laws as to what can actually be called X or Y spirits, in order to specifically exclude these new processes?
- prawn 12y ago
  Depends on who moves first and how much clout they have. If it's not the more powerful producers, they could seek any path that defended their turf.
- patmcc 12y ago
  I suspect they'd do both; use a process like this to drastically improve their low-end products, but make a labelling distinction between 'natural' and 'artificially-aged' scotch/rum/etc.
- nevdka 12y ago
  They would probably do both. A Johnny Walker label without the word 'Whisky' would still make people think of it as whisky.
- mbarrett 12y ago
  many laws already exist. for example, scotch has to be aged at least 3 years in scotland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_whisky#Legal_definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_whisky#Legal_definition
  - forrestthewoods 12y ago
    Only sort of. Their laws have no jurisdiction outside of Scotland. Except in some cases based on trade agreements, as the wiki says. You could probably distill and sell Scotch in the US if you like. Various state regulators may not give you the necessary licenses to sell but it's probably not illegal.
    - zzalpha 12y ago
      Except you couldn't call it Scotch due to the name being a protected mark, with most countries, the US included, participants in treaties that protect those marks.
derefr 12y ago
I'm surprised that this is the state of the art. Compare this to the manufacture of, say, orange juice: from the input oranges, the chemicals are all individually distilled out, put into separate bioreactors at exact concentrations along with additives and catalysts, each reaction product is filtered to remove waste products, and then the results are mixed back together in prescribed concentrations. Effectively, they're making a completely synthetic product, like a plastic or a mouthwash, except that (almost) all the input chemicals happen to be extracted from the same source.
- oaktowner 12y ago
  Wow. I never knew that. I do know that I far prefer the taste of fresh-squeezed (and, in fact, won't buy anything that is not). But I never really knew why.
  - derefr 12y ago
    Note that whether or not it says "from concentrate", this process is still happening. If it wasn't, they wouldn't be able to screen out pesticides and bacterial agents, and wouldn't be able to keep each jug to the correct concentrations of its component chemicals (which each have very different molecular weights, and so would band in industrial mixers) and so forth. If you mean that you prefer actual juice you get by juicing an orange yourself, then sure. But "fresh-squeezed" orange juice at the supermarket is just organic synthesis without a freezing step. (Which is an important-enough distinction; freezing fruit, or its juices, denatures a lot of the nutrients.)
    - WaxProlix 12y ago
      I think that "fresh-squeezed" is just what it means; if you look at the chemically de- and re-constructed juices (like Tropicana), they have some super evasive language on them about their juice being "squeezed from fresh oranges" or similar.
    - oaktowner 12y ago
      I either squeeze it myself or buy juice that was squeezed in my (local) grocery store. No store-bought brand comes close to the taste.
yojo 12y ago
There's a little more on the chemistry from this story in an email sent to K&L (bay area liquor store) by the distiller: http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/klwinescom-spirits-blog/2014/2/5/rum-super-geekdom.html http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/klwinescom-spirits-blog/20... FWIW, I'm a bit of a rum nerd and have been super impressed by the Lost Spirits Navy and Polynesian rums. I also noticed Longitude, a newish upscale Oakland bar by a veteran Tiki bartender, was using the Navy rum in a drink, so there are at least a few folks in industry who are believers as well.
GigabyteCoin 12y ago
Then why is he giving wired the story on this and not in a Diageo boardroom right now?

119 points by rockdiesel 12y ago

I'm sure traditionally aged sprits would remain with luxury-pricing if this took hold, but this is fascinating from a scientific perspective.

cshotwell 12y ago

Cleveland Whiskey is using what I must assume is a similar process. I've had it several times, and rather enjoy it.

faehnrich 12y ago
Cleveland Whiskey says they do something like use pressure to force it through the wood I think, where this says he, "forces the creation of the same key chemical compounds." If those in the end mean the same thing, I don't know. Friends snobbier than me say it's ok but not at the price it was originally going at, but I liked it.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

There is an apparently not apocryphal story about a Scottish University that was charged with helping develop a synthetic "scotch whiskey taste". The labs identified the complex molecules and started looking for ways to synthesise them. Amazingly one day they found someone able to supply just the chemicals - they ordered a large supply and it worked. The new additive gave a rich full body to poor scotch. They were about to tell the distilleries the good news when they decided to ask how fast the supplier could provide this - "oh about twenty years, you see we buy barrels from these distilleries in the Highlands and then ..." Cannot at all remember who told me that, but it seemed apt.

paulannesley 12y ago
Sounds similar to http://www.norvig.com/speech.html http://www.norvig.com/speech.html which mdonahoe quoted shortly after your post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371086

no_wave 12y ago

Doubt it, but these experiments are interesting because they let us discover the unknown unknowns in these chemical reactions. If laboratory-aged whiskey is, to the best of our understanding, identical to normally-aged whiskey, what are the odds that it's actually identical? Pretty low, but it's how we expand our knowledge. Also, it often trickles down and makes low-end products way better.

mdonahoe 12y ago

Reminds me of Peter Norvig's whiskey story: http://www.norvig.com/speech.html http://www.norvig.com/speech.html "Before I answer that, let me return for the moment to Dewey Decimal 663: beverage technology. It turns out that in my very first professional job, as an intern thirty years ago, I had a colleague, a chemist, who had worked in beverage technology. The summer before he had been an intern and was given the task of figuring out if there was a particular chemical that gave whisky the distinctive taste of being aged in an oak cask. The company figured if they could isolate the chemical maybe they could just mix it in, and skip five or ten years of aging. So my friend went into the lab and isolated what he thought might be the right compound. He ordered a small vial from a chemical supply company (remember, this was before online shopping and email, so they had to actually write words on paper) and mixed up a batch. It tasted pretty good. (Why can't we computer scientists get research projects that involve consuming alcohol?) My friend was duly congratulated, and he wrote to the chemical supply company and asked for a 55 gallon drum of the stuff. They wrote back, saying "we regret that we can not fill your order because we are currently low on stock and, as I'm sure you know, to produce this chemical we need to age it in oak casks for five years."

dalke 12y ago
That sounds like malarkey. (Academic) organic chemists love to synthesize compounds that previously could only be done in nature. Novig is not a chemist, and the recollection is 30 years old. It could be that he misremembered the story, or the original chemist was telling him a tall tale. Instead, this sounds like a just-so story that people tell to impart truthiness. To be more concrete, what's the compound? As this Wired piece says: > Much as it sounds, extraction involves the pulling of new chemicals from the oak, including phenol, benzoic acid, and vanillin. When you taste notes of sawed wood, burnt toast, smoke, or vanilla in a whiskey, it’s largely due to extraction of these compounds from the barrel, literally aldehydes and phenols leaching into your drink Quoting now from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-new-science-of-old-whiskey/309522/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-new-... : > He says the company’s chemists have found about 300 different compounds, and have identified some 200 of them. Once all elements are ascertained and understood, some fear it may be a short step to producing synthetic aged bourbon. “You could go to the lab and say, ‘I’m going to take one part per billion of this and one part per billion of this and three parts per billion of that, I’m going to put it all in a test tube, and I’m going to make the perfect bourbon based on our research,’ ” says Brown. He hastens to add, “I don’t think we’ll ever be looking to make a synthetic bourbon.”

hoopism 12y ago

Man has been trying to do this for decades. There's this AMAZING old movie called Gizmo! from the 60s (I think) with some guys running wine through a series of tubes and declaring it aged... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVwqraUKxA&feature=youtu.be&t=2267 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVwqraUKxA&feature=youtu.be... I found the clip! Must watch.

beat 12y ago

I'm really looking forward to trying a product of this system. As a fan of complex whiskies (mostly Scotch) and wild, chaotic rums, I'm wondering how close it can get to the myriad of flavors and textures those aged drinks provide. Differences in barrel types are immediately obvious in whisky - try Balvenie or other distilleries that offer different barrel-aging options. I worry some, because as a musician, I'm all too familiar with the shortcomings of digital emulations of classic sounds. They can get 98%, but that last two percent is really bothersome and weak. I hope these new whiskies aren't like that!

bweitzman 12y ago
Off topic, but I'm always bothered when people say something like "It's the last 1% that counts the most". It's misleading to say that any single percentage point is more important than any other. If the last 1% is the most important, doesn't it make more sense to call it the last 99%? I suppose if you are considering only the top percentiles of whatever you're talking about, it makes more sense. If you're only looking at the 95th-100th percentiles, then 1% of total quality is actually more like a 20% change in the space you're considering. But at that the same, to arbitrarily say that only things in the top 5 percent are worth considering is, well, arbitrary. /rant
- vacri 12y ago
  Not quite the same thing, but when I see low fat "2% fat milk", it sounds to me that there should be 2% by volume of visible fat spheroids... :)
  - auxym 12y ago
    Your milk also likely is labeled "homogenized", otherwise the fatty cream would indeed separate and float on top.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Off topic, but I'm always bothered when people say something like "It's the last 1% that counts the most". It's misleading to say that any single percentage point is more important than any other. Its actually valid when its related to something like the Pareto principle, when you are talking about which percent by one measure is important in consideration of some other measure.

beat 12y ago

comrade1 12y ago

Good luck to him. There have been tricks to fake aged flavors wine, whiskey, and other aged alcohols for centuries. In CA mass-produced Chardonnay is aged in giant stainless steel with wood chips. Others make Bourbon with charred wood chips. There are tricks with pressure and temperature, wood, and other things that I'm sure that is secret and proprietary. It's not always clear where tradition ends and modern tricks begin because they've been doing some of these things for a long time. But in the end these 'tricks' always produces an inferior product and are really only good for mass-produced wine/alcohol on the cheaper end. As an aside, two things, there are some excellent aged rums out there. The complexity can be almost as good as aged whiskey and the texture/mouth-feel (don't know the proper word) can be like a 20-year+ scotch for something not aged as long. Second, I see that he produced Absinthe in Spain which has similar thujone levels to absinthe that is legal in the u.s. USA absinthe is nothing like the real thing - it is more like drinking Pernod. In Switzerland, where Absinthe originates, the thujone level is 100x (?) what you get in the u.s. When you drink a fair amount of it it is like you have a high-contrast filter on your eyes. Further, modern absinthe is clear although I still prefer the green.

dangerlibrary 12y ago
It could be substantially less than 100x. The maximum amount of thujone in the EU is 35mg/L. The US requires that absinthe be "thujone free" but defines that as less than 10mg/L. Old recipes (from 1899) have been recreated and measured at 4.3mg/L. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thujone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thujone
- girvo 12y ago
  And in the same article, absinthe from the same time period of those recipes were shown to have > between 0.5 mg/L and 48.3 mg/L and averaged 25.4 mg/L via GC-MS. Interesting stuff!
DannoHung 12y ago
> But in the end these 'tricks' always produces an inferior product and are really only good for mass-produced wine/alcohol on the cheaper end. Double blind proven or asserted by experts?

noarchy 12y ago

Can we assume that the big spirit producers would embrace this kind of process, or instead, seek to tighten laws as to what can actually be called X or Y spirits, in order to specifically exclude these new processes?

prawn 12y ago
Depends on who moves first and how much clout they have. If it's not the more powerful producers, they could seek any path that defended their turf.
patmcc 12y ago
I suspect they'd do both; use a process like this to drastically improve their low-end products, but make a labelling distinction between 'natural' and 'artificially-aged' scotch/rum/etc.
nevdka 12y ago
They would probably do both. A Johnny Walker label without the word 'Whisky' would still make people think of it as whisky.
mbarrett 12y ago
many laws already exist. for example, scotch has to be aged at least 3 years in scotland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_whisky#Legal_definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_whisky#Legal_definition
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  Only sort of. Their laws have no jurisdiction outside of Scotland. Except in some cases based on trade agreements, as the wiki says. You could probably distill and sell Scotch in the US if you like. Various state regulators may not give you the necessary licenses to sell but it's probably not illegal.
  - zzalpha 12y ago
    Except you couldn't call it Scotch due to the name being a protected mark, with most countries, the US included, participants in treaties that protect those marks.

derefr 12y ago

I'm surprised that this is the state of the art. Compare this to the manufacture of, say, orange juice: from the input oranges, the chemicals are all individually distilled out, put into separate bioreactors at exact concentrations along with additives and catalysts, each reaction product is filtered to remove waste products, and then the results are mixed back together in prescribed concentrations. Effectively, they're making a completely synthetic product, like a plastic or a mouthwash, except that (almost) all the input chemicals happen to be extracted from the same source.

oaktowner 12y ago
Wow. I never knew that. I do know that I far prefer the taste of fresh-squeezed (and, in fact, won't buy anything that is not). But I never really knew why.
- derefr 12y ago
  Note that whether or not it says "from concentrate", this process is still happening. If it wasn't, they wouldn't be able to screen out pesticides and bacterial agents, and wouldn't be able to keep each jug to the correct concentrations of its component chemicals (which each have very different molecular weights, and so would band in industrial mixers) and so forth. If you mean that you prefer actual juice you get by juicing an orange yourself, then sure. But "fresh-squeezed" orange juice at the supermarket is just organic synthesis without a freezing step. (Which is an important-enough distinction; freezing fruit, or its juices, denatures a lot of the nutrients.)
  - WaxProlix 12y ago
    I think that "fresh-squeezed" is just what it means; if you look at the chemically de- and re-constructed juices (like Tropicana), they have some super evasive language on them about their juice being "squeezed from fresh oranges" or similar.
  - oaktowner 12y ago
    I either squeeze it myself or buy juice that was squeezed in my (local) grocery store. No store-bought brand comes close to the taste.

yojo 12y ago

There's a little more on the chemistry from this story in an email sent to K&L (bay area liquor store) by the distiller: http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/klwinescom-spirits-blog/2014/2/5/rum-super-geekdom.html http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/klwinescom-spirits-blog/20... FWIW, I'm a bit of a rum nerd and have been super impressed by the Lost Spirits Navy and Polynesian rums. I also noticed Longitude, a newish upscale Oakland bar by a veteran Tiki bartender, was using the Navy rum in a drink, so there are at least a few folks in industry who are believers as well.

GigabyteCoin 12y ago

Then why is he giving wired the story on this and not in a Diageo boardroom right now?