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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 t

by 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.”

e12e 12y ago
It would seem that simply using oak chips in plastic (or glass - inert in the context of destilled rum etc) barrels would be an easier way to speed up the process. Apparently the whisky industry is moving away from the age/years distinction - as it really is more marketing than a good indication of taste (see No-Age Statement). Cognac is moving in a different direction: increasing the age required of the youngest au-de-vies for VSOP and XO characterisation. As rum is generally blended, like Cognac - that's probably a better analogy than single malt whisky. This why for example bottles of the same series of Cognac, or brand rums like Havana Club 7 anos can taste (almost) the same even when produced from different raw stocks - they are blended to meet a certain taste.
- CompelTechnic 12y ago
  Wood chips in the barrel seems so easy to try I almost feel like it can't possibly not have been tried before and proven not to work. Might be something along the same lines as the brewing temperature/ timing of coffee (replace wood surface area for temperature)- hotter water extracts everything faster, but some things faster than others. A longer but colder brew will extract the hard-to-get compounds in larger relative proportion. Just rampant speculation though.
  - RyJones 12y ago
    Chipping barrels with toasted chips is extremely common in distilleries that are just getting started. Also, smaller barrels and artificial heat/cool cycles. Take some distillery tours, you'll learn a lot of shortcuts to producing passable products. they say as much in the first paragraph.
  - zizee 12y ago
    This is standard practice in wine making: Oak is used in winemaking to vary the color, flavor, tannin profile and texture of wine. It can be introduced in the form of a barrel during the fermentation or aging periods, or as free-floating chips or staves added to wine fermented in a vessel like stainless steel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_%28wine%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_%28wine%29
- yasth 12y ago
  Wood chips are a very common method most home brewers use. Also Budweiser is beechwood aged using chips [1], and is hardly unique in using chips (though rarely does anyone else use beechwood). For the most part people like high age counts for the same reason they want high megapixel counts, it is a comparable number that gives them at least the illusion of control, and rational differentiation. 1: http://anheuser-busch.com/index.php/our-heritage/commitment-to-quality/brewing-process/ http://anheuser-busch.com/index.php/our-heritage/commitment-... (agewall)
- crdb 12y ago
  The reason for the industry moving away from age statements (or towards No Age Statement, or NAS bottlings) is popularity. Whisky goes through peaks and troughs, but, like coffee (whose trees take a few years to yield fruit), supply lags demand. During troughs, perfectly palatable 12+ year old single malts get chucked into your basic Jonny Walker type bottle because it makes more economic sense than storing it. Peaks require some creative thinking to cope with massive demand. Take Japan: both Nikka and Suntory have moved to NAS (Taketsuru Pure Malt, Hibiki Harmony, etc.) because of a surge both in foreign demand for Japanese whisky (thanks to Murray who helpfully added that in his mind Scottish quality had been declining for several years after giving top ranking to Japanese names) and because Suntory (I think) tried to resurrect the waning appetite amongst the young Japanese for the "unfashionable, old-fashioned" brown spirit by launching advertising campaigns centered on highballs. They just don't have enough 12/17/21 year old barrels to meet demand and try to deflect some onto the NAS blends (and also skim some margin off the wave of popularity). I don't know what Laphroaig is doing, but as a long term drinker of the 18 I've also noticed a steady drop in quality (shorter finish, less complexity). And of course most of the major houses now add caramel to their base offering and often in more expensive older ones too... Meanwhile, Karuisawa distillery, which had to close some years ago (like Port Ellen) for economic reasons and due to the lack of interest in whisky at the time, is now seeing its last bottles go for thousands - if you can find them anywhere. Hibiki 17 is out of stock at all Japanese duty frees and - as of April - is no longer sold at Haneda airport. You're seeing a lot of smaller names come into existence immediately at Scottish level prices - Ichiro/Chichibu (formerly Hanyu), Mars, Fuji to name three - and they are also often out of stock. (If you're interested in the subject, the Nonjatta blog is phenomenal.) The rum industry is relatively untouched. Yes, there are massively marketed rums using all the tricks in the book, but if you are a fan of vintage rhum agricole (e.g. La Favorite La Flibuste or Privilege, 35 year old rhum agricole, still hand bottled and waxed, for 100-120 EUR!) or limited editions from Italian houses finding interesting barrels, you'll pay a lot less than for the equivalent quality in malt world...
rtpg 12y ago
I don't think the story is meant to convey truthiness, but kind of a silly story. Maybe something about leaky abstractions or the perils of black-box thinking? I'm sure an FP nerd could extrapolate and use this to point out the importance of referential transparency
- dalke 12y ago
  Norvig writes: "The point of this story is that if it had happened today, my friend would not have had to spend months in the lab; he could have spent minutes on Google instead. " This view is almost irrelevant. 40 years ago all of this information was available through commercial chemical information providers, like CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) and ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). Both started computerizing their search services in the 1960s. In fact, if you look at the early history you'll see that information retrieval and chemistry search were very closely coupled; several of the IR pioneers worked with CAS, and the term "information retrieval" itself was first used at a chemistry conference. Even without computers, a good chemistry library would have had a copy of the Beilstein Handbook of Organic Chemistry, with this information. Asimov even wrote a short story in the 1950s based on the ubiquity of 'Beilstein' in chemistry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_in_a_Name%3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_in_a_Name%3F . At best, Norvig's story is a retelling of Westheimer’s Discovery: "A month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library." Only it puts the glory on Google, as if IR were a recent advance in chemistry. That's why I think it's a tall tale, with no basis in reality, but meant to impart the underlying truthiness that Google is a great IR engine. And yet, it isn't. Try using Google to find information about the chemical compound under discussion. Only a chemist could do it, because the chemist knows how to convert the structure into a chemical name - Google doesn't accept chemical structures as input - and any chemist who can extract a compound from whiskey would know how to search specialized chemistry databases.

by dalke 12y ago

e12e 12y ago

It would seem that simply using oak chips in plastic (or glass - inert in the context of destilled rum etc) barrels would be an easier way to speed up the process. Apparently the whisky industry is moving away from the age/years distinction - as it really is more marketing than a good indication of taste (see No-Age Statement). Cognac is moving in a different direction: increasing the age required of the youngest au-de-vies for VSOP and XO characterisation. As rum is generally blended, like Cognac - that's probably a better analogy than single malt whisky. This why for example bottles of the same series of Cognac, or brand rums like Havana Club 7 anos can taste (almost) the same even when produced from different raw stocks - they are blended to meet a certain taste.

CompelTechnic 12y ago
Wood chips in the barrel seems so easy to try I almost feel like it can't possibly not have been tried before and proven not to work. Might be something along the same lines as the brewing temperature/ timing of coffee (replace wood surface area for temperature)- hotter water extracts everything faster, but some things faster than others. A longer but colder brew will extract the hard-to-get compounds in larger relative proportion. Just rampant speculation though.
- RyJones 12y ago
  Chipping barrels with toasted chips is extremely common in distilleries that are just getting started. Also, smaller barrels and artificial heat/cool cycles. Take some distillery tours, you'll learn a lot of shortcuts to producing passable products. they say as much in the first paragraph.
- zizee 12y ago
  This is standard practice in wine making: Oak is used in winemaking to vary the color, flavor, tannin profile and texture of wine. It can be introduced in the form of a barrel during the fermentation or aging periods, or as free-floating chips or staves added to wine fermented in a vessel like stainless steel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_%28wine%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_%28wine%29
yasth 12y ago
Wood chips are a very common method most home brewers use. Also Budweiser is beechwood aged using chips [1], and is hardly unique in using chips (though rarely does anyone else use beechwood). For the most part people like high age counts for the same reason they want high megapixel counts, it is a comparable number that gives them at least the illusion of control, and rational differentiation. 1: http://anheuser-busch.com/index.php/our-heritage/commitment-to-quality/brewing-process/ http://anheuser-busch.com/index.php/our-heritage/commitment-... (agewall)
crdb 12y ago
The reason for the industry moving away from age statements (or towards No Age Statement, or NAS bottlings) is popularity. Whisky goes through peaks and troughs, but, like coffee (whose trees take a few years to yield fruit), supply lags demand. During troughs, perfectly palatable 12+ year old single malts get chucked into your basic Jonny Walker type bottle because it makes more economic sense than storing it. Peaks require some creative thinking to cope with massive demand. Take Japan: both Nikka and Suntory have moved to NAS (Taketsuru Pure Malt, Hibiki Harmony, etc.) because of a surge both in foreign demand for Japanese whisky (thanks to Murray who helpfully added that in his mind Scottish quality had been declining for several years after giving top ranking to Japanese names) and because Suntory (I think) tried to resurrect the waning appetite amongst the young Japanese for the "unfashionable, old-fashioned" brown spirit by launching advertising campaigns centered on highballs. They just don't have enough 12/17/21 year old barrels to meet demand and try to deflect some onto the NAS blends (and also skim some margin off the wave of popularity). I don't know what Laphroaig is doing, but as a long term drinker of the 18 I've also noticed a steady drop in quality (shorter finish, less complexity). And of course most of the major houses now add caramel to their base offering and often in more expensive older ones too... Meanwhile, Karuisawa distillery, which had to close some years ago (like Port Ellen) for economic reasons and due to the lack of interest in whisky at the time, is now seeing its last bottles go for thousands - if you can find them anywhere. Hibiki 17 is out of stock at all Japanese duty frees and - as of April - is no longer sold at Haneda airport. You're seeing a lot of smaller names come into existence immediately at Scottish level prices - Ichiro/Chichibu (formerly Hanyu), Mars, Fuji to name three - and they are also often out of stock. (If you're interested in the subject, the Nonjatta blog is phenomenal.) The rum industry is relatively untouched. Yes, there are massively marketed rums using all the tricks in the book, but if you are a fan of vintage rhum agricole (e.g. La Favorite La Flibuste or Privilege, 35 year old rhum agricole, still hand bottled and waxed, for 100-120 EUR!) or limited editions from Italian houses finding interesting barrels, you'll pay a lot less than for the equivalent quality in malt world...

rtpg 12y ago

I don't think the story is meant to convey truthiness, but kind of a silly story. Maybe something about leaky abstractions or the perils of black-box thinking? I'm sure an FP nerd could extrapolate and use this to point out the importance of referential transparency

dalke 12y ago
Norvig writes: "The point of this story is that if it had happened today, my friend would not have had to spend months in the lab; he could have spent minutes on Google instead. " This view is almost irrelevant. 40 years ago all of this information was available through commercial chemical information providers, like CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) and ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). Both started computerizing their search services in the 1960s. In fact, if you look at the early history you'll see that information retrieval and chemistry search were very closely coupled; several of the IR pioneers worked with CAS, and the term "information retrieval" itself was first used at a chemistry conference. Even without computers, a good chemistry library would have had a copy of the Beilstein Handbook of Organic Chemistry, with this information. Asimov even wrote a short story in the 1950s based on the ubiquity of 'Beilstein' in chemistry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_in_a_Name%3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_in_a_Name%3F . At best, Norvig's story is a retelling of Westheimer’s Discovery: "A month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library." Only it puts the glory on Google, as if IR were a recent advance in chemistry. That's why I think it's a tall tale, with no basis in reality, but meant to impart the underlying truthiness that Google is a great IR engine. And yet, it isn't. Try using Google to find information about the chemical compound under discussion. Only a chemist could do it, because the chemist knows how to convert the structure into a chemical name - Google doesn't accept chemical structures as input - and any chemist who can extract a compound from whiskey would know how to search specialized chemistry databases.