Posted on 10/28/2022 12:38:35 PM PDT by Red Badger
A new kind of “gold standard” could soon permeate the whiskey industry.
Whiskey distillers typically age spirits in charred, wooden casks for years, allowing the liquor to gradually absorb flavorful chemicals released from the wood (SN: 10/31/19). Now, researchers have demonstrated that swirling gold ions into a whiskey can reveal how much flavor the liquor has taken in — a quality called agedness. The method could provide master blenders with a quick and inexpensive test for whiskey agedness, researchers report October 6 in ACS Applied Nano Materials.
“A tiny amount of gold gives you this really bright, strong, red or blue or purple color,” says William Peveler, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. The stronger the color, and the quicker that color arises, the more aged the whiskey, he says.
Master blenders sometimes conduct tasting sessions to gauge agedness, but this process can be labor intensive. Alternatively, laboratory assays can measure agedness by checking whiskeys for flavorful chemicals called congeners, absorbed from wood casks, but such analyses can be expensive.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
I had an uncle once that excelled in ‘fresh’ whisky..............😉
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