Ultrasound Machine Ages Wine 448
Inventor Casey Jones says his creation uses ultrasound technology to recreate the effects of decades of aging by colliding alcohol molecules inside the bottle. Mr. Jones said, "This machine can take your run-of-the-mill £3.99 bottle of plonk and turn it into a finest bottle of vintage tasting like it costs hundreds. It works on any alcohol that tastes better aged, even a bottle of paintstripper whisky can taste like an 8-year-aged single malt." The Ultrasonic Wine Ager, which looks like a Dr. Who ice bucket, takes 30 minutes to work and has already been given the thumbs up by an English winemaker. I know a certain special lady who is about to have the best bottle of Boone's Farm in the world.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:5, Informative)
Yup indeedy. Whisky "ages" by leeching oils from the wood it's casked in.
Also, making a blend taste like a single malt is a ridiculous claim. It's akin to claiming a device can turn fruit-punch into pineapple juice. Where do the other flavours go?
HAL.
Re:yes; but does it .. (Score:3, Informative)
.. work on Mountain Dew?
If you feel that the carbonation in Mountain Dew was an undesirable trait, then yes. Sonication is an effective technique for degassing liquids - so it could make your dew flat quicker than just about anything else.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention Budweiser. Google "Beechwood aged."
Re:It would be cool (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Whiskey? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Whiskey? (Score:3, Informative)
Whisky ages by evaporating bad alcohols while retaining tasty ones. Flavours from the barrel wood and the sea air are a secondary effect. This cannot happen through a glass bottle, so bottling indeed stops the aging process. This explains why all whisky isn't 25 years old. Slashdot readers have surely wondered why we can't fill the pipeline and always have 25 year old whisky. The answer is that about 2% of the alcohols evaporate each year. Waiting 25 years means you lose about half the alcohol.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:5, Informative)
Whiskey most definitely is aged in oak casks, for quite a long time at that. Some distillers use fresh casks while others use casks that had been previously used for sherry. Some may use a sequence of casks even, or may have different types/lines that require certain types of casks. I know the scotch [theglenlivet.com] I drink has several different vintages. They age for a various number of years, again for the Glenlivet, that can be 12, 15, 16, 18, 21 years or more. The difference between each vintage is noticeable, primarily in the smoothness and variety in tastes.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It would be cool (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It would be cool (Score:3, Informative)
Typically the 'age-worthy' wines are made with the choice fruit, and are designed to age by balancing the acid content with the fruit content. As the fruit mellows over time so do the acids (tannins). It is an art as much as as it is a science.
Are the two chemical processes related by any chance? It seems to me that this process could artificially mellow the tannins and the fruit, even in cheap wine. Since we don't know how or if it works, it's possible. Why is it that bad wine doesn't get better with age?
This definitely seems like an area where science could take out the need for art.
Snake oil!!! (Score:2, Informative)
This is just plain nonsense.
The "aging" of wine in a bottle is active yeast dying a slow and horrible death of suffocation on the ever decreasing amount of dissolved oxygen in the wine. There is always a slight pressure and gas leak within the bottle of CO2 generated by the yeast digesting the remaining sugars and O2. A wine will be "done" aging in the bottle and start to spoil when all the dissolved oxygen is gone. The yeast dies and no more CO2 is produced. The pressure in the bottle drops to zero, and air flow starts to reverse and foreign elements like bacteria can get in. The bacteria can now start to feed on the remaining sugars and produce acid. This is when wine turns to vinegar.
Ultrasonic ager moving around alcohol molecules! Changing them so you have no hangover! What a sham! The only way, I suppose, it could work is to free up dissolved O2 in the wine (much like shaking a soda bottle frees up dissolved CO2) and supercharge the yeast, but I suspect that won't work in 30 minutes.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:3, Informative)
I believe new casks are required by law only if you want to call your whiskey "bourbon".
http://www.straightbourbon.com/whatisbourbon.html [straightbourbon.com]
If you don't mind calling it "whiskey" or making up your own name for it, you can do it however you want. (Southern Comfort, Jack Daniels, rye whiskey, Georgia Moon, for examples) The only real reason there isn't a lot more experimentation in the US-origin whiskey market is the gigantic outlay required for getting licensed as a distiller, and the VERY long time horizon before you'll see any kind of return.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whiskey == Burnt Oak Juice. (Score:4, Informative)
Er, there are a lot of different kinds of whiskey. Bourbon is aged in new, charred oak casks. Most of the flavor in bourbon comes from the barrel. These barrels are used once. Used bourbon barrels are then sold to other spirit makers, and sometimes beer brewers. (Samuel adams uses barrels from the Buffalo Trace distillery in Kentucky.)
Scotch whiskey does NOT use fresh charred barrels. When aging Scotch, it is very important NOT to impart too much flavor from the barrel as this overpowers the natural flavors in the whiskey itself. Scotch is aged in a variety of barrels, including used sherry barrels, used bourbon barrels, etc.
And yes, whiskey does indeed stop aging once it is bottled.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whiskey? (Score:1, Informative)
Ah, no.
In whiskey, there's a whole load of different higher-order alcohols present in high enough doses to change the taste.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:1, Informative)
Makers Mark is not a blended whiskey, it's bourbon.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:3, Informative)
Interestingly, I have had a recent change of heart with respect to Bourbon. Having only ever sampled crap like Jim Beam and Wild Turkey didn't exactly make me want to partake again, and I happily moved over to Scotch. However, I was in Kentucky this summer and went on a few Bourbon tours. There are actually some very good Bourbons being made today, some very nice small batch stuff that is not blended, and is aged quite nicely. Apparently up until the mid 80's or so, NO bourbon was aged more than 4 years or so. But the distillers realized there was actually a market for something a bit better than that. (No shit ;)
Buffalo Trace is one distiller that makes some nice bourbon. Go for any small batch or aged bottling.
Jim Beam actually does make a good whiskey called Knob Creek...trust me, it ain't your standard Jim Beam.
Woodford Reserve is actually very good as well.
Now, it's still no Scotch, but there is indeed some very nice and drinkable bourbon out there!
Re:Whiskey? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, the other alcohols are toxic (to varying degrees), but no, ethanol isn't the only alcohol present in fermented beverages. For that matter, ethanol is toxic by itself, if you take enough of it. It's the dose that makes the poison.
Small amounts of methanol can be produced in fermentation, as well as a number of heavier alcohols. These heavier alcohols are collectively called fusel alcohols or fusel oils, and may impart significant flavour to the final beverage. Whiskeys are generally fairly high in fusel oils; these heavier alcohols contribute some 'spiciness' or 'heat' to the drink.
That said, I agree with part of the parent post. The idea that fusel oils are lost to evaporation during aging is indeed nonsense. If anything, these higher-mass alcohols will have a lower vapour pressure than ethanol, and will be concentrated relative to ethanol. (Fusel oils are - partly - removed during the distillation process, not during aging.)
Re:Whiskey? (Score:5, Informative)
So there is a good chance that there is a bit of Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, or maybe even Jack Daniels (even though it is actually Tennessee whiskey not bourbon) in your favorite scotch.
Re:Even with the can sealed? (Score:3, Informative)
The volume (or pressure) most certainly would change.
Volume for solutions isn't strictly additive, especially when you're talking about liquids and gas. The packing of water and CO2 is tighter than the packing of CO2 and CO2.
12 Years? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whiskey? (Score:1, Informative)
>because it's been obscured by blending different batches. So this machine suddenly adds 'character' now? Sounds like magic.
A blended Whisky is a mix of malt and grain whisky. (e.g. Johnny Walker Black)
A vatted malt is a mix of single malts from different distilleries. (e.g. Johnny Walker Green)
A single malt comes from one distillery but contains whisky from different barrels in order to maintain consistency. (e.g. Highland Park)
A bottle of single cask contains whisky from just one barrel. (e.g. Balvenie 15 year old)
Actually, no. (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, no. There are all kinds of alcohols, but I'll spare you the chemistry lesson.
The reason whiskey and brandy's don't age much in the bottle is because they are distillates. Most of those fancy falvanoids and esters you find in wine, along with more harsh tannis, don't come along for the ride. Instead, you concentrate tasty and not so tasty fusile alcohols. As the polymerize with the various esters leached from the oak, they mellow, rather than evaporate away (much faster than ethenol). Once pulled from the barrel, it not only loses access to new oak, but it is also diluted down to 80 proof, buffering the whole process significantly. While it might age, it would be VERY, VERY slow.
Wines that can age do so because their tannins polymerize, which makes them much more tolerable, if not outright yummy. The really bad ones tend to precipitate out with tannic acid, which is why you'll get a crunchy mouthful if you don't pour correctly. However, most wines don't age well like this. They need to have good acid / alcohol balance to begin with and a dearth of tannis that will play along. You might pull a little edge off a crappy wine with this gizmo, but you're also probably losing good flavors too, perhaps even creaming the anthocyanines (sp?) that make certain bold (thing CA or Australia) wines drinkable young.
This device does nothing. (Score:3, Informative)
I think we can be pretty sure this device does exactly nothing. But once you've spent $800 on this thing are you going to admit you are an idiot that was swindled out of $800? No... You're probably going to tell your friends how much better it makes your wine taste.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:4, Informative)
Obligatory: I like my women like my scotch; 12 years old and mixed up with coke.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:5, Informative)
My family has been distilling for generations, and finding ways to "age" things has been around forever. "Aging" is a nice ancient technique to make up for not having advanced technology at their disposal.
As far as cask aging, which I saw a few posts on, it has nothing to do with evaporating heavier alcohols (where would they go, and, there's is only one alcohol, ethanol).
Many distilleries use white oak casks, which receive a 1200 degree firing of the interior to charcoal the insides before the product is added. This is one of the causes of the "brown" color of those liquors that use this method as well as the "smoke" flavor, and is used to basically create an activated charcoal filter that the product lives in for "years".
When the barrel is fired (and then extinguished with steam blasted in) the char has all these nice little pathways and tiny cracks whose job is to grab all these taste screwing large molecules that give a harsh taste to the product. Just like activated charcoal is used in a water filter for drinking water, the same technique mellows the flavor of the liquor. The "aging" is the act of, as summers and winters went by, the casks would "breath" due to the contraction and expansion of the cask due to temperature variation which would circulate the product in a fashion to get the filtering going with pressure changes. The more that occurs, the more it is filtered, the cleaner the taste.
These molecules that we're trying to get rid of are some of the products of the distillation. When you distill your mash or beer, you have a variety of products separated from the water, the heads (where the majority of your flavors come from), the ethanol, and the tails (fuseoils, which are the disgusting taste). When distilling you carefully test the product coming out and separate it into the various products (if using reflux distillation with plates). The heads are high volatility and the tails are high weight. The tails are smelly and screw up your taste so you have to be careful distilling to get the correct balance of the middle of the distillate, but not losing the flavoring agents of the heads or tails from the heart of the product.
If you distill and filter over and over, you get "pure" ethanol or the basis of vodka. The ethanol purity is only about 95.6% as the distillate reaches azetrope, meaning you can't really separate it from what it's being boiled off of. There are methods to get beyond this such as vaccuum distillation to separate your distillates or post distillation methods (steam blasting through oeatmeal for example or even using gasoline) to use adsorption to remove the last remaining bits of stuff you don't want. Of course, if you leave a bottle of 100% ethanol out, it'll go back to 95.6% as it exchanges water from the air.
Aging has no real meaning these days. The point of aging is to use activated charcoal to remove things you don't want. You don't want the big molecules that cause bad taste, you want it filtered from the product. You do want to keep some though, which are in the "heads" because they have the specific flavors you want to distinguish your liquor. You can't use a perfectly pure vodka base, because then you've gotten rid of all those
Today, as part of your distillation process, after the product has gone through fractional (reflux) distillation through your column, it is common to "force" it through several packs of activated charcoal, in order to quick filter it. This is used to get the purest base ethanol in vodka creation, and why you see different marketing of "triple filtered" or "6 filtered" vodka, claiming how many filter processes it goes through to remove taste impurities.
Re:Whiskey == Burnt Oak Juice. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Correction... (Score:3, Informative)
If you get methanol you're doing it wrong.
Not only that but it's a lighter alcohol. It's also really fucking bad for you. This is one of the reasons home spirit distillation is illegal in a lot of countries
Re:Whiskey? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whiskey? (Score:3, Informative)
Bourbon casks? Generally not!
Most 'Scotch', which has to be made in Scotland, is aged in ex-sherry casks. There are non-Scottish whisky makers (generally whisky is Scottish, whiskey is Irish) who use bourbon casks, but if they are not in Scotland then it is just whisky, not scotch.
The Glenora distillery in Nova Scotia produces Glen Breton whisky using barley and yeast imported from Scotland, vats and a still from Scotland, was set up by a master distiller from Scotland, but it still isn't Scotch. It is Canada's only single malt producer and they do use Bourbon casks, because they are easier to obtain there. These give a much smoother, less peaty, flavour to the whisky. It is very good, but unfortunately, since they only have a small production run, pretty expensive and hard to obtain outside Canada.
Re:Whiskey? (Score:2, Informative)
Well, actually, very few Australian wines are made with charred oak chips for flavor, except maybe the cheap mass produced stuff. The vast majority of decent wooded Australian wines are aged with properly coopered American or French oak barrels just like good wine everywhere. The earlier industrial fermentation stages may often be more industrial, with fermentation vats and industrial machinery, but the aging is usually done the old fashioned way.