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Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408
For more than two years now — from the second floor of a repurposed warehouse in the Dogpatch district of San Francisco — the young scientists and chemists at Ava Winery have been attempting to save the planet and conduct commerce by producing wine without grapes or fermentation. Recently, the company rebranded and shifted its focus: now known as Endless West, it is attempting to make brown spirits without the hidebound utilization of barrels for maturation.
In Endless West's 1,800-square-foot lab, there are no implements ordinarily associated with making wine or whiskey. Instead, one sees chemists quietly sitting at computers beside beakers, gas chromatography and mass spectrometer machines, and something called a liquid handling robot, which is loaded with test tubes that are filled with liquid from "real" wines and spirits. The white-smocked bio and analytical chemists are measuring and mapping the molecular profiles of standard alcoholic beverages. There is even a scanning area with an "electronic nose" to measure olfactory properties; something you likely won't find in a standard winery lab.
The quest is to tease out which "naturally derived" carbohydrates, sugars, proteins, amino acids, and lipids comprise a wine or spirit, and which components encompass the organoleptic profiles of various alcoholic beverages. Key aromatics and flavor molecules are being identified such as citrus-like esters from ethyl isobutyrate and pineapple-y aromas derived from ethyl hexanoate or the buttery qualities found in the compound diacetyl.
Once recognized, neutral distillates or grain alcohol is then added to the recipe to synthetically formulate a wine or whiskey.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 30 2018, @12:32PM (8 children)
More realistically, once the magic recipe for superWhiskey is locked down, measurements will be made on disgusting rotgut, the delta will be calculated, and a special custom mix will turn 10 kiloliters of rotgut and a mysterious amount of custom mystery substance into something similar to the measured recipe for superWhiskey, then the price will be marked up to 1% less than "real" whiskey, destroying the market.
Also your "bourbon bbq sauce" will at least theoretically taste more like actual bourbon, we'll have whiskey flavored soda and energy drinks, whiskey flavored donut frosting and ice cream, etc.
Luckily whiskey stores well, so if you want to buy real tasting good whiskey, maybe now is the time to stock up? A couple crates of the good stuff would last me a couple decades; for some of you thats probably a weekly shopping list, LOL.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday August 30 2018, @02:10PM (7 children)
The issue with low-quality spirits is congeners impurities. There's two way around those: Multiple distillations with active carbon filtering, and being very careful with your ingredients. The former method also removes the flavor and leaves you with moonshine/vodka/medical grade alcohol*. The latter method is expensive and error prone.
What these fellas are trying to do is synthesize the barrel aging process into an additive that could be applied to a variety of distilled spirits. Whiskey just happens to be an easy target since aside from the acetals and diacetyls, the barrel aging is responsible for all the flavor as it's traditionally made without hops. So, in theory, you could take some vodka (or moonshine + acetals and diacetyls) and add the synthetic flavor and end up with a perfect whiskey.
So, overall, the risk of them ending up with a low quality flavoring is quite low. What's more likely is that they'll break apart the product into 2-3 formulas that need to be combined to get the perfect results(representing different aging duration, temperatures and such) and that many stills won't bother and end up using just the most dominant flavors. Regardless, the end result is very likely to still be superior for the simple reason that much of the flavors currently found in alcohols are there just to mask the presence of congeners and we might actually prefer truly pure alcohol with fewer flavors.
*the difference in flavor is how much and at what ratio the acetals and diacetyls are introduced which, in practice, means how many distillation runs you're preforming.
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(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday August 30 2018, @05:29PM (6 children)
If you want just the alcohol flavor, there's Vodka already. A number of popular brands contain nothing but food grade industrially produced ethanol and expensive marketing.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday August 30 2018, @08:07PM (5 children)
But, most folks do prefer Vodka: https://www.liquor.com/articles/vodka-popularity/ [liquor.com]
FYI, medical (pharmaceutical) ethanol is superior and even comes Kosher suggesting it's often used by the food and beverage industries: https://www.spectrumchemical.com/OA_HTML/Ethyl-Alcohol-Grade-Selector.jsp?minisite=10020 [spectrumchemical.com]
On a side note, Absolut vodka derived their name from the Absolute Ethyl Alcohol [wikipedia.org] they use to produce it as alluded to on their site:
https://www.absolut.com/us/products/absolut-vodka/ [absolut.com]
So, while you're right that they use continues distillation - aka industrial process - to distill their ethanol, calling it "expensive marketing" when they're just stating it with pride connotes negativity. As I said, it IS what people want AND if they crack the barrel aging flavor it will almost definitely be preferable to use such highly distilled alcohols instead of a single distillation pass of beer wash and four shots to the trash in the hopes the fermentation didn't produce too many impurities.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday August 30 2018, @08:56PM (2 children)
Vodka "snobs" aside, I suspect most drinkers of vodka enjoy it in mixed drinks in which the flavor, for all intents and purposes, is almost entirely from the mixers which mask any alcohol taste. In my experience, those who drink expensive vodkas straight are doing it mostly for status, and they chose vodka because it has little taste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @10:44PM (1 child)
It's a good thing there aren't any whiskey snobs or cocktails then!
Besides, if cocktails are the objective, shouldn't rum be best selling?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @12:45AM
there are excellent scotch cocktail try a rob roy perfect
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday August 31 2018, @12:40AM
The expensive marketing part lies in claiming that there is (or can be) any difference between brand X highly distilled ethanol and brand Y highly distilled ethanol. Most of it is delivered in tanker trucks from industrial manufacturers, diluted with filtered water, poured into a bottle, and then slapped with an expensive looking label.
That's not to say there aren't low end brands where they get the cheapest most poorly distilled ethanol available that can still be called food grade.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @10:42PM
Ah, but then most folks haven't almost killed themselves with the stuff (20 hours unconscious, oh, the fun things one gets up to as a student...) it was hellishly easy to get to that state 'bibing vodka (looks like water, drinks like water...), a lot easier than with whisky or rum.
Indeed!, very fond memories of working in labs where I had access to as much BP grade ethanol as I wanted, having a taste for the poitín I couldn't believe how smooth and sweet pure ethanol was the first time I tasted it.