SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 30 2018, @01:50PM (1 child)
Make alcohol, someone will drink it, you just have to price it correctly. Bootleggers have proven this consistently throughout history - people will pay cheaper prices even if it will kill them.
Make "artificial alcohol", you don't have to invest in aging facilities and can reduce your warehousing costs by orders of magnitude. You get to deliver a cheaper product either approximating or equaling what's available now and make more money at it than the other guy who insists on keeping casks warehoused for 3-7-12-20 years as it ages.
Race to the bottom ensues, leaving artisinal blends with ever-higher price points.
And from TFA.... while they can try to analyze and approximate fine quality their first goal needs to be "create a cheaper product people will drink." Refinements can wait. I don't see the path where they can please the critics and the snobs - they need to please the non-industry person who wants a drink before dinner and doesn't care if it's Johnnie Walker, Dewars, Cutty Sark, or BRAND X MADE YESTERDAY, er, Endless West.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday August 30 2018, @02:18PM
Given what has been done with blind taste tests [theguardian.com] on the wine side, I would not be surprised if they go from "drinkable" to tricking snobs/critics in a very short amount of time. Kind of like with cultured meat, I expect that the artificial technique could produce "acceptable" quality in the beginning but ultimately exceed the quality of top tier stuff due to the fine-grained control you could achieve.
Traditional distilleries will continue to exist, they will call themselves craft distilleries, and life will go on. I don't know if price points will climb much higher. If a bunch of small distilleries close down while big distilleries stop using barrels, suddenly there will be a lot of barrels on the market. It seems that barrels can be used indefinitely [gobourbon.com], although the effects of the wood can diminish after repeated uses. I know that some beer breweries out there buy used wine and spirit barrels in order to impart interesting flavors onto beers. One brewery I visited was aging stuff in wine, bourbon, and tequila barrels.
Also, how about a hybrid technique? Age the traditional way in a fresh barrel for 2 years, then add some synthesized compounds to the finished product. Compare 2 years of natural aging to 20.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]