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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, Interesting) by danmars on Thursday August 30 2018, @03:32PM (3 children)
(To clarify, I do understand the parent figured this out.) Among people who don't drink these things, the naming conventions are definitely confusing.
I doubt they'll have too much trouble selling artificially-flavored "spirits" since, for example, people already buy many kinds of vodka (which is really just very simple chemistry). While knowing that a company is trying to come up with more artificial flavors to mix with alcohol and water, it doesn't seem particularly revolutionary to me. They're unlikely to run into lots of companies and countries fighting them over their products not being "real" like they would with wine, so labeling and marketing would probably be a lot easier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @03:41PM (2 children)
Vodka drinkers and whisk(e)y drinkers tend to mostly be cut from quite different cloth..all the moreso flavored vodka folks.
But, don't worry. Alcoholism has a way of bringing one's funds down, and the freshly broke former whiskey snobs will be thrilled to have artificial Bourbon instead of being left with gin.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 30 2018, @04:14PM (1 child)
Gin is great IMO, and you can easily bring your funds down with craft [thespruceeats.com] or artisanal [supercall.com] gins. Or you can just settle for a bottle of New Amsterdam.
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(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Thursday August 30 2018, @08:18PM
New Amsterdam is not quite good enough (for me) to drink straight, but it's head and shoulders above the really cheap stuff for martinis, G&T, gimlets, etc.
Even the more expensive gins ring up far below where comparable-quality whiskeys do though (thankfully :) ).