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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/its-now-possible-to-detect-counterfeit-whisky-without-opening-the-bottle/ [arstechnica.com]

There's nothing quite like the pleasure of sipping a fine Scotch whisky, for those whose tastes run to such indulgences. But how can you be sure that you're paying for the real deal and not some cheap counterfeit? Good news: physicists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have figured out how to test the authenticity of bottles of fine Scotch whisky using laser light, without ever having to open the bottles. They described their work in a recent paper [rsc.org] published in the journal Analytical Methods.
[...]
A 2018 study subjected 55 randomly selected bottles from auctions, private collectors, and retailers to radiocarbon dating and found that 21 of them were either outright fakes or not distilled in the year claimed on the label.
[...]
That's what prompted Alasdair Clark of the University of Glasgow to develop an artificial "tongue" [rsc.org] capable of distinguishing between different brands of whisky.
[...]
And you still have to open the bottles in order to test the whiskies.
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Food scientists and chemists are also interested in using spectroscopy to identify the chemical compounds inside a whisky bottle. This involves shining a laser light into a substance, which scatters the light and breaks it into a spectrum of wavelengths.
[...]
The challenge in applying such techniques to whisky is that the glass bottles themselves produce a large spectral signal, making it difficult to discern the chemical fingerprint of interest (that of the spirit inside). So spectroscopy is usually performed after whiskies have been removed from the bottle.

That's the problem Holly Fleming and her colleagues at St. Andrews have solved with this latest paper. They figured out how to shape the laser light into a ring instead of a focused beam, thereby suppressing the noisy signal from the glass.

Original Submission