Making Time Go Faster for Aged Booze | WIRED
Summary
Here’s the high-stakes part of the story in case you don’t want to click: A New Orleans bartender named Max Messier mixes housemade distilled apple juice, made with a rotary evaporator, with wood chips and then cavitates the mixture into something almost but not entirely like Calvados. That’s why, for example, bourbon distillery Buffalo Trace built its “Warehouse X,” to test things like temperature increases—cycles of higher heat induce a distillate to infiltrate wood more frequently, which is why makers of American whiskey will tell you that it doesn’t need as much age on it as, say, single malt Scotch. Brown-Foreman builds on the other of a couple thousand barrels a day, mostly to feed the rapacious beast that is Jack Daniels; Independent Stave makes perhaps a million a year. The hot-roll steel hoops get pitted with rust in the damp warehouse air, and the wood is kiln-dried instead of seasoned for two or three years outside, which means it never acquires the silver-black infection of fungus that eats away at the lignin, exposing the cellulose to the spirit as it ages and sparking all kinds of weird chemistry. Kelvin rehabs them and puts them into their own cargo containers, bound for Scotland, Ireland, China, the Caribbean, and elsewhere so distillers in those places can age their new-make spirit in ex-bourbon casks from America.