
Man Says He Can Make 20-Year-Old Rum in 6 Days - rockdiesel
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/lost-spirits/
======
mdonahoe
Reminds me of Peter Norvig's whiskey story:

[http://www.norvig.com/speech.html](http://www.norvig.com/speech.html)

"Before I answer that, let me return for the moment to Dewey Decimal 663:
beverage technology. It turns out that in my very first professional job, as
an intern thirty years ago, I had a colleague, a chemist, who had worked in
beverage technology. The summer before he had been an intern and was given the
task of figuring out if there was a particular chemical that gave whisky the
distinctive taste of being aged in an oak cask. The company figured if they
could isolate the chemical maybe they could just mix it in, and skip five or
ten years of aging. So my friend went into the lab and isolated what he
thought might be the right compound. He ordered a small vial from a chemical
supply company (remember, this was before online shopping and email, so they
had to actually write words on paper) and mixed up a batch. It tasted pretty
good. (Why can't we computer scientists get research projects that involve
consuming alcohol?) My friend was duly congratulated, and he wrote to the
chemical supply company and asked for a 55 gallon drum of the stuff. They
wrote back, saying "we regret that we can not fill your order because we are
currently low on stock and, as I'm sure you know, to produce this chemical we
need to age it in oak casks for five years."

~~~
fragmede
It's a cute story, but in this day and age of designer drugs where you can
draw the chemical you want, email it to China, and have them synthesize a
batch (marked "not for human consumption), does it still hold true?

Eg [https://medium.com/matter/the-drug-revolution-that-no-one-
ca...](https://medium.com/matter/the-drug-revolution-that-no-one-can-
stop-19f753fb15e0)

~~~
dzhiurgis
I came to write the same.

I wonder what other products could be created this way? First thing that comes
to mind is quality soy sauce and balsamic vinegar.

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derefr
I'm surprised that this is the state of the art. Compare this to the
manufacture of, say, orange juice: from the input oranges, the chemicals are
all individually distilled out, put into separate bioreactors at exact
concentrations along with additives and catalysts, each reaction product is
filtered to remove waste products, and then the results are mixed back
together in prescribed concentrations. Effectively, they're making a
completely synthetic product, like a plastic or a mouthwash, except that
(almost) all the input chemicals happen to be extracted from the same source.

~~~
oaktowner
Wow. I never knew that.

I do know that I far prefer the taste of fresh-squeezed (and, in fact, won't
buy anything that is not). But I never really knew why.

~~~
derefr
Note that whether or not it says "from concentrate", this process is still
happening. If it wasn't, they wouldn't be able to screen out pesticides and
bacterial agents, and wouldn't be able to keep each jug to the correct
concentrations of its component chemicals (which each have very different
molecular weights, and so would band in industrial mixers) and so forth.

If you mean that you prefer actual juice you get by juicing an orange
yourself, then sure. But "fresh-squeezed" orange juice at the supermarket is
just organic synthesis without a freezing step. (Which is an important-enough
distinction; freezing fruit, or its juices, denatures a lot of the nutrients.)

~~~
WaxProlix
I think that "fresh-squeezed" is just what it means; if you look at the
chemically de- and re-constructed juices (like Tropicana), they have some
super evasive language on them about their juice being "squeezed from fresh
oranges" or similar.

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lifeisstillgood
There is an apparently not apocryphal story about a Scottish University that
was charged with helping develop a synthetic "scotch whiskey taste". The labs
identified the complex molecules and started looking for ways to synthesise
them. Amazingly one day they found someone able to supply just the chemicals -
they ordered a large supply and it worked. The new additive gave a rich full
body to poor scotch. They were about to tell the distilleries the good news
when they decided to ask how fast the supplier could provide this - "oh about
twenty years, you see we buy barrels from these distilleries in the Highlands
and then ..."

Cannot at all remember who told me that, but it seemed apt.

~~~
paulannesley
Sounds similar to
[http://www.norvig.com/speech.html](http://www.norvig.com/speech.html) which
mdonahoe quoted shortly after your post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371086)

------
beat
I'm really looking forward to trying a product of this system. As a fan of
complex whiskies (mostly Scotch) and wild, chaotic rums, I'm wondering how
close it can get to the myriad of flavors and textures those aged drinks
provide. Differences in barrel types are immediately obvious in whisky - try
Balvenie or other distilleries that offer different barrel-aging options.

I worry some, because as a musician, I'm all too familiar with the
shortcomings of digital emulations of classic sounds. They can get 98%, but
that last two percent is really bothersome and weak. I hope these new whiskies
aren't like that!

~~~
bweitzman
Off topic, but I'm always bothered when people say something like "It's the
last 1% that counts the most". It's misleading to say that any single
percentage point is more important than any other. If the last 1% is the most
important, doesn't it make more sense to call it the last 99%?

I suppose if you are considering only the top percentiles of whatever you're
talking about, it makes more sense. If you're only looking at the 95th-100th
percentiles, then 1% of total quality is actually more like a 20% change in
the space you're considering. But at that the same, to arbitrarily say that
only things in the top 5 percent are worth considering is, well, arbitrary.

/rant

~~~
beat
In genetics, that last 2% is the difference between a human being and a
chimpanzee.

~~~
dzhiurgis
Is it really the last, or just 2% spread across the code?

~~~
ekianjo
It's not the last.

------
yojo
There's a little more on the chemistry from this story in an email sent to K&L
(bay area liquor store) by the distiller:
[http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/klwinescom-spirits-
blog/20...](http://spiritsjournal.klwines.com/klwinescom-spirits-
blog/2014/2/5/rum-super-geekdom.html)

FWIW, I'm a bit of a rum nerd and have been super impressed by the Lost
Spirits Navy and Polynesian rums. I also noticed Longitude, a newish upscale
Oakland bar by a veteran Tiki bartender, was using the Navy rum in a drink, so
there are at least a few folks in industry who are believers as well.

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Splendor
I'm sure traditionally aged sprits would remain with luxury-pricing if this
took hold, but this is fascinating from a scientific perspective.

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hoopism
Man has been trying to do this for decades. There's this AMAZING old movie
called Gizmo! from the 60s (I think) with some guys running wine through a
series of tubes and declaring it aged...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVwqraUKxA&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVwqraUKxA&feature=youtu.be&t=2267)

I found the clip! Must watch.

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no_wave
Doubt it, but these experiments are interesting because they let us discover
the unknown unknowns in these chemical reactions.

If laboratory-aged whiskey is, to the best of our understanding, identical to
normally-aged whiskey, what are the odds that it's actually identical? Pretty
low, but it's how we expand our knowledge.

Also, it often trickles down and makes low-end products way better.

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noarchy
Can we assume that the big spirit producers would embrace this kind of
process, or instead, seek to tighten laws as to what can actually be called X
or Y spirits, in order to specifically exclude these new processes?

~~~
mbarrett
many laws already exist. for example, scotch has to be aged at least 3 years
in scotland.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_whisky#Legal_definition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_whisky#Legal_definition)

~~~
forrestthewoods
Only sort of. Their laws have no jurisdiction outside of Scotland. Except in
some cases based on trade agreements, as the wiki says. You could probably
distill and sell Scotch in the US if you like. Various state regulators may
not give you the necessary licenses to sell but it's probably not illegal.

~~~
zzalpha
Except you couldn't call it Scotch due to the name being a protected mark,
with most countries, the US included, participants in treaties that protect
those marks.

~~~
mbarrett
same with Champagne and a few other protected names.

all scotch is whiskey, but not all whiskey is scotch sort of thing.

he is essentially just creating hard liquor with aging characteristics as I
see it. He could technically create any new name to differentiate his product
and make it more marketable as the other protected names have done.

------
cshotwell
Cleveland Whiskey is using what I must assume is a similar process. I've had
it several times, and rather enjoy it.

~~~
faehnrich
Cleveland Whiskey says they do something like use pressure to force it through
the wood I think, where this says he, "forces the creation of the same key
chemical compounds."

If those in the end mean the same thing, I don't know.

Friends snobbier than me say it's ok but not at the price it was originally
going at, but I liked it.

------
GigabyteCoin
Then why is he giving wired the story on this and not in a Diageo boardroom
right now?

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comrade1
Good luck to him. There have been tricks to fake aged flavors wine, whiskey,
and other aged alcohols for centuries. In CA mass-produced Chardonnay is aged
in giant stainless steel with wood chips. Others make Bourbon with charred
wood chips. There are tricks with pressure and temperature, wood, and other
things that I'm sure that is secret and proprietary. It's not always clear
where tradition ends and modern tricks begin because they've been doing some
of these things for a long time.

But in the end these 'tricks' always produces an inferior product and are
really only good for mass-produced wine/alcohol on the cheaper end.

As an aside, two things, there are some excellent aged rums out there. The
complexity can be almost as good as aged whiskey and the texture/mouth-feel
(don't know the proper word) can be like a 20-year+ scotch for something not
aged as long.

Second, I see that he produced Absinthe in Spain which has similar thujone
levels to absinthe that is legal in the u.s. USA absinthe is nothing like the
real thing - it is more like drinking Pernod. In Switzerland, where Absinthe
originates, the thujone level is 100x (?) what you get in the u.s. When you
drink a fair amount of it it is like you have a high-contrast filter on your
eyes. Further, modern absinthe is clear although I still prefer the green.

~~~
DannoHung
> But in the end these 'tricks' always produces an inferior product and are
> really only good for mass-produced wine/alcohol on the cheaper end.

Double blind proven or asserted by experts?

~~~
bbcbasic
Blind drunk experts

