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– Most people want to turn back time. A quest has arisen among whiskey makers to speed it up. Last fall, the Silicon Valley startup Bespoken Spirits made headlines by raising $ 2.6 million in seed capital to introduce a rapid aging process that does not require whiskey maturing in barrels, which usually takes at least three years. It’s an evolution that could recoup $ 20 billion a year for the whiskey industry, according to Bespoken, according to Phys.org. “This is accelerated maturation 2.0,” said co-founder Stuart Aaron at the time. Now the New York Times takes a closer look at Bespoken and other similar companies, the history of whiskey aging and the technology they now use to create a process that takes place almost overnight. Typically, whiskey sits somewhere in oak barrels for a few years to a few decades, and as the seasons change and temperatures rise and fall, the whiskey is pushed in and out of the barrel’s wood, changing the flavor and color of the liquid. strengthens. .
Whiskey makers are now getting around that longer process. Haunted, for example, throws small wood chips called “microstaves” made from different woods (ie, not just oak) into a steel tank along with the unaged whiskey. Workers then increase and decrease the heat and pressure in the tank, achieving the same “aging effect” in a fraction of the time. Other makers blow light into the wood to influence its molecular structure, or reverse engineer the process using natural resources such as yeast and plants. One company, Endless West, says it can make a copy of 30-year-old Balvenie single-malt scotch, which retails for about $ 1,300, and sell it for about $ 40. Experts say that the quickly matured whiskeys are not quite in line with the traditionally matured whiskeys, but that may not matter. “A whiskey like Bespoken doesn’t have to taste like the best bourbon to succeed,” said de Times notes. “It just has to be better than the worst, at a competitive price.” (Read more whiskey stories.)