DRINK
BETTER
WITH TIME Experimenting with aging whiskey by KEVIN BARRETT
W
hen I was a child, I received a chemistry set for Christmas. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, and I was excited about its possibilities. I envisioned mixology of the sort you see on TV: I thought I was going to solve crimes with my sudden forensic aptitude. I thought I was going to be Batman. I planned to make smoke bombs and Batarangs…but Santa swindled me.
The picture on the front of the chemistry set box was of a boy wearing safety glasses, protective gloves, and a lab coat, to me the image of modern-day Archimedes in a eureka moment. Within the box, however, were instructions for me to combine sugar and water before dangling a string in the mixture to watch a crystal form. It took weeks. It was underwhelming. Did Batman do this?! I’m happy to report that after many years, while I’m still not Batman, I do
have a new chemistry set of sorts, and this one is no disappointment. Today I have a barrel instead of a test tube, and it’s full of whiskey instead of sugar water. Here’s an interesting scientific fact: Whiskey gets up to 80 percent of its flavor and all of its color from the barrel. My grown-up chemistry experiment is to play with this knowledge. Hypothesis 1: Whiskey served from a barrel will change in flavor after a few months. To test this hypothesis, I bought an entire barrel of Buffalo Trace Single Barrel Select bourbon and put it back in its original barrel to continue the aging process. I expected the liquor to have a slight but noticeable flavor change after a few months. It turns out, the whiskey changes much faster than hypothesized. A local photographs by KEITH ISAACS
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