THE LEGEND OF THE CHARRED BARREL

WHISKEY HISTORY

Charring a barrel before you store and age whiskey is absolutely crucial to the depth and complexity of the flavor profiles we've come to associate with it.

However, it's a practice that, for all the catalogued history we have on the creation of whiskey, has no true known origin. Depending on who you ask, there are a myriad of different legends that attribute the use of charred barrels to a number of different people and/or events.

We thought we would share some of these stories with you all to enjoy.

ELIJAH CRAIG

He was a well-known Baptist preacher in the late 1800s. He was also a well known Entrepreneur.

He had a farm where he distilled spirits. The story goes that it caught fire one fateful night, and he was able to save some of the whiskey and open barrels. He still used the charred barrels to send whiskey down the river to his customers, and what came out was a totally new product full of additional flavors and color that spurred the use of charred barrels.

CHAR CLEANING

It was said there was a barrel shortage in the United States right at the time the whiskey trade started to boom. The demand for whiskey outpaced the supply of available unused barrels.

Distillers began looking towards unusual sources to get barrels to store their whiskey in. It is said one of these sources was the fish industry. The barrels that transported preserved fish between locations were relatively undesirable because cleaning them out was an absolute pain.

However, some distillers would clean them and then use fire to sanitize and burn the smell and taste out of the wood, and when people began bottling from these used barrels, people enjoyed the singed wood complexity.

LOW QUALITY WOOD

Another story goes that the demand for whiskey had some barrel makers churning barrels out quickly, focusing on quantity rather than quality.

The barrels would have splinters, and distillers would burn the splinters out to help keep the wood from cracking and large chunks getting into the whiskey.

While the stories are fun, experts are divided on what actually happened.

British Science Advisory & William Nicholson

In the later half of the 1700s, British scientists were studying ways to preserve water for longer before it went stagnant on ships.

They discovered that charring the barrels helped keep things sterile and allowed the water to stay good longer. However, the barrel charring also led to new flavors being taken on by the water.

In the 1806, chemist William Nicholson published a blurb in a Chemistry Journal detailing the results of his study into the effects of char-sterilized barrels for purposes other than storing water.

As more companies began trying this method to improve consistency and flavor, it supposedly became a standard for the whiskey aging process to use charred barrels.

One thing he noted was that spirits dissolved some of the wood, and that the qualities that the whiskey took on were desirable for taste. It also protected the spirits via char sterilization, leading to more consistent products.