Ashley Hanson

Decoding the Complex Art of Whiskey Making What makes a great whiskey get that smooth flavor? If whiskey’s signature flavor came from a simple formula of grains and distilling ratios plus time distilling in the barrel, you’d assume there would be hundreds of qualities, profiles, and tastes. Whiskey production is a complex art, and I’ll break it down for you below. Barrels The type of barrels and the way you choose to store them while the whiskey ages gives the whiskey different notes of flavor. Size The biggest barrel variable is the size. The barrel’s size directly impacts how much the whiskey inside the barrel gets exposed to the wood. Smaller barrel sizes age faster. Major American whiskey manufacturers use a 53-gallon barrel. Smaller or newer producers have started using 30-gallon barrels and smaller because this helps them age their whiskey quicker. The whiskey industry also has what it calls sherry butts, and they hold around 132 gallons. Rebuilt barrels called Hogsheads hold between 60 and 65 gallons. You see these in the Scotch industry. Wood Different regions produce different wood, and the wood gives whiskey different flavors. Shinji Fukuyo is the chief blender at Suntory Whisky, and he claims the spicy, long finish you find with this brand comes from the Miunara casks. Minnesota produces American Oak that has distinct characteristics when you compare it to American Oak from different states. Each wood has a different composition. Wood that is more porous allows the whiskey to go deeper into the barrel. Did the wood come from a dense forest that had hundreds of years of growth, or did it come from newer forests? You’ll get different qualities, even if the wood came from the exact trees grown in the same place. Char Open flame touches the barrels on the inside to create a char effect. Bourbon has to go through the aging process in new American oak barrels with fresh char. When you char the barrels, the wood releases the vanillin compounds that give Bourbon its classic caramel and vanilla flavor. Since there are different chars available, they get numbers to tell the stages apart. Wild Turkey uses char #4, and this is the deepest char possible. This type of char makes the inside of the barrel look like alligator skin. You have to toast each barrel to different levels using dry heat. New or Used Bourbon, by law, gets aged in new charred American oak barrels. A new barrel has never taken any whiskey through the aging process. New barrels give a stronger charred flavor and element that a used barrel. Many Scotch manufacturers use old Bourbon and Sherry barrels. These are first-fill barrels that have had a single use. Second-used barrels have had two uses, and anything offered beyond that gives the whiskey slight hints of the original spirit’s flavor. Staves A stave is an individual piece of wood used when you create a new barrel. The stave should get cut in a way that produces their proper grain profile. Did the staves get naturally aged or heated? For how long? Maker’s Mark uses staves that they season for 9 months to help the staves give off the highest amount of vanillin compounds. If they produce Maker’s Mark 46, 18-month-old French oak staves that were seared get inserted into the barrel. This only happens in the colder months, and it adds 8 to 11 weeks to the aging time. Woodford Reserve roasts their wood after aging it for nine months outside. Then, they char it to pre-set a specific flavor set deep into the wood of the barrel. Cuts Distilleries have tight control over what distillate parts gets into the barrel. You can break down the liquid coming from the still into the poisonous heads, the tastiest and cleanest portion (hearts), and the tails. The tails are where you get a reduced flavor quality. How loosely or tightly a distiller makes their cuts changes the raw spirit. The Macallan only uses 16% distillate, and it’s famous for tight cuts. Distillation Type Distillation happens in a column or pot still. A pot still is traditional, and whiskey came out of a batch by batch production process. The column still was more efficient and could cut out creating batches. Along with these two still choices, the distillery may double distill their product. Double distilling is classic, but Scotch doesn’t require it. Irish whisky requires triple distillation. Jim Beam sends 200 gallons of whiskey every minute into their six-story high still while Woodford Reserve Morris favors the Irish style distillation process. Formula Adding grain, yeast, and water makes whiskey. While this is a deceptively simple formula, it leaves a lot of room for experimentation, variation, and refinement. Mash Whiskey’s mash bill refers to the grain ratio. Bourbon has to have 51% corn at a minimum, while Rye must have 51% rye grain. For a single malt Scotch, the mash bill has to be 100% malted barley. Beyond this, different brands can do whatever they like to their own standards. Bourbon typically uses malted barley, rye, and corn. Corn acts like the base to the Bourbon, rye gives it a shot of flavor, and malted barley gives Bourbon the needed enzymes to keep the fermentation process going. The ration for these grains fluctuates widely, and some manufacturers choose to use wheat instead of rye. If a Bourbon uses a light rye, it’ll pull more spice from the rye grain. Wheated Bourbon has softer flavor notes without as much spice. However, not all barely and rye is created equal. Many whiskey manufacturers use proprietary or exclusive grains. Maker’s Mark uses a red winter wheat rather than just any wheat. The milling techniques give the whiskey different end results as well. Yeast Whichever yeast strain a particular brand of whiskey uses during the fermentation process gets a place as one of the brand’s defining characteristics. Wild Turkey uses the same yeast it’s had for over 50 years. Every single weak, master distiller Jimmy Russell starts a new batch of yeast using a Petri dish from scratch. Jim Beam’s yeast is the same strain they started in 1935. Maker’s Mark also uses the same yeast strain it has maintained for decades. The length of the fermentation process will give the whiskey different qualities. Longer fermentation periods give fruity undertones. Woodford Reserve uses a six-day process for fermenting each batch. This could be one of the longest, if not the longest in the world. The average process is two or three days at the most. Water Were you to go to Kentucky and talk about yeast; the conversation would eventually end up talking about the limestone water supply. The limestone content gives Kentucky’s water a very unique taste, and it’s one of the biggest reasons Bourbon stays rooted here. This isn’t just exclusive to Kentucky. Japan has the Suntory’s distilleries that were built in their location specifically for the water. They use thousand-year-old granite rocks to filter the snow and rain they use to create their whiskey. Peat and Smoke Whiskey’s many aspects didn’t come from scientists experimenting to get the right formula. Happenstance played a huge role. In America, Rye whiskey dominated due to the high quantities of available rye grain. As corn became more accessible, the whiskey industry largely switched to using it, and Bourbon’s backbone was born. Scotland has peat bogs to provide energy and heat. They used peat fires to dry the malted barley and heat the stills. This gave Scotch the signature peat profile. If you really want to taste it, try Islay Scotch. Different smoking techniques for the grain are more popular. This ranges from the high-profile Corsair Triple Smoke that uses cherrywood, beachwood, and peat to the cherrywood and applewood smoke blend of Virginia’s Copper Fox Distillery. Production Control Certain manufacturers make their own barrels for aging their whiskey. This helps ensure they never run out, and they can hit their high standards. Brown-Forman makes over 3,000 barrels every day for their brands, including Woodford Reserve and Jack Daniel’s. Stills Each distillery has a unique magic associated with it that’s impossible to recreate. From warehouses and barrels to yeast, fermentation processes, and mash bills to the stills themselves. You could replicate one recipe down to the nth degree, but using a different still will only give you a similar whiskey. Sizes and Shapes The still’s shape, size, neck and arm sizes, how you heat it, how many plates you use, and what the still is made out of will give you different end results. The Macallan’s use the smallest stills in Speyside. However, they’re bigger than the newer American distillers. Suntory Whisky goes the other direction with three different distilleries using very different pot stills. The different sizes and shapes let them easily produce over 100 different malt whiskies. Warehouse Types If you were to visit Kentucky’s Wild Turkey distillery, you may be able to hear Eddie Russell talk about Wild Turkey’s warehouses. The warehouses are the linchpin for Wild Turkey whiskey, and they control every minute detail ranging from the paint colors, construction materials, temperature, building location, how much sunlight it gets, and their preference for using metal on the sides of their warehouses. If you took a stroll to Woodford Reserve and talked to Chris Morris, you’d find that this master distiller believes in heated and unheated maturation. Here, they heat cycle each warehouse and tightly control the internal temperatures, so external temperatures don’t play a role. Their warehouses are insulated concrete, stone, or brick because it lets them micromanage every step of the aging process. How you choose to store the whiskey barrels is also essential. Frederick Stinzel was the man behind barrel warehousing, and he invented this method in 1879. Storing your whiskey barrels with a thin plank of wood supporting each barrel at each end and the barrels aligned horizontally allows for maximum element exposure Internal Location The inside of the warehouse is critical as well because this is where they actually store the barrels. Barrels stored in the top of the warehouse get consistently higher temperatures, and this speeds up the aging process. Other factors include the warehouse flooring, specific row locations, and different building sides all shape unique characteristics based on humidity, airflow, and temperature. If you move the barrels from one spot to another, this will impact the final flavor profile. Take a look at Maker’s Mark. They have a set schedule where they put all of the whiskey barrels to age on the top floor of the warehouse. They stay here for three summers before they get rotated back down to the bottom floors. Once they’re here, they age for three to four additional years. Warehousing and Aging The amount of time whisky spends in a barrel is one of several factors that combine to create whiskey’s final flavor profile. Weather and Temperature The external climate directly around where manufacturers warehouse their whiskey plays a large role on how rapidly it ages, how much evaporation takes place, and how much interaction the whiskey gets with the wood. The hotter it is, the more evaporation occurs, and the more the alcohol penetrates the wood. Add humidity, and the evaporation goes up even more. Kentucky’s seasonal temperatures allow the barrels to contract when it gets cooler in the winter and expand when the summer heat comes in. In Scotland, you get relatively the same temperature year round. The Yoichi distillery is home to Japan’s Nikka Whisky, and you can find it in the Hokkaido Prefecture. This region mimics Scotland’s weather conditions, and the founder had spent a fair amount of time in Scotland learning the art of Whiskey making. However, ocean side environments may not be available, so certain manufacturers like Jefferson’s Ocean Aged At Sea send their whiskey around the world on ships. This allows the whiskey to get sloshed around and get exposure to the salty ocean air. There you have it. Now you know the biggest factors that go into creating that complex and smooth flavor profile that is essentially whiskey.