Whiskey maker swaps oak barrel-aging for a laboratory. But how does it taste?

Record ID: 1650489

  • Title: Whiskey maker swaps oak barrel-aging for a laboratory. But how does it taste?
  • Date: 9th December 2021
  • Summary: MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (RECENT - OCTOBER 20, 2021) (Reuters) (SOUNDBITE) (English) MARTIN JANOUSEK, CEO OF BESPOKEN SPIRITS, SAYING: "So we use chemical fingerprints to determine where, what, uh, what are (the) critical compounds, what the customer is looking for, what we are looking for in a spirit, and how to how to get to the target of the spirit. And we also use it as a, as a, as a quality tool to, to prove to ourselves that each time we can do this repeatable."
  • Embargoed: 23rd December 2021 11:03
  • Keywords: Bespoken Bespoken Spirits bourbon maturing whiskey rapid maturation sustainable whiskey whiskey whiskey maturation
  • Location: MENLO PARK + SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES / FORT WORTH, TEXAS, UNITED STATES
  • City: MENLO PARK + SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES / FORT WORTH, TEXAS, UNITED STATES
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: Climate Adaptation and Solution,Climate Change,Environment,General News,United States
  • Reuters ID: LVA003F7CE4WR
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: In a small lab in California's Silicon Valley, Martin Janousek (pronounced YAN-O-SHECK) and Stu Aaron are making whiskey.
    There are no oak barrels stacked floor to ceiling. In fact, there's hardly any wood at all. Instead, they use syringes, beakers and vials to find a more sustainable way to distill whiskey.
    "This modern consumer - they tend to care about causes like climate change," said Aaron, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Menlo Park-based Bespoken Spirits.
    The spirit spends three to five days in a keg-like metal barrel, which contains the company's proprietary technology known as the ACTivator. The company's technology speeds up oxidation, thus changing the whiskey's flavor and extracting the color, smell and flavor profile from a piece of oak about the size of a pinky finger.
    "Rather than taking a spirit and dumping it into a barrel and kind of wait for it one year, two years, three years, 10 years, we kind of take an active role in controlling this maturation process," Janousek, a material scientist and company CEO and co-founder, said.
    The company's original whiskey, its Japanese-style special batch and its American light spirit all were produced in the ACTivator in three to five days, whereas the bourbon and ryes the company produces are aged in barrels at the source in Indiana to meet the legal requirements to be called bourbon and rye before going into the ACTivator, Aaron said.
    They char the oak in the lab before cutting it into small pieces known as microstaves, which constitute about 1/25,000th of a traditional barrel. Janousek said this allows them to use 97% less wood.
    By nixing barrels completely, they can avoid cutting down trees and the costs of storing barrels for years in climate-controlled conditions.
    With each recipe, especially in research and development, Janousek and Aaron said they can also remove unpleasant aromas that arise from a volatile compound. To do so, they use a rotary evaporator machine, which helps maintain the spirit without drastically affecting or causing other chemical reactions.
    Because of the short maturation time, Bespoken does not lose liquid to evaporation, known as the "angel's share." Aaron said this allows them to use 20% less water. In its original whiskey, the alcohol tones do stand out.
    Throughout, the Bespoken team runs a sample of the source spirits and the whiskeys they produce in a gas chromatograph to determine its chemical fingerprint, allowing them to create a hyper-specific recipe and track the chemical compounds of flavors like vanilla.
    Those flavors are why Michael Kudra (pronounced KOO-DRA), principal bartender at Quince in San Francisco, prefers whiskey. At Reuters' request, Kudra tasted the Bespoken Spirits whiskey.
    "You definitely get alcohol straight off the nose... That caramel color flavor comes right away, and then that alcohol starts burning your tongue," Kudra said, adding that an egg white cocktail such as a whiskey sour could cut down on the high tones of alcohol and bring out the whiskey notes.
    (Production: Nathan Frandino)
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