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#26 ETOH's Whiskey Reactor : Accelerated "Ageing"
1.7k Plays3 years ago
Tobias and Johan from ETOH in Denmark explain the technical process of using their Whiskey Reactor to accelerate the ageing process of whisky and rum. They also share the ehtos, convictions and creative flair behind the technique.
Find ETOH here: https://etoh.dk
Get your own kick ass shirt from into the am: https://www.intotheam.com/chase
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Transcript
Podcast Move Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
How's it going chasers? I hope you're having a kickass week. I'm Jesse and this is the Chase the Craft podcast and we're in for a little bit of a treat today with our guests and discussion. But before we get into that, I've got some quite important housekeeping stuff to get through. Number one is that this is going to be probably the last podcast on the Stillett YouTube channel. So if you're listening to this podcast,
00:00:24
Speaker
through a pod catcher, through Spotify, whatever it happens to be, that's fine. Nothing's gonna change for you guys. But for those of you that listen to the podcast on YouTube, you're going to have to make sure to subscribe to the new channel. There'll be a link in the description down below and I'll stick it up on screen here as well.
00:00:43
Speaker
Long story short, it's just not great for the standard YouTube metrics. I don't want to stop doing this podcast because it, I mean, honestly, it's a great way to learn awesome things for the Still It channel and to try new things to talk to awesome people. I don't want to stop doing it. It just needs to move off the Still It channel. So make sure you go and subscribe to the podcast channel here on YouTube. Also.
00:01:03
Speaker
Also, I need to let everyone know that this podcast today is sponsored by Into the AM. If you're listening to
Sponsor Spotlight: Into the AM
00:01:09
Speaker
this podcast and you're not watching it, you're not going to be able to see the awesome new Into the AM shirt that I'm wearing right now. Honestly, it is a little bit tricky to describe. It's kind of trippy, multicolored like most of their shirts are, which sounds bizarre. And normally I would never be into that. But for these shirts, it just really freaking works. It's kind of like a DNA double helix moving up into a tree.
00:01:30
Speaker
that sort of branches out and it's all set in space. Trippi-R stuff, very, very cool. And there's a bunch of stuff like this that into the AM make. Some of my favorite shirts, the ones that I wear on the channel all the time and the ones that get comments from viewers all the time are all into the AM shirts as well.
00:01:47
Speaker
They're not just cool designs either guys, they're really, really high quality shirts, super comfortable, long wearing, they stand up to me giving them an absolute thrashing. So if you're interested in picking up some sweet Into the AM shirts, you can go to intotheam.com.chase, C-H-A-S-E, which will give you 10% off pretty much anything you wanna buy there. If you wanna get shirts by themselves, that's cool, hoodies, hats, and even the package deal kind of things as well. So if you wanna sign up for the shirt club or whatever, that'll give you 10% off that as
Introduction to ETOH's Innovative Process
00:02:16
Speaker
well.
00:02:16
Speaker
Like I said in the intro guys, we've got a real special treat for you guys today. We are going to be talking to Johan and Tobias from ETOH in Denmark. These guys specialize in sourcing and purchasing very nice white new spirits and then putting it through their special reactor to quote unquote
00:02:36
Speaker
age the product. For those of you that aren't watching I put that in inverted commas because well you're going to hear directly from them their exact thoughts on how aging is not quite the correct term for it. This is a really interesting topic guys because even if you don't really want to drink
00:02:55
Speaker
reactor aged or force aged spirits. There's a lot of really interesting things you can learn about the process of how whiskey or rum maturates in a cask regardless of how you plan on doing it. These guys are very very much here to honor and respect the traditional ways of doing things and just figure out if they can find a way to sort of carry on that tradition in a new way. So it's not about
00:03:22
Speaker
saying screw it into the old guard and doing something better, that's not what they're about at all and I really think that comes through in this podcast. During this podcast they're going to say a couple of times that they're happy for you guys to get in touch with them if you have more questions about this process because honestly there's a lot to cover.
00:03:39
Speaker
So I want to say right from the beginning that if you want to do that, the best way to do it is to go to etoh. Let me double check this, DK. So etoh.dk.
How Does ETOH Accelerate Spirit Maturation?
00:03:50
Speaker
There's a contact form on their website and that's the best place to get in touch with them if you have questions. So without further ado, let's get stuck right in with Johan and Tobias from ETOH in Denmark.
00:04:03
Speaker
All right, Tobias and Johan, thank you so much for doing this, guys. For those of you at home, we've been trying to set this up for a little while. And I have one, two, three, four, five, six of these little bottles sitting here on my desk that I have wanted nothing more but to open them and taste them since they turned up. And I've been good and waited. So you're here finally. Can you introduce yourselves? Let us know who you are and what you do and what ETOH is. And then I guess we can kind of get into some tasting from there, I guess.
00:04:33
Speaker
Sounds all good. My name is Tobias Ibi Jenssen. I am the founder of 808 Spirits. We founded it four years ago. I guess I have a title that's like founder or like maintenance guy. I make the machine work and we do, I like having the research, but also like talking with a lot of people.
00:05:01
Speaker
Yeah. My name is Johan Blasbois. Old, old colleagues of Tobias and been working together way in the past. Tobias brought me on board to deal with everything that he's not good at. Some of that being a bit of planning and structure, other parts being actually selling the stuff and marketing it as well.
00:05:27
Speaker
Okay, cool. So what is it that you're selling in marketing? Is it the spirit or is it the technology behind the spirit or both? No, it's just definitely the spirit. I mean, we're very, very super passionate about the products that comes out of the reactor that we built. And I think that
00:05:45
Speaker
We're romantic in that sense as well, that we want to create amazing and fun and interesting spirits out of what we've built for so long as well. So for us, we definitely care about the products coming out of it, even though the technique could probably be quite interesting for bigger companies. That's not where we're headed today.
00:06:06
Speaker
Yeah, cool. So I think you've kind of piqued interests already, and I'm sure the title of this podcast would have as well. Do you want to describe what the reactor is? Because I guess that's kind of the core of what we're probably going to end up talking about today and the results of the reactor. So what is the reactor? What are the goals of the reactor? And then give us a little detail on
Extracting vs. Transforming Wood Flavors
00:06:28
Speaker
how it does what it does.
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, so when I left the brewing business, I came from a tradition of challenging the way things are made. The whole ethos of the craft revolution is about shaping things up and doing things in a new or more modern way.
00:06:51
Speaker
So when we started with the idea of making spirits or in particular whiskey light spirits, I didn't want to go for classic barrel aging because it's simply
00:07:03
Speaker
It's without any input. You can't change bell aging. You have a bell. You can choose the warehouse. You can set the temperature of the warehouse and humidity. But that's about all you can do. And being a master brewer, it's all about control when you make something that's good. So we came up with the idea that we should build a machine.
00:07:26
Speaker
We would humbly name it a reactor. I even so more humbly named it the Jensen reactor. Since I built it together with my dad, we are both Jensen's. And there's this thing in chemistry that you name things after yourself with a humble approach. We learned.
00:07:46
Speaker
The only thing we knew from the start was that temperature increases aging. That's apparent when you look at Asian produced whiskies, they tend to age just faster. Some people say that you get like three years and one year because it's a hotter climate. So we knew from theory that increasing the temperature does help. We work typically in the range of the 60s between 60 and 70 in that range.
00:08:14
Speaker
uh fahrenheit celsius celsius sorry yeah centigrade cilisus yeah mid-european sorry i was pretty sure but you never know you never know
00:08:30
Speaker
Then we continued on with the University of Copenhagen and we started to look at what could give us more options of control. Very quickly it came apparent that ultrasound is a way of both extracting and transforming the product into something that's good. It comes with a lot of options of what you can change during the process.
00:08:55
Speaker
We then also looked at different catalysts. The catalyst being something that aids in a chemical reaction without being consumed itself. We discovered that adding very small amounts of acids actually can increase the formation of esters.
00:09:17
Speaker
And we know that in a whiskey, European Scotch style whiskey, the esters are the primary flavor, like mass of the whiskey. There are all the compounds which gives flavor, but the esters plays the biggest role basically. So that's a way of adding small amounts of acid and like in the PPM ranges, so like milligrams that we add, we can increase or change the fruity expression of the whiskey.
00:09:47
Speaker
Since our system is all stainless steel, there's no permeability or a breathing with the outside. So we introduce oxygen to the whisky through micro oxygenation.
00:10:02
Speaker
That is helping us to control the actual age of the whisky. If you don't add oxygen, things are unoxidized. Things are not mellowed out. So by working with oxygen, we can like sort of might give it like a wholesome finished feeling. We have some few other experiments that we work with but haven't accomplished yet.
Tasting and Comparing ETOH's Spirits
00:10:28
Speaker
First thing is enzymes. Enzymes works on the wood. Wood is the key to good whiskey. Everybody talks about what kind of balance you use, and we talk about how you level up toasting or you level up charring. But enzymes can basically change what you get from the battle. So it's not about saving wood, because that's not our interest. The idea is that we can make the wood give totally different aromas or college.
00:10:57
Speaker
So that's something we are researching. And we have a small project on the use of light. Everybody knows that light degrades wood, you can see that on terraces and decks. So it is something that we were searching that either we can like
00:11:17
Speaker
alter the whisky itself, or we alter the wood before we soak it in the whisky, or we actually do both, so we treat the wood while it's in contact with the whisky. That should give us some more promising results. I think it's worth summing up. I mean, the process from the start to finish as well, it has to condense a little bit what to be saying, but we basically start with a new make spirit.
00:11:45
Speaker
We've been sourcing new make distillates from whichever region fits the style that we're looking to make in the beginning for our proof of concept and to show that the machine is actually doing what we like in the way we want.
00:12:00
Speaker
We've been going to Scotland a lot and sourcing what is pure mould spirits from Scotland. They're not single moulds because, I mean, of course, the Scots doesn't want the single moulds to leave the country. But they are from good reputable distillers.
00:12:19
Speaker
At the same time, we've been looking at Germany for rice spirits. We've been looking at the U.S. for white dogs or bourbons, all to kind of get the spirit that fits what we're trying to make. And then to come up with this spirit, we put that in the reactor, but we also put the wood that Tobias has been talking about, mostly in the forms of used barrels that we buy.
00:12:45
Speaker
And also here we source whatever barrels are interesting for us that might be French sweet wine barrels, that might be sherry barrels from Spain, that might be a whole different kind of barrel altogether or a whole different type of wood. But the point is that we are actually putting the barrels inside the spirit instead of the other way around.
00:13:07
Speaker
And then we leave this in the reactor with all the parameters that we have set for the specific batch. And between 5 to 15 days later, we have a spirit come out that has a very, very different taste than when it came in.
00:13:28
Speaker
Very cool. So just for the sake of clarity, so we're talking on the same page going forward, what the reactor is actually doing at the moment is adding heat, pressure, oxygen, ultrasonic waves, and micro oxidation. And what you're looking at doing in the future, but you, like I don't have examples of here is the enzymes and the
00:13:56
Speaker
light? Is that correct? That's very well answered. Yes.
Exploring Peated Spirits with ETOH
00:14:00
Speaker
Okay. Can you say a slight bit of pressure? Not high in pressure, but a little bit of pressure. Yes. Okay, cool. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that we Yeah, yeah. Cool. Okay, so something else that I think there's going to be a lot of people disappointed at me if I don't bring this up from the start. And there's different ways that people talk about different
00:14:25
Speaker
that I guess different people use the same words and mean different things by it and I think I've also I think I've already figured out what what you're meaning by this but
00:14:35
Speaker
There's a difference, I guess, how do I put this? There's different things that happen when spirits come into contact with wood in any way, shape or form, right? There's maturation or basically oak teabagging of the spirit, you know, like the flavor of the oak is getting into the spirit. And then there's aging as a second thing. And you touched on this in terms of
00:15:03
Speaker
So let's compare Texas to Scotland. Three years in Texas is like 15 in Scotland or something silly like that. But that's mostly, mostly in terms of wood flavor.
00:15:18
Speaker
And I know that a lot of the guys in Texas are trying to figure out how to slow that down because they want more age on the spirit. They're getting the wood flavor, but they're not getting that rounded. The just literal time in the barrel, it's not giving them quite the same result.
00:15:40
Speaker
So which part of the reactor is giving you those two things? And I'm assuming that one is literally just pulling tannins and flavors out of the wood and the other is the actual taking those things that come out of the wood and taking the spirit and evolving them, breaking them down, turning them into different chemicals. So are you focusing on these two different paths in different ways? Like is there different parts that are doing different things here or is it all just part and parcel?
00:16:07
Speaker
Yeah, I talk about what you mean and it's a very, very good question. We call it two other things. Instead of calling it aging or maturation, we call it extraction and transformation.
00:16:23
Speaker
I think just after one day, the spirit basically has color. I mean, tannins are easy to wash out. I mean, if you just add like wood dust, the bigger the surface area, the harder the heat.
00:16:38
Speaker
the faster you extract. So tea bagging is not the difficult thing and that's not the sign of quality because anyone can dump in some wood in spirit and it will get wood flavors. What we have been focusing on from the start is to transform those said wood compounds
00:16:59
Speaker
Into the whiskey it needs to integrate it needs to there's a long list of chemical reactions that happens But basically you can't just like what what in a way in a spirit tastes like spirit like wooden spirit What we want is a whiskey and the key is time So what we need to do is to speed up the time. I don't think any of the processes are
00:17:26
Speaker
A heat, ulcer sound and the circulation and pressure, they all help with the extraction. The oxygen is solely during the transformation, but the heat and the movement, pressure and the ulcer sound also gives us the transformation.
00:17:49
Speaker
We basically want to look at age being a relative thing. One way of explaining this is that when we look at the wood that we put in, we have our piece of balustafe. Once we put it in the machine and we take it out again,
00:18:10
Speaker
The interior of the wood should look like a used bow stay from a, say, 15-year-old bow. If the wood looks brand new, that means we only achieved extraction. We just extracted some tannins and some acids. That's it. So we had a project where we had, like, microscopy samples of wood. So you could look at the structure of the cell walls in the wood
00:18:39
Speaker
give them as a deer, if our would,
Experimenting with Different Woods
00:18:42
Speaker
our bellastaves should look like a very old bell, that means that we have achieved this age that at certain times has progressed. Because we told on the same page, whiskey is a beautiful drink that has so much complexity,
00:19:02
Speaker
And I would dare to say you can't rush whiskey because it takes time. So what we are hopefully trying to do is to try to alter some of these things so that we can actually speed up time. But secondly, it's also about
00:19:18
Speaker
we want to control in which way it ages. So if we want to say, make this whiskey the more like mellow, mellow, not so tannic direction, we can try to steer in that direction. If you want it to be like super fragrant, not so woody, more like expressive in its flavor, we can try to do that. So one thing is having what Johanna said, a proof of concept.
00:19:45
Speaker
show that we can age things faster. But for my sake, for my interest, it's about designing the flavors. Like, so we actually know what we want, instead of just get what we did. If that makes sense.
00:20:03
Speaker
OK, cool. So let's use that as a great segue to me tasting something here. And I think let's do it in exactly the same order that you just said. Is there something here that you've got that is basically just a proof of concept, something that is able to show that the process is doing what it's supposed to do? And I see some of these bottles are marked New Make Spirit.
00:20:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I sent you a couple bottles of Numic as well because I thought it'd be really interesting for you to kind of compare them to see from where we've gone to what we have. But I think that the first one should probably be the one named Binapart. Let's see. We have the bottle here as well.
00:20:46
Speaker
Yep. Uh, I've got that one. Yep. And is, and I've got the white white forest new make and double pitch new make is, uh, so, oh yeah, cool. Um, so should I.
00:21:02
Speaker
Should I pour one of the new makes with the Bena part or is that are they not the same as that? I think you might want to have it just next to it to see how they compare basically. So is the white forest new make the new make from Bena part?
00:21:19
Speaker
No, do you have a new make called been apart? I think you I've only got I've got white first and double peach. All right. Well, we'll move on to those one later. But we will just taste this one as this. And this was the the second spirit that we made. So yes, to give you a little bit of introduction to what you're tasting here. This is
00:21:44
Speaker
One of our first ones, a little bit softer, a little bit more mellow, but this has been aged on Burgundy brandy and Rivel Salters is a French sweet wine barrel. So the first one we made was a little bit more on the oaky side.
00:22:00
Speaker
Here we kind of toned that down a little bit to try and get more of these nuances that we talked about getting out from aging. A little bit of these more light fruity flavors and also a freshness. Yeah, it's very...
00:22:22
Speaker
Hmm. I'm trying to think what it reminds me of. So we're not going necessarily to typically the whiskey here. And I mean, although whiskey is our inspiration already here, we're just staring maybe a little bit in a different direction with something that is a bit more understated, if you will. But, but that carries on more of this kind of brandy character and more of the sweet wine character.
00:22:49
Speaker
Mm hmm. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of the sweet wine character a lot of sweet
Adding Subtle Fruit Flavors for Complexity
00:22:53
Speaker
almost like white wine characters raisins It has a very nice subtle caramel vanilla thing going on as well. That's quite pleasant guys. It is very
00:23:11
Speaker
This is a little bit lighter in alcohol as well. Then we've gone with some of the other ones. This one is sitting at 42%. So we decided to pull this down a little bit to get some of this very fiery flavor off it. And then this one we've been running on the reactor for about seven days. Wow. That's crazy. I would have loved to taste the white, the white spirit from this, but I wouldn't, yeah.
00:23:40
Speaker
It doesn't I mean i'll be honest. It doesn't strike me as something that would come with a huge age statement, but at the same time It doesn't smell like young whiskey at all. And when I say that i'm talking about scotch, you know, so I I could see this coming in in a Um like a a non-age statement nice bottle of whiskey for sure
00:24:04
Speaker
I was in this, we were in a Danish TV program about startups, how we get to work. And in this TV program there was a scene where we shot a tasting.
00:24:22
Speaker
To be fair, that was just our pre prototype. So it didn't have oxygen. It didn't have the catalyst. There was lots of things lacking, but at least we had made one bottle. That was all we had. One half liter bottle was my entire like one year production. So it was very, very, uh, rare to, to open and drink. But in this program, there's a Danish whiskey expert that, that, uh, noses whiskey.
00:24:50
Speaker
And I really remember his impression. He was like, whoa, whoa, this is really old. Whoa, this is like 50-year-old whiskey. And then like five seconds passed. It's like, wait, wait, no, it's really young. It's like green. It's like, whoa, this is weird. It was a prototype, but I totally get that there is a unique flavor to our whiskeys because they taste old.
00:25:19
Speaker
Um, we tried to put an H statement on, uh, we have this relative scale on the back with a barcode. So we tried to say on this one, we gave it an 80 day rule of four. Yeah. Uh, this is not years. This is just our subjective say it feels kind of old or it feels kind of young. Um, there's no true facts and absolute facts in this. Um,
00:25:45
Speaker
Because H is relative. We can measure specific compounds. We have measured a lot of commercial whiskeys. We can say that so this compound is on the same level as a 15 year old. So there's something in the whiskey that like a 15 year old, but there might be somewhere which go higher or go lower. So it is very, it's debatable whether or not you can see this as being
00:26:14
Speaker
on the young side or normal age, because it is hard to say what is the relative age of this one or for most of our products. And I think also when it comes to designing around the age,
00:26:33
Speaker
We haven't yet been trying to push our system to the maximum and then to see what can we actually create. For us, it's been way more important to get the subtlety of Scotch that we're very inspired by into our products.
00:26:50
Speaker
but also just getting smoothness and something that's tasty without being okay or without being unbalanced in any way. Yeah, right. So what can you tell me about the the new make spirit here because there's two things that really make me want to know this one is I'm getting this really intriguing almost like a malt funk kind of like a almost
00:27:20
Speaker
I don't know, almost spring bank kind of thing going on, which is fun. And I have to think that's the base spirit, not the aging process. And two is the aromas and the flavors smell and taste very much like an old whiskey, like maybe like a 10 or a 12 or something like that to me.
Transparency and Innovation in Whiskey Making
00:27:43
Speaker
But then on the palette, at the back end of it, there's this slight, I don't know how to put this without it sounding insulting and I don't mean it in an insulting way. There's like a slight lightness to the end of the palette that I very seldomly get in a
00:28:03
Speaker
older whiskey and something that how do I put it something that tastes like this would never normally feel like that at the end it has that slight um yeah it's not sharpness it's not it's not shiny it's not harsh it's not jaggy
00:28:22
Speaker
but it feels just a little bit like that. And I'm wondering if this is a, like if it's a column-stilled whiskey, then I could kind of understand maybe that's what it's from. Yeah, what can you tell me about the NuMake? Oh, okay. Our NuMakes, we actually, we can't buy them directly because that is simply not happening. It's actually not operating at our size.
00:28:49
Speaker
So we actually use a Dutch intermediary that helps us source new make spirits from Scotland. But whatever we get is spooned, which basically means we buy a blended whisky. They're not necessarily blended though.
00:29:07
Speaker
in the way that you normally think of, but this is just that they're blended enough that it cannot be sold as a single mold. This actually means that we're not able to get to know the distilleries we're working with.
00:29:25
Speaker
But we know it's a pot still. That was our requirements. They sent us samples of different Numex that we can buy. And whenever we choose one, we also have the knowledge that we can get more. It's not like we have to change in Numex. But yeah, we are to do it this way.
00:29:47
Speaker
If we're really good, we can make like 10,000 bottles, 11,000 bottles in a year. So that leaves us at about, we're using like what, five, six, 7,000 liters of whiskey in a year.
00:30:05
Speaker
That's small. So when we buy a lot of say 1,000, 2,000 liters of NuMake, there's little, very little things that can be done. We would need to buy hundreds of thousands of liters to like really get to know who we work with. And that's why we have an ongoing interest of maybe like sourcing it more locally, especially obviously from Denmark, could be Sweden where Johan is from.
00:30:32
Speaker
Um, but the Danish and Swedish whisk scene is also emerging and, and we need that, that partner who could like be part of the process, uh, because then we would like maybe saw some different models or use a proprietary yeast, something that could be fun. Um, but we simply need to scale up. So what we do now is that we buy the best, best things possible. Um, we have full, like there's a full analysis of everything you buy. We know what we're getting. We know the quality.
00:31:01
Speaker
we are just not allowed to know the name of this theory. But it's also interesting, I mean, following up what Tobias is saying about that and then choosing the right pneumic is that with some of our understanding of spirits and also basically the way that it tastes after it's gone through the reactor, it kind of narrows down our guessing as well. So with some of the pneumics after they come out of the reactor,
00:31:30
Speaker
they certainly have a flavor that if you've tried a lot of scotch whisky, then you can narrow down to maybe a handful of distilleries that would be likely suspects.
00:31:41
Speaker
I mean, it makes it very interesting for us as well. But I think what Tobias hinted at as well, to actually collaborate with a distillery would be really fantastic because we could do some really fun stuff together and also offering them maybe a sneak peek of what could be their whisky five years down the line.
00:32:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good point. So if you guys had the ability to be able to collaborate with what's going into the mash bill and what's going into the process of how it's being distilled and stuff, that would be fun for you guys. But also, I mean, I hadn't actually even thought of that, which is hilarious because I do it all the time, right? I just do the down and dirty.
00:32:24
Speaker
hot cold forced aging in a freezer and hot water baths just to you know make a spirit I don't know what to do with it I'm not sure whether to oak it on French oak or American oak so I'll do this down-and-dirty forced aging thing to get an idea of what the spirits gonna be like and then pick a direction from that so for a distillery to be able to pump out new make and then in four or five days time have a really good idea of what their spirit might be like in 10 years time
00:32:50
Speaker
That'd be pretty special. Yeah. So I think moving on from, from this bin apart, our French inspired lighter, more mellow whiskey. I mean, we say whiskey a lot and it's going to come back and forth as well. But by, I mean, of course our products are not technically whiskey. It's a slip of the tongue, if you will, but, but I know what you mean. We've recognized very clearly that that's not what we're working with.
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah, we are based in the EU. We have the same laws as they have in Scotland. So it has to be A's for three years to be whiskey. It has to be in an oak barrel and
Can Home Distillers Use ETOH's Methods?
00:33:34
Speaker
it has to be nothing not in 600 liters. So we fit the lead requirements.
00:33:41
Speaker
We sometimes fit the oak. We do have a whiskey, like the white forest, where we didn't use any oak, which I think is interesting. But that's like, so we bring two rules in the rules of whiskey. It's just way easier to say whiskey. Because to me, this is what it is. Well, it's the closest descriptor in terms of if someone picked this up and said, what am I buying? Or what is this going to taste like? It's whiskey. 100% whiskey.
00:34:09
Speaker
it tastes like a good value scotch with a hairy sherry cask influence um and it's quite pleasant i it's really pleasant if you had have given given this to me uh you know if i was at someone's house and i put this in my glass i i would not go oh that's young whiskey like why have you given me this young whiskey you know it's just it's not even a thought um which is your proof of concept right there i mean i'm no master
00:34:38
Speaker
whiskey taster or connoisseur by any means, but you would have me a hundred percent fooled. And I think you're sitting with a sample bottle of the one we called our bite as well. Is that right?
00:34:54
Speaker
Perfect. I think that's a good follow-up, especially as we've been talking a lot about Numix. This is a pita whiskey, an inspired whiskey. And we also get this desolate from Scotland, and once tasting pita stuff, it narrows it down.
00:35:15
Speaker
to fewer distilleries, which is, of course, interesting for us. And I mean, we're going to try and do this without name-dropping anyone, as we're not sure. But I find this very interesting. Here we've gone for a much more kind of classic approach, using only all of those sherry barrels, and then a light peated desolate. Also this one here, I'd say an even lower
00:35:43
Speaker
oak influence than the last one. So we could say that it has a lower age indication, which we've also put in the bottle. But I think that this is one of my favorites that we made. It's just incredibly balanced and very pea-driven, where we have done probably the least to the whiskey of any of our products, but just giving it that
00:36:11
Speaker
backbone of sweetness and of oak and of a little bit of sherry character that just helps bring it together. Yeah. So this to me, um, well, first of all, I'll just, I'll
Balancing Flavor Extraction and Transformation
00:36:24
Speaker
just give the people at home a real quick idea of what this tastes like to me. It's a clean Pete. It's not a dirty, funky Pete, which makes me think it's probably not a LeFroy or I'd big I'd be thinking more like,
00:36:42
Speaker
I don't know actually. I'm not sure. It's a clean smoke peat. It's not a funky earth peat or like a peat reek that has a real subtle spiciness at the end of it, which is really nice.
00:36:56
Speaker
And you're right, not in terms of the whisky at all, but it reminds me of some of the younger Lefroyg bottles in terms of the oak influence. There's not a whole lot of oak jumping out and slapping you around, but it has that finish sitting on it that doesn't taste like shiny young whisky at all.
00:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, this is my kind of drink, guys, so I'm glad you sent this. In the beginning, we did a lot of experiments without peat, because when we analyze whiskey, we know how peat tastes. So if we take the peat out of the aroma analysis, we can focus more on the aging aromas.
00:37:39
Speaker
But I myself, I like, I love Pete. I know it sends people apart. Some people really don't like it, which is fair enough. It can do something. But I actually started being, I honestly started enjoying a lot more non-Pedia whiskeys after doing this. Before I started, I only would have had Pedia whiskeys.
00:38:04
Speaker
So I'd like to appreciate a flavor without Pete, but I still like, this is, last night I was having this as my work desk at night because it just, it tastes good.
00:38:17
Speaker
Oh, totally. The name Arbeit is the Danish word for work. It'll be similar to the German Arbeit, I guess, Swedish Arbeit. So there's a little of like slight name play to a famous Scottish distillery, which is named it a bit more Danish. Yeah, right, right. Yeah. Definitely has a
00:38:42
Speaker
Like a sherry sort of leaning, thin, like sweetness to it on the end as well. Some of those dark fruits kind of things. Um, I'm pretty impressed guys. How long was this on the reactor for? It was nine days.
00:38:59
Speaker
I mean, the time they spend on the reactor is not in any way kind of reflective of how okay they will be in the glass when you taste them. Because as Tobias mentioned before, that old flavor, that is the easiest thing to get out. But it's so easy to overdo it and to get an unbalanced flavor as well.
00:39:19
Speaker
So when we use soak, I mean, we also process it before we might toast it or we might char it to get rid of some of those really intense salty flavors. But with this one in particular, I think it was just important for us to add that subtlety of a bit of sherry, but actually let this be a more molten and spirit driven flavor in our range.
00:39:45
Speaker
I mean, we don't want to destroy the beautiful new make that went into this. But I mean, we have so many experiments that we want to do. I mean, down the line, we'd love to do something dark and share it with Pete and other expressions of it. As you'll see a little bit later as well.
00:40:07
Speaker
Yeah, so this to me, in terms of what you're saying before, this is low on the extraction and high on the conversion. It tastes rounded and mellow on the back end, other than the peat. Obviously the peat is kind of slapping you around a little bit. But yeah, there's very little
00:40:27
Speaker
oak influence, there's wine influence, for sure, but the oak is just chilled in the background, which is hilarious, because I had no idea what to expect, you know, when I was... And like I said, I wanted to not taste them, I wanted to not open them, because, oh, by the way, are all these stickers, did you have them like that? Or is this, were they supposed to... No, I think they've got up, it's just, you know, to a sign that they're unbroken.
00:40:56
Speaker
Yeah, to all kind of duty markers. I was trying to figure out, I was trying to figure out if customs had gone through and opened all the, excuse me, opened all the bottles or not. But, um, yeah. Uh, I, anyway, I was interested to see what these were going to taste like, because I, it would be very easy to picture someone in your position being very heavy handed with the amount of
00:41:25
Speaker
influence they're putting on the spirit? Do you know what I mean? If what someone was doing was creating this reactor and trying to influence spirit, I could easily see that person being very heavy-handed and just putting too much oak into it.
00:41:41
Speaker
trying to do too much to it where this to me is the opposite this is exactly like you said it is a beautiful new make spirit and you guys have just rounded off the edges quite nicely uh so kudos guys i'm impressed that cheers thank you i think it's so important what you say as well in regards to not overdoing it because
00:42:01
Speaker
I mean, we're not the only ones trying to accelerate aging processes. I mean, it's been done on both commercial scales and on hobby scales and smaller for a long time. But I think what we do that is a bit unique is that we're able to combine so many different methods and we're able to control them so carefully.
00:42:20
Speaker
But with that power, I mean, you also have to treat the spirit with a lot of respect because a lot of what we've tried and seen from others is just overly old spirit that tastes tannic, that tastes sour, that tastes bitter. And I don't think that's the direction that we want to go.
00:42:40
Speaker
So what should I try next, guys? These are both very un, unadventurous. They're very traditional. Yeah. So I mean, I think we should go a little bit more adventurous and have the one we call white forest. So this is exactly you have both the new make and the non new make, right? Mm hmm.
00:43:04
Speaker
Great. I mean, if you can pour them side to side or taste one after each other, I think that'd be great. I think you mentioned, though, that this one here is the cask strength. So the one that you have is not diluted, so it's very aggressive.
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah, no problem. But this is our kind of continuation of Pete. So we're working with half of Pete the pneumic and half of Orion pneumic. So already here we have a lot of spice and power. I'm so interested in seeing what we can do with our reactor when we're not using oak.
00:43:43
Speaker
So this has no oak, but instead it has a bit of chestnut and cedar tree. And cedar tree is what we started out with, which is this insanely spicy, peppery, citrusy wood type. And we've just balanced that with a little bit of chestnut, which has a lot of sweetness. So this is kind of what's happening when we're pushing way more on the extreme and experimental side.
00:44:12
Speaker
And this is a good example of how, how adept we are because we started just with cedar tree because we want to do like how it's just pure cedar tree. And I think we both agree the nose was exceptional. I haven't had a more intriguing nose when it was just cedar.
00:44:36
Speaker
But I agreed that the mouthfeel was bitter, stringent, lacking some body. There was no balance in the text, although the aroma was just beautiful. So we chose the...
00:44:51
Speaker
the chestnut because it gives that sweet roundness to it. So this is the perfect complementary thing to add to the cedar wood. So I think what drives the nose is the cedar along with the peat and that like spicy addition of the rye and then the taste is a bit more dominated by the chestnut but the cedar leaves this what I really enjoy
00:45:15
Speaker
this kind of bitter like feeling. I'm not saying this is like gin, but there's a slight more bitter character that I have not seen before with my experience in whiskey, which I think is putting it, it stands out. I know a lot of industry people
00:45:40
Speaker
Some people, they absolutely love this one because this is really redefining what a whiskey can taste like. But some people, which might have a more like classical nose, says that there's just too many things going on here. There's so many expressions because we mix two kinds of wood, we mix two kinds of new makes, so there's a lot of things going on. It's not just one new make, one cask. It's like several things happening here.
00:46:10
Speaker
So the first thing that struck me on this was the nose. And it's so hard to put a finger on it because it is quite different than anything I've smelled in whiskey before. I mean, that's what's so cool as well that we have this opportunity to use different woods and even different spices and different fruit additions to give them a very kind of natural flavor of how they would behave.
00:46:40
Speaker
if they were aged in a normal sense on them but but cedar tree as well as something that we've been fascinated with before and it it has such a unique flavor as you put it yeah there's something on i don't know if i'd call it bitterness it's kind of it's sort of all of the mouth sensations rolled into one it's bitter astringent
00:47:04
Speaker
uh drying but also oily and uh warming uh almost like cane pepper all at the same time all of those things together it makes me think more of beer than spirits yeah it's more like hops like it's more like a hot bit in this um yeah it's quite interesting and there's something in that nose that is um
00:47:29
Speaker
Actually, once again, like a New England IPA, like a cloudy IPA, juicy and sweet, but not candy sweet, like tropical fruit grapes and pears and passion fruit almost.
00:47:49
Speaker
I think for me to see the trees, almost like if you mix black pepper and grapefruit, I think you get some of those characters in there. But I think as individual as well, what kind of associations you make.
00:48:04
Speaker
I mean, I haven't had cedar or chestnut, so I'm probably mixing the two up because it was the chestnut you said that was really sweet, wasn't it? So maybe that's what I'm mixing up. There's definitely black pepper though. That's a hundred percent for sure. So this is an interesting thing too, right? So generally when people are making whiskey, the confines to wood that you can turn into a barrel that'll hold liquid that won't leak.
00:48:28
Speaker
You guys don't have that problem because you're putting at least at least for you P and whiskey makers I know the Japanese I think are allowed to experiment a bit. They have the like the sweaty kind of words. I can't remember the name. I know many U.S. designers they use some like what do you use applewood, cherry wood. They have a bit more room of opportunity.
00:48:54
Speaker
But we are very bound. We have to follow European rules since we are EU country. And I think this is fun because I don't feel like breaking the rules. We're using wood. I mean, it's not like we're adding some weird flavor or something. It's a wood.
00:49:12
Speaker
I'm not an expert on like I'm not a botanist I don't know how to identify a tree by the shape of the leaves like it's way too advanced for me but there's something really like um enthusiastic about
00:49:28
Speaker
I basically feel like wood is wood, some wood is dark, some wood is light. You can make furniture, you can build barrels. But there's so many things that are different. Even people that dig out like, so how many different species of oak and then on the forest level from which forest did you source these oak trees. It's really something that I want to explore more.
00:49:53
Speaker
Because wood is not just wood, even though they all kind of sort of like look the same. And we've gotten an understanding that yes, it matters where we saw the battle from, what kind of sherry had been used in it, or pork wine, or surf wine, that matters. But there's so much more like, um,
00:50:19
Speaker
potential in the barrel itself, not just that thin layer of absorbed wine. It's the entire barrel that's interesting. Yeah, for sure. All right. So we may as well finish off this tasting flight, right? And do the double peach there as well. Yeah.
00:50:40
Speaker
And I mean, the one that you had now in a double piece, as we had made a couple of spirits and the more we talked and the more we came with new ideas for first off, we actually decided to kind of split our range of spirits in two. So we've decided to call our more classic interpretations of spirits, the classics.
00:51:09
Speaker
And as we get a little bit more experimental and as we are playing around a little bit more, we've decided to call them the novels.
00:51:21
Speaker
So the one you had before, I mean, is definitely a very noble spirit. I don't think that there's much in the range of it. This one as well to some extent, even though we have a more kind of classic flavor, this is a spirit where we've just added a little bit of fresh pulp peaches together with port wine barrels and
00:51:47
Speaker
Just a little bit more of a neutral Numic, I want to say. But this is kind of showcasing what will happen when you use a little bit of fruits. I mean, we're not trying to make licorice as you're going to taste and smell as well. That's not what you're tasting. Instead, we're kind of able to harness all the subtlety from the peaches and some of this little bit of stone fruity character and just add as a layer of complexity to the base spirit.
00:52:18
Speaker
Yeah, right. We made another release called Call of Excise Duty, which is like, there we want like full port wine dominance, like Ruby called it, lots of red fruit and raisins. This one we opted for like a lighter touch of the port because there should be room. The peach, that stone for aroma is quite elegant and quite weak in its own way.
00:52:43
Speaker
So it had to be balanced. It would have been overly bowel aged. The peaches wouldn't go through. It's been like having a lighter dose of coffee. You need to have it at a lighter dose. I really enjoy this because the mom, the peaches really changed counter.
00:53:04
Speaker
because they got eight as well during the process. So the highest temperature was in the sixties Celsius. Um, so we never achieved that, like cooked, uh, which I conceived as being negative, like cooked fruit aroma, but it has a little bit of marmalade touch that is like a bit jammy, but still retains that freshness of the peach, but has gotten like, there is something that reacted with, with the spirit and the, and the wood. Um,
00:53:33
Speaker
So there was something in the pages that could add to the maturation of the whisky.
00:53:39
Speaker
Yeah, right. I'm, I'll be honest with you guys. I'm struggling to get any peach, but I'm also recovering from Pete. So I think that's okay. And I think that it's totally fair not to get a lot of the flavor. Uh, there's never been our intention to make a peach whiskey. Uh, this one, the, the, the peach is supposed to add this subtle fruit flavors and
00:54:07
Speaker
just add to the overall complexity and then kind of juiciness of it, which I personally think it's doing really quite well because it behaves quite normally. But you can also try to add a little bit of water to it that usually opens it up a bit. It's funny, man. This is the second one now that I'm thinking kind of reminds me of beer. And I've just remembered that you came from beer, didn't you? Yeah.
00:54:38
Speaker
Because you're right, it's got that same, I've never heard anyone in the whiskey space describe a whiskey as juicy. I was just recording something, I just made, I was just messing around with gin and hops and trying like 10 different ways to put hops into gin.
00:54:55
Speaker
And the goal was to make it juicy, like a really hopped up APA. And I was trying to figure out how to describe that. And in the end, I was just, you know what? If you're a beer guy, you get it for anyone else. I don't know. I think of tropical fruit juice. But it does definitely have that juicy finish to it, which is interesting for a whiskey.
00:55:19
Speaker
But I appreciate that this doesn't taste like peach flavored liqueur. Do you know what I mean? Exactly, yes. That would not be the way we want to go, obviously.
00:55:35
Speaker
We have to experiment with hops, but this is a fascinating thing because when you make beer and you have hops, you have to solve aromas in water. Certain aromas are more soluble in water than others, but when you switch and it's spirit,
00:55:56
Speaker
It's not the same compounds that solubilize in the spirit. So you completely have another flavor profile of the hop, which is why it is intriguing. But I have to throw away all the knowledge I have. I consider this variety to be very stone fruity, but in the spirit, it acts like all resinous. It really transforms its expression when it's a
00:56:23
Speaker
ethanol based extraction compared to a water extraction. That's interesting, man. My conclusion in the end was to do a cold vapor infusion. So just have a jar of spirit and suspend the hops above the level of the liquid.
00:56:41
Speaker
and not let it get any hotter than like 25 degrees celsius or something leave it in there for two or three days take the hops out refresh the hops put new hops in keep doing that for about four or five days and that's how i was able to get the original um
00:56:56
Speaker
that it smells like putting your face in a bag of hops. But trying to do vapor infusion like a gin, that was horrible. It just tasted like green grass, like old grass clippings. Trying to put it in the pot was the same. But interestingly enough, I managed to get the hot bitterness from steeping hops and really high alcohol, like 95% alcohol, and then straining all the hops out and then putting the liquid into the pot.
00:57:24
Speaker
And that didn't give a lot of flavor, but it gave that hot, that IPA bitterness on the time. Yeah, so that video is not out yet. By the time the people see this video, it'll be out. But for our time, you and I, it's going out this weekend. But that was a really interesting project. But yeah, it is very different how things interact between beer and spirits. And then not only that, man, it's
00:57:50
Speaker
It's weird drinking a spirit, but having the flavors from a different category come through, like drinking a pen, but it tasting like an IPA is strange. I mean, I think it goes to say for both me and Tobias that we're just super curious. And I think a lot of this project and our passion for it is that we want to experiment and we want to innovate and want to be created with such an old fashioned medium.
00:58:20
Speaker
But with that said, all of our passion comes out of respect and love for the product. So it makes it interesting to kind of decide how we go about doing things.
00:58:35
Speaker
One of the things that we've been working on now lately is based on a bourbon. So we're using a kind of American white dog new make, a lot of corn. And I think it was Tobias' initial idea because when you have a really nice complex and interesting bourbon, you get so many different layers of flavors. And what we did with that was that we added just a little bit of coffee and coconut.
00:59:05
Speaker
And in such a subtle way, we're able to integrate those things in the aging process. And they're hard spices, you know, in the way that they act. So instead of being like a layer on top, which I don't know how many coffee flavored things I've had, but we're just a layer on top and it's weird. When we do it through the ultrasound, it's just so deeply integrated to the spirit.
00:59:31
Speaker
that it becomes more subtle, but becomes a very balanced component of it. Yeah, that's a very interesting point. So I've, how do I put this? I've always felt torn.
00:59:48
Speaker
in any of these sort of areas when it comes to whisky because on one hand the reason I've fallen in love with whisky is 100% because of the tradition and the way things have been done for hundreds of years that's a beautiful thing that's full of craftsmanship and I don't want
01:00:07
Speaker
There's part of me that doesn't want to mess with that. Then there's the other part of me that kind of thinks, I don't care what the process is, I just care what it tastes like, right? So sure, if you want to throw all sorts of crazy things into it, but what you end up with is a spirit that people can't tell the difference between
01:00:28
Speaker
You know, I've got one spirit over here that took me three days to make, but I put it through a reactor and I added chocolate to it and I squeezed fresh grape juice into it and whatever, threw a dirty old thong into it and that made it taste amazing. And people literally can't tell it.
01:00:44
Speaker
apart from something that's been from a master distiller in Scotland and 15 years in a barrel, then what's the problem? But I've got these two sides of me that fight over what's right or how to go about it.
01:01:01
Speaker
Yeah, so it's intriguing to me and I think you touched on it right at the beginning when you said that this is kind of coming from a craft point of view for you. You're just trying to approach things and see what's possible with the whisky, which is admirable rather than tearing everything down, I guess. I don't really quite know how to put my thoughts into
01:01:24
Speaker
Yeah, this is not some sort of like anti anti-movement or like, cross the, cross the politics area and whatever. This is just, I admire what people are doing in the world and craft of whiskey. This is our contribution to what we think could be the next step or the next level. Maybe inspire the same way that we got inspired by what people are doing.
01:01:54
Speaker
Maybe we could inspire people to maybe look at the aging process just a slight bit different. I know that a guy like John Glaser from Compass Box, he had his troubles trying to change the things that the way you made your ballet stuff. And by changing, there's a few things. And I totally, I think every,
01:02:22
Speaker
It's intelligent to have a natural bond skepticism about traditional things, not saying that everything should get thrown away, but everything can be improved over time. And this is not just us trying to make a copy of a Scotch whisky, because then go for the original. There's no interest in it, it's just a copy. This is our version of Scotch whisky.
01:02:51
Speaker
but like whiskey, international whiskey, modern whiskey. But in the same way, I think it is in your position, I think it's very important that you have a couple of whiskeys that present like traditional Scotch.
01:03:07
Speaker
Because let's face it, whiskey drinkers can be snobby bastards. And if you don't have something that is a proof of concept of like, no, really, you can take us seriously. Look, we can make something that tastes like a 12 year old scotch. Okay, we've ticked that box. Now you trust us. Now try something that's got peach in it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, grapefruits and whatever, sister success.
01:03:30
Speaker
I think what's so important coming from our position as well is that we have to meet both the consumers and the whole spirits industry very, very humbly. I mean, for us, I think it comes so natural because the scientific background that we just open about our findings, both the methods that we use, the way we make it and what we've learned from it,
01:04:00
Speaker
Everything of that should be open and should be something that we can share to other people. For us, it's never been about hiding or trying to fool anyone with our products in that regard. And I mean, I think it goes to show as well. I don't know how well you can see it, but just on the back of the label,
01:04:23
Speaker
We're writing out every detail about how it's made and what temperatures and what different settings that we have used to kind of emphasize that as well. Yeah. So I kind of feel.
01:04:39
Speaker
very similarly about anything like this when it comes to consumer whisky products. It's the same I feel about sourced products. If you want to buy from MGP and repackage it and put it into a bottle and sell it, that's fine. I've got nothing against it whatsoever.
01:04:57
Speaker
as long as you're open about it, as long as you tell the world and the customers what it is you're doing and explain what it is that you're adding to that bottle that makes it special and makes it yours, right? So if you're a master blender, but you just don't have a distillery, then sure, source barrels from MGP, buy a whole lot of them, bring them in, you know, age them in different barrels and casks and swap them around and put them in different finishes and then
01:05:26
Speaker
work your magic by blending them together into a finished product and sell it. But don't try and pull the wool over people's eyes and say that it is a craft spirit from Long Beach, California. It's not, it's a freaking MGP product, you know what I mean? And the same thing, the reason I go into great detail on that is I feel exactly the same about this, right? So if your bottles were saying 15-year-old whisky,
01:05:51
Speaker
and then there was tiny little fine print on the back of the bottle to cover the legal basis saying actually it's not and blah blah blah or you know whatever you're doing everything you legally could to make it look exactly the same as a an age statement whiskey that's dirty but that's not what you guys are about from what I can tell I mean I've only talked to you for
01:06:13
Speaker
an hour now, but that seems very much like that's not what you're about. You want to be open about it. You want to celebrate the fact that you're doing things differently and you want to appeal to people's geeky and adventurous side to come and try something different and experience it for themselves. And as long as people are doing that, then as far as I'm concerned, all power to you. It's awesome. It's going to do nothing but push the entire industry forward. It's going to give people that
01:06:40
Speaker
are a little bit stuck and need some inspiration, perhaps some inspiration. It's going to give people that perhaps weren't interested in the industry suddenly now going to jump into it from a geek point of view or a science point of view. And maybe it'll give some people that are being a little bit lazy to kick in the pants and, you know, competition's always healthy. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think you had that on with that.
01:07:08
Speaker
We, we, we, I had a discussion with this, uh, uh, Facebook group of Danish whiskey drinkers, because it would be more clear message if we wrote single molds on the labels. Because for me, it is a single mold. Yes. The new make is spooned, but.
01:07:30
Speaker
anyone with the knowledge about flavor enough that that doesn't create a blended mold or pure mold because we just had a spoonful in the new make. But I understand the rules of the game. If it's blended, it's blended. I asked these people what would you expect on the label and they were like
01:07:49
Speaker
Even though how little addition we would, I would, I would feel cheated if you said Sycamore. I was like, fair, let's write pure malt because we don't want to hide anything. I would have loved to put Sycamore on the label. People more understand the name. We can't put the name whiskey, but we can write Sycamores. But we can't because the product we're getting are spooned, which is fair enough. So we write pure malt instead. We opted out of blended malt because
01:08:15
Speaker
And that might be a Danish thing, but here blended malt is really like the discount cheap whiskies. I know there's plenty of good producers of high quality blended malt, but it tends to be in the Danish world, a cheap product. So pure malt had a bit of feeling about it. So we went for that name.
01:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, so just in case people at home don't know what we're talking about here, the Scots do not want, they want single malt, Scottish single malt to be a Scottish product. Yes. End of story, no one else can have it. You can buy the product, but you're not allowed to buy a single malt.
01:08:52
Speaker
We'll sell you single malt, but before it leaves the country, we are literally gonna put a teaspoon of something else, like literally a teaspoon of something else into it. So now it's no longer a single malt, it's a blended malt. That's what we're talking about from teaspooning here, which is hilarious. Yeah, so just in case people didn't understand that previous conversation, I hope that puts it into perspective. So I have to ask men,
01:09:18
Speaker
I am, I'm impressed. I'm very interested to see where you go with this. I'm interested, would be very interested to see what would happen if you could have more direct, let's not say control, more direct collaboration with the spirit that was being made as well. But for me at home, what can I learn from this and are there things that I can do
01:09:45
Speaker
without having an insanely fancy reactor like yours to start speeding up the development of my spirits at home. Yeah. I think anyone with a say a Soviet water bath at home can easily achieve something like having a bottle in your, in your, on your stove or something that can hold steadily
01:10:10
Speaker
62, 65 degrees. That's doable. If you are a cooking geek and have a Soviet experiment, if you have some modern ovens, they could be quite precise. If you set it to like 60 or 70 and you put a thermometer inside your oven, you can like check where it hits. That's possible.
01:10:32
Speaker
I know that some people, I also do some figure painting in my free time. People buy these like ultrasonic baths that are typically bought for like cleaning jewelry or glasses, what else needs to be cleaned. They don't work the same way as our ultrasound. The ultrasonic bath, like the entire water is shaking. We have like a probe, a titanium probe,
01:11:00
Speaker
that has a very strong ultrasonic field. But it gives you something. So having some wood, some wood pieces, chop up some wood, toast it in your oven, maybe charge with your wheat burner, and then put it in your ultrasonic bath with some spirit, that can give you a long way. That will be the two most easy home options.
01:11:28
Speaker
If you want to introduce oxygen more fast, something like an aquarium pump is quite good for like bubbling and bending the whiskey if you want to introduce more oxygen. Because what we're talking about, it's easy to extract wood flavors. That goes very quickly. It's about making them mellow. But you should be careful with the oxygen because over oxidizing the whiskey completely ruins the flavor. It's about maybe turning it on and off here and then to give it that
01:11:56
Speaker
just that level of oxygen in solution so that the compounds in the whiskey have available oxygen to react with. But if you just flush it with oxygen, you're just going to burst away all the aromas. And that's not the case that you want. Yeah, right. So it's not about, how do we put this?
01:12:19
Speaker
putting more oxygen in, more oxygen in than is needed isn't helping it oxidize faster. It's just literally like the same going back to beer. It's like CO2 scrubbing a bad flavor out of a beer. You just, you're flushing everything out and pushing more out. So all you need to do is just have enough oxygen in solution so that the things are happening because you're at a higher temperature.
01:12:44
Speaker
Um, those chemical reactions are going to happen a little bit quicker. Uh, and the ultrasonic bath, I'm assuming is working more on the wood than what's in solution. You will not target the whiskey itself as much. Right. We, we, we discovered that even.
01:13:03
Speaker
With the setup we have, we can change the amplitude of the ultrasound. So one thing is the Hertz. Typically, ultrasound is in the range of around 20,000 Hertz. That is the definition of ultrasound. That's what you can hear or you can't hear. Then you have an expression of the power.
01:13:22
Speaker
usually wattage, that's an expression of the energy. And we write on the labels, we write the total amount of joules that we applied per liter or milliliters. So there's something about the energy that was put into the thing. But the most important thing is actually the amplitude of the sound waves. I mean, the height of the sinus waves, you can make them longer, you can make them shorter.
01:13:50
Speaker
that basically changes what molecules you target. But there are limited options when it comes to an auto-select path, what kind of amplitude you can run. So people can try to give it a go, see if you get any effect out of it. Because it's not just auto-sound. Auto-sound is just a frequency.
01:14:18
Speaker
There's a lot of sound that sounds horrible, and the sound of the music sounds good. It's all the same wavelength, but it's about how it sounds basically.
01:14:28
Speaker
Yeah, right, so there is definitely, there's been an influx in people messing with the basically the, like you said, the jewelry cleaner baths in home distilling. That's interesting to know though. So I used to use them, the only time I've ever used them is I used to work in a dive store and we used to clean all the bits from when we were servicing rigs, we'd use them for that. And that's my only sort of touch point with it. And they're definitely like, the settings on the thing was on.
01:14:58
Speaker
or off. So yeah, so I guess whatever machine you have, you end up targeting the kind of molecule that that amplitude is going to target and you can't change it. Yeah. So to go from that to something where you can, what sort of price point are you looking at for a machine that'll? I know. Okay. I know.
01:15:27
Speaker
if you're really geeky. You can buy this like a handheld ultrasonic probe
01:15:34
Speaker
The company that sells this, you can use it for many applications. They say that you can actually make a very good french fry because apparently the water, like something about the starch on the exterior of the potato, like loses water more easily. Like it's like, it's like, yeah, something happened. So you get a finer crust with lower humidity, meaning like more brown, brown,
01:16:02
Speaker
round-collar reactions, caramelization and major reactions. So supposedly it also works on your french fries. But you can buy that one, but I think...
01:16:13
Speaker
it's at least a couple of hundred euros to get those. So it's for the dedicated persons. I think what some of our biggest takeaways are philosophy wise that you should bring onto the home scale is that there's not one perfect method of accelerating aging. Is this combination of doing
01:16:36
Speaker
a couple of different small steps to create something that is more complex. Because just by using an ultrasound that wouldn't have worked for us because we need some of those other steps involved to get the balanced product out.
01:16:53
Speaker
So by using a little bit of oxidization, but by playing around with no pressure, sound bad, the fifth, that's why you have laying around to try to play around with light, which is something that we've definitely seen. That's something we're yet to understand exactly how and when to use it.
01:17:12
Speaker
but continuously look around your surroundings in your kitchen and look at other equipment to see how you can incorporate it. Because that for us is where a lot of creativity comes in in trying to come up with new ideas and then test them out and be a bit scientific about it.
01:17:33
Speaker
Yeah, I was just gonna say that. So the huge advantage you have is that you can literally program a aging cycle, right? And hit go and then change one parameter, hit go again. So I have to imagine if you're doing this at home, the key thing to getting any success over time would just be keeping immaculate records. I have to imagine, right? Like just recording everything you do and then trying to match that with an outcome.
01:18:02
Speaker
So you can change it next time. Yeah, for sure. And the difficult thing is that some of these effects are the work in harmony. Uh, right. So it is best to run. We, we see the best results when we dose oxygen while we used all the sound with the idea of like, there's so much reactivity, uh, in that chamber where the old sound sits.
01:18:31
Speaker
So when the oxygen gets in, it reacts more with the compounds. So you can't just use heat on its own, or just like you want, just on some, just oxygen. You have to like,
01:18:42
Speaker
do it all together and we have dialed in like a process where we typically start with ultrasound and finish with ultrasound. But we wouldn't start with oxygen but we finish with oxygen. So there's different day progressing into the method where it's most suitable to apply something.
01:19:02
Speaker
um like we want to start with the transformation we want to move on to three uh sorry we start with the extraction we slowly move towards just focusing on the transformation that's interesting i i've been working on uh how do i put it i i've always believed that everything that happens to a whiskey is purely a scientific process and that there is more than likely ways to essentially gamify that like to
01:19:32
Speaker
speed it up and have exactly the same chemical process happen but at a faster pace. I've also sort of felt that me messing around with glass jars and wood at home, probably I'm not going to crack the code. So age is kind of the big thing for me.
01:19:50
Speaker
In saying that, I have been experimenting with something that I feel like has been working and that has been to heavily, heavily load extraction at the beginning. So put four or five times the amount of wood that I think I really need into a spirit, get a whole lot of extraction out of it, get a whole lot of colour, a whole lot of wood flavour, get it to the point where it tastes horribly over-oaked and then pull almost all of that wood out and let it sit.
01:20:18
Speaker
And that seems to get me a better spirit quicker than just putting a regular amount of wood in and just waiting. And my horrible layman explanation for it with no backing whatsoever, this is just entirely a personal guess, is that if you can extract stuff and get it into solution and you get a whole lot of it into solution, then more of that stuff can start going through to chemical changes that it needs to go through rather than slowly seeping out of the wood.
01:20:48
Speaker
And then it almost sounds like you're kind of doing the same thing in the reactor. So you focus on extraction first, you get what you need out of the wood, out of the wood, and then you figure out how to change it into what you need it to be. Is that kind of what you're saying? Yes. Uh, you're, you're, you're totally right. The only thing is if, if I would give my, my, uh, my, my personal professional, uh, if you is that.
01:21:15
Speaker
Some things in the wood doesn't extract just over one day. There are some things that come off in the first couple of hours and then in a couple of days, but even in the matter of weeks. So that could be something very hardly bound in the wood, especially compound that just doesn't wash off in a day. It needs like five days to soak to probably extract it.
01:21:40
Speaker
But the more you have from the start, the more you can work with. Instead of having a constant increase in extraction, but you also need a constant transformation, it's easy just to start.
01:21:54
Speaker
with a very big extraction and transform it slowly. So I would agree, yeah. Just to clarify, if people at home, because I haven't publicly really said this a whole lot, just to clarify, what I'm saying is I will get to a whole lot of extraction over like a month. So I'll put a lot of wood into the spirit for me, instead of putting in enough wood to get it to where I want it to be in a year's time, I'll put
01:22:22
Speaker
enough wood to get away like I'll increase the amount of wood aiming for a month so after one month is when I'm saying uh it's too oaky and then I'll pull everything out leave some wood in there in terms of I'm just trying to think what the best way to get some information is here because there's so much I want to ask you guys it's just too much to ask let's just go through the the a few of the different things I think the I think the extraction
01:22:50
Speaker
is fairly, I think most people just get that. That doesn't seem too tricky to me. Let's talk ultrasound really quickly. You're able to target stuff with the ultrasound, so you're using ultrasound on the transformation side of things as well. Do you think that if you were using a, I know this is a horrible question to throw at you, but using one of those ultrasonic baths, do you think that's gonna help at all with transformation or mostly just with extraction?
01:23:19
Speaker
I got to taste... The answer is yes. I got to taste a product from another Danish company that actually worked on accelerated spirits. And they were quite secretive about the process, but I could get that their prototypes were made in an ultrasonic bath.
01:23:38
Speaker
and I got the taste, there was set prototypes and they were quite good. So I know there's something transforming. All the sound
01:23:51
Speaker
What it does is that it creates vibrations. It creates this concept called cavitation, meaning that this pressure of sound waves, they create microscopic air bubbles in the liquid. And when these bubbles, they cavitate, they fall in. Instead of explode, they implode. You have a very high temperature
01:24:21
Speaker
on a microscopic scale, like several hundreds or even thousands of degree Celsius, but in like a minuscule little piece of air. So that's where you can really jump up with some reactions. The vibration helps, yeah, it helps the wood to loosen up. You can, you
01:24:47
Speaker
out of the wood with the theory. It's not fully proved yet our process, but this is like our working theory. But the transformation is basically it decreases the chemical reactions. So I would say there's a good chance that it could work for a home distiller.
01:25:08
Speaker
cool man so is there something that you're looking for in terms of not enough influence or too much influence specifically from the ultrasonic side of things i just figured what we'll go through each of these points and see if
01:25:23
Speaker
If there's rough markers for people in terms of being able to sort of jumpstart them on this journey to be able to say, you know, if this is happening, you can probably keep using the ultrasonic. If this is happening, you've probably used it enough. Turn that off and focus on the other methods. Do you know what I mean? Or is it just that simple?
01:25:42
Speaker
We did a test where we didn't be like you described earlier. We infused the wood, we gave us more of the sound. We removed the wood, we gave us more of the sound. Then we bottled half, we took half the volume, and then we said, okay, why don't we just go full on all the sound for three days? Yeah, right.
01:26:09
Speaker
And it was quite clear that it's not dangerous to use ultrasound, because it seems to reach a global maximum. It's an exponentially decreasing function. When there's nothing left to work with, it just vibrates and does nothing. It doesn't seem like you can overdo it.
01:26:30
Speaker
Yes, you could overextract when you have the wood in. The first samples we got, I was amazed that we could, it was just like five liters of Yumek, some wood pieces. And then we have this big ultrasonic probe. So we achieved something like five hours and we got a dark brown liquid.
01:26:52
Speaker
That was too dark. Even for an experimental release, it was too dark. So I'd say, yeah, stop if your color is overly dark. But that would be my only advice, I think. I think something just to jump in and not necessarily directly related to the ultrasound, but also be curious to where you source your oak. If it's something that we've seen is that not all oaks is equal.
01:27:21
Speaker
So if you go to the home brew store and you buy the cheapest old cube to add flavor, you're not going to get the same flavor as if you to some distillery as for some old staves or if you're able to source different qualities of it.
01:27:38
Speaker
What about the time and duration for heat? You haven't done it for long enough and for warm enough versus you've done it for too long and it's too hot. Is there a markers on either side of that? We know that the 60s work. So far we've been focusing on the 60s because we had a theory background why that would be the best range.
01:28:08
Speaker
When you get above 68, 70, you start getting some problems with partial pressure. I mean, you're almost distilling. So it starts to be important if your lids are tight.
01:28:24
Speaker
that you're possibly not actually exploding anything because you're creating a high pressure in a system. We follow a lot of rules because we have this almost like pressurized tank of spirit with electricity. Obviously, we have to follow some strength regulations on the machine.
01:28:43
Speaker
I don't think, we still have to uncover all the effects in the mid-50s. We just have this idea that 60 is better than 50, but if people could drive 50, 42, 58, that would be possible. But we have the experience that in the mid-60s is where we get the best effect.
01:29:05
Speaker
It's also about one thing is the aging of the whisky. The chemical reactions happen faster. But say there are like some resinous material in the wood. Like the oak carries some hardly soluble materials.
01:29:22
Speaker
they obviously get more, less viscous when they heat it up. The same way like your butter is stiff in the fridge, but it becomes soft when you take it out for a few while. So you can imagine that the wood has some like fatty resin like components that is more soft when it's at high temperatures.
01:29:44
Speaker
So I have to kind of assume too that that is helping along with the ultrasonic treatment. This is kind of getting at what you talked about recently in terms of some of the things in the wood just take a long time to break down and also what I have to imagine you were talking about.
01:30:01
Speaker
right back at the beginning when you were saying you were looking at the wood staves to see how old they were. It's these things that are harder to break down under normal circumstances. They just take a long time to break down. The heat, the pressure, the ultrasonic waves acting on it are all just encouraging that stuff to break down quicker, right? Like this is the whole idea too. Yeah. So, so would you,
01:30:32
Speaker
There's a balancing act here I have to imagine in terms of overextraction.
01:30:40
Speaker
initially in terms of just getting something that tastes horrible and over-oaked and tannic and nasty, but you still don't get to that point where you're really breaking the wood down and aging. I say aging with big inverted commas here. You're not creating that old wood. You're not breaking down the stuff that's harder to break down because you've you can't get to that point. You've extracted too much flavor and oak from it by using too much wood too soon. So there's got to be a balancing act here.
01:31:10
Speaker
the same as there is in a barrel in terms of the size of the barrel, I have to assume, right? So if you use a little teeny tiny barrel, you just get something that tastes like oak soup and you never get it to the point where it gets old. So what are your thoughts on trying to figure out how to reach that balance?
01:31:28
Speaker
at home because, I mean, I think I've kind of reached a point where I know the rough amount of wood I want to use per spirit. But if I go and throw it into an ultrasonic bath at 60 degrees and everything, I've got no idea, man, that could just completely turn it on its head. Is it the same sort of volumes that you're using? Or do you need to change the volumes of wood? Or how does that work? Or the ratio, I should say, from wood to material? This is a very good question because you can talk about weight.
01:31:57
Speaker
but weight of a stave has a very different volume or service area than that weight of wood dust. We have an idea that when we work with cubes of wood, we end the range of like grams per liter, like two, three, five grams per liter gets you something. But it so much depends on
01:32:23
Speaker
on your setup. What we did is that we took the ballastaves, the whole staves, and then we have like a whole drill. So we drilled, we couldn't coins out of lack of a better word. So like tiny discs or coins of barrel staves.
Wood Cubes and Their Impact on Aging
01:32:41
Speaker
because they're easier to work with. They're easier to put in and take out. We tried to pressure cook them in water just to see if we got some effect. So I know that we can start with having like 10 to 12 this side cubes, the thickness of a ballast, Dave, is a good amount. So if you can have access to a bowel,
01:33:08
Speaker
And you drill two holes in it. I would say one or two of those would get you plenty for like five, 10 liters of spirit. Be my recommended dosage. I think what's interesting and something that we've learned as well is that we haven't really seen a lot of downsides in adding wood as we go, if we need more.
01:33:30
Speaker
And finding that balance and never overstepping and gradually adding more wood up to a level where we feel it's right. That's really interesting because this whole process just opened so many doors in terms of the way that you can go about spirits, right? So in a world where creating a spirit takes 10, 15 years,
01:34:02
Speaker
The idea of being like, ah, well, we'll just put a little bit of wood in and then we'll see how it's like halfway through. You wake up seven years later and you're like, ah, shit. Now this is going to take 30 years, not 15. I guess we should have put more oak in, right? That's what's so fun and so interesting for us as well, because there's still so much experimentation on every time we do a batch.
01:34:26
Speaker
We've done something differently and we've learned something now. Yeah. And it's so tantalizing for a home distiller because a home distiller doesn't, you walk into a distillery and there is literally hundreds of
Challenges for Home Distillers
01:34:40
Speaker
years of experience, right? Like master distiller is in Scotland. There's three or four guys around the place that just know that inside out. And not only that, they learned from someone who knew it inside out.
01:34:54
Speaker
And they're really, really focused on that specific product they're creating. Whereas for a home distiller, I've read stuff in forums and books and interviews and stuff that I've gathered up. So I try something and then I don't know if I did good or not.
01:35:11
Speaker
for like a year and then you're like oh I screwed up I guess I better go back to my notes from a year ago and then adjust and try again but that cycle is so long it's so long to be able to improve yourself because you just don't know like I you know like the first time I'd ever made whiskey I'd never tasted white dog I never tasted a white spirit before so I'm sitting here tasting something that's come off the still going I
01:35:36
Speaker
I don't know. Did I do good? Did I not do good? So you've got no way of improving or adjusting or having, there's no, there's no feedback. Do you know what I mean? To improve yourself. But man, the idea of being able to distill something and then age it in 10 days and then be able to go back and change the ingredients that I put into the mash.
01:35:59
Speaker
and have that system or that whole timeline distilled down to maybe a month? Man, that's tantalizing. That's exciting. I totally agree. This message might not light all the lamps for a consumer, but for the whiskey geeks,
Embracing Flexibility in Spirit Production
01:36:25
Speaker
They totally love this. And we can adapt. If, say, after the summer, I got tired of something and I want to completely change direction, we just do it. We didn't plan for our autumn releases five or 10 years ago. Yeah, whatever. We still have a plan for them. Yeah, we have no plan. That's the beauty. We have a plan for the next batch, but that's about it. And then we decide what we want to do.
01:36:55
Speaker
And I mean, not to mention too that the whole problem with supply and demand, right? Like you said, the stuff that people are putting into barrels now is what they're going to be using in years time.
Predicting Supply and Demand
01:37:06
Speaker
And you just have to, you have to go on predictions, right? Like, oh, we see the trend for whiskey going up. I guess we better make more whiskey and really hope it doesn't tank.
01:37:17
Speaker
You get the opposite happening where the trends going down, down, down, down. So production dips and then suddenly demand goes sky high and there's no whiskey. It's really worth pointing out what you're speaking about now is that we've been very inspired by whiskey and creating our products so far.
01:37:37
Speaker
But of course we're looking at, as we talked about bourbon, but of course we're looking at other brown spirits. And then also spirits that might not even be traditionally brown spirits, but that we can do other stuff with. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a, that's a good point, right? So I, um, I've talked to a few people about
01:38:00
Speaker
I mean, depending on where you're from or what you want to call it. Rakia or fruit brandy, basically. And traditionally, a lot of them weren't aged. They were white spirits. And after a little bit more pressing and asking about why that was the case, it basically came out that, well, this is a seasonal thing.
Blending Traditional and Modern Techniques
01:38:17
Speaker
We have all the fruit, we make it.
01:38:19
Speaker
and then we drink it over the off season, we drink it all and then we make more next year. So it's not that we don't like aging it, it's just that it's never around long enough to age it. It's just traditionally was never done. But with something like this, right? Like you could apply your system to something like that and it would make sense. It would almost be a, how do you put it? It would be, it wouldn't be insulting to the tradition. It would be adding to or
01:38:49
Speaker
augmenting the tradition in some ways, which is cool. I like that. That's a cool idea.
The Role of Acids in Spirit Making
01:38:54
Speaker
One other thing that's been really sticking in the back of my mind ever since you mentioned it were the acids. Is this something that is just not even worth trying on a small scale because the dosing levels are so tiny? Or is it something that is potentially worth playing with? I think it's worth playing with. We can, I can, the
01:39:16
Speaker
viewers can probably see the link with the exact dosing because I don't know by numbers. There are a few things here.
01:39:28
Speaker
There are acids that are food grade. When you work with something like citric acid, acetic acid, they are always normally food grade because this is like balsamic vinegar. You can't buy household cleaning acetic acid that I would not put in my whiskey because it's like for chemical cleaning purposes, for descaling your bathroom or whatever.
01:39:54
Speaker
We would prefer to use hydrochloric acid, but it's very hard to buy food grade hydrochloric acid or hydrogen chloride. So I wouldn't do it unless you're absolutely sure that what you're adding is free of any pollutants or contaminants from the production.
01:40:15
Speaker
So you have to make sure that works. Otherwise, I think it's quite fun to play with the assets. One key thing about acetic acid compared to citric or hydrochloric is that it's volatile. So the good thing and the bad thing about acetic acid is that it adds just a little bit of tangy aroma to it. That's why you should be careful with it because they can easily overdose the aroma.
01:40:43
Speaker
We know on theory that wood will excrete acetic acid over time. There is acetic acid precursors in wood, but by adding from the start, you sort of say like kickstart the process.
01:40:59
Speaker
So we can definitely give the dosings. It's not dangerous to work with asset. Just follow ordinary safety rules if you work with strong assets. But if you work with normal like household, that's how I'm going to get everything. You're all good.
01:41:16
Speaker
Yeah, right. So my understanding of this is that a specific acid will go through the esterification process and turn into a specific ester.
Micro-Oxygenation and Flavor Enhancement
01:41:25
Speaker
So if you want a different ester, you need to start with a different acid. Is that basically correct? Yeah. In the case when we add a cetic acid, it can act both as the precursor, like the active ingredient in the ester, the acid part, but it's also
01:41:45
Speaker
adding protons, it's an acid, it leaves hydrogen or protons in the liquid, which is what catalyzes the esterification process. To put it in effect, this is what we call the fissures bioesterification.
01:42:01
Speaker
And ester is the combination of a carboxylic acid, which is the normal organic acids, citric, tartaric, lactic, et cetera. But you could never form an ester with a, we say mineral acid, like phosphoric acid, hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid. They are all like,
01:42:27
Speaker
on organic, so they wouldn't work, but they can all catalyze deer deformation. We did one experiment where we added pure palm fat, the most ugly looking chunk of palm oil from the supermarket.
01:42:49
Speaker
It does something because you have a lot of free fatty acids that make a lot of fruity esters. The problem with that experiment was that it tasted all like rancid fats. But that was it because, yeah, we can always, we have plenty of ethanol. We don't need ethanol. We have ethanol and propanol. So that part of the process is all good. You shouldn't be lacking ethanol in a whiskey spirit.
01:43:19
Speaker
What you do is yes, introduce different acids and fatty acids is an acid. Maybe trap that like a teaspoon of olive oil that could actually do something. Almond oil, something that has an interesting aroma, something that could bind with the process. What was the main acid that you were suggesting as the catalyst?
01:43:44
Speaker
Yeah, the best catalyst in theory is hydrochloric acid. But as an all-purpose precursor and catalyst, we would say acetic acid or citric acid. And they should be commonly available.
01:44:01
Speaker
Okay, so they'll act as a precursor and a catalyst, and then once you have the catalyst, then you can add the other acids that basically won't go through the esterification process unless they are in the presence of citric acid. They happen, but they happen faster. Okay, right. It's not binary, yes or no, but it helps. There are acids in the wood. That's why that's what's creating the esters. The wood is contributing to the acid profile.
01:44:29
Speaker
Yeah, food, the assets, but you can play with profile by giving a different assets. Which I think is interesting. That is very interesting. So I have heard that there's two places. Well, there's multiple places obviously, but the two.
01:44:45
Speaker
Estrification process that have interested me is one in the still, where acids from the wash are esterified. And then the second is the barrel esterification. And I never quite understood the chemistry of what was happening there. That makes a whole lot more sense to me now. So thank you. I appreciate that. One more thing in this. Man, whiskey is just so huge. There's so many
01:45:07
Speaker
and just spirits in general there's so many topics to cover it's insane i'm convinced that there's literally no such thing as a master of whiskey on the face of the planet no one knows at all you just can't all spirits in general for sure uh anyway uh oxygen let's talk oxygen now you said that that the way that you were doing it was with micro oxidation uh yes what is the micro part of that mean is that just literally the size of
01:45:35
Speaker
the bubbles being introduced or how does this happen? What's the deal here? To clarify, we call it micro oxygenation. So oxygenation is a process and oxygenation is the stabilizing oxygen in a liquid, adding oxygen to a liquid, that's oxygenation.
01:45:59
Speaker
When we say micro, that's because at the end of the little tip is a ceramic part. So we're basically pushing air or oxygen into a ceramic
01:46:14
Speaker
filter. So it leaves into the liquid as very tiny bubbles. So they are more easily goes into solution and doesn't act as a carrier gas flowing away all over. We don't want to bubble the whiskey, we want to add oxygen in the liquid. In our machine,
01:46:44
Speaker
We add, when we turn it on, we add one liter of oxygen for one minute for a very little volume, for like 250, 200. So the home, it's very little that you add. We had this calculation. We saw a paper discussing how much oxygen a wine barrel was taking up per year.
01:47:10
Speaker
And then we were like, okay, that number times 10, because it's 10 years, theoretical 10 years, that will be the amount that we would have to add. But we added very slowly. So that could be hard to mimic. But even just having it, if you had your spirit in a flask with some head space, just once in a while,
01:47:39
Speaker
give it a shake because that would help solubilize something. We're still keeping the system closed, so we're not letting up a lot of precious aromas. But that could be one part of it, just to have some head space and regularly shake it. Yeah, right. I mean, I
01:47:58
Speaker
What I've been doing with my jars is I will just, once in a while, I'll go and open the jar up, close it up, and give it a shake, or just walk past and give it a shake. But I have to imagine, especially if you're using things at high temperature, you definitely want it to be a closed system, right? Because you'll just have nothing left in a day. 60 degrees, it'll just all disappear. Yeah, so that's going to be hard to do, isn't it?
01:48:25
Speaker
Ideally, you need an airtight container that you can deliver oxygen into it. Those stones, I imagine they're just the same thing that the brewers used to oxygenate before. Yeah, it's a capstone if you go by that one. Yeah. Yeah, cool. 10 by capstone, if that's possible. Yeah. Yeah.
01:48:46
Speaker
And I have to imagine that for us with small volumes that using straight oxygen isn't an issue, that we're using such small volumes that just using air is going to get there.
01:48:58
Speaker
enough oxygen into solution. Yeah, cool. So what you don't want is literally whiskey going bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, because you're just stripping everything out of it. So how do you deal with, is this why you're under pressure? So you've got a sealed system and you're putting oxygen in. Do you have basically a blow-off valve somewhere or are you just letting the pressure go up as you put oxygen in?
01:49:25
Speaker
It's so little oxygen that we actually add that it doesn't add to the pressure of the tank. But yes, the tank is contained. Nothing in the tank, unless we have a safety valve. So as the pressure goes too high, it blows off the steam.
01:49:43
Speaker
but otherwise it's a completely closed system. I think what's worth pointing out that we maybe haven't spoken about enough is that our system is a flow as well as like a circular flow so throughout the system the liquid or the spirit is slowly moving so it's not the same spirit that's in touch with the ultrasound the whole time but it just adds as well to the
01:50:12
Speaker
to the process. Yeah. Everything is moving around slowly. So we don't overextract on the other sound or anything that we want. It works this way. It's not standing still, but that can be very hard to achieve as a whole distiller. Yeah, I would imagine. I just got the peach.
01:50:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's really nice. Yeah, I enjoyed that. All right, guys, we've been at this for almost two hours, which is kind of crazy. So I just want to sum up. I really, really appreciate you giving specific details for people doing this at home. That's very generous of you. We very much appreciate it. So if we wanted to set this up ourselves an ultrasonic bath and
01:51:00
Speaker
Would it be as effective to put basically have the ultrasonic bath as a Bay Marie kind of thing? So fill that with liquid and then have a jar sitting inside the liquid. Would that penetrate through the glass or whatever the jar is? Does that make sense? Yes, that's the theory. Yeah. Okay. So that's good. I've seen are with the glass jar in the liquid, which is simply what I think. Yeah.
01:51:27
Speaker
Yeah cool and then I know some of these baths have the ability to set temperature on them but you could almost set it up like you mentioned before like a sous vide you can get those little sous vide stick machines or whatever so you have the water on the outside of the bath transmitting the ultrasonic into the jar in the middle and you also have something to control temperature sitting in the water of the ultrasonic bath as well and then ideally you would have
01:51:54
Speaker
some way of delivering oxygen into the middle of the bath as well. What would you think about just doing, heating it up, giving it treatment of ultrasonic and 60 odd degrees for say two days, pulling the jar out, putting it in the fridge, letting it cool down and then opening it up, getting some more air into it, closing it back up and putting it back into the ultrasonic bath.
01:52:24
Speaker
To be honest, we haven't worked with cold oxygenation because we always work at high temperatures because we think we know that the solubility of oxygen is higher at high temperatures. But I know what you mean. We can't just open the jar all the time because we're going to lose aromas. Maybe just
01:52:48
Speaker
Yeah. Open it quickly. That would be my best answer. I mean, the other option is having a valve in the lid or something that you can open and close. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, cool. Well, we're on a host and then introduce it that way. Sorry, say again? Or like a host that you can have a valve on as well, that you can introduce it through.
01:53:15
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Alright guys, I am absolutely buzzing with anticipation. I have seen people messing around with this stuff a lot, but it is hard to get excited about something without
01:53:32
Speaker
proof of concept, right? Like you see people talking in forums and like, yeah, sure. Maybe I believe you. Maybe I don't. I'm just not that motivated to go and try what you're trying without really knowing that it's working. But this, I mean, this is, this is working for sure. I mean, people could have a debate over stylistic choice. They could have debate over the types of spirits that you're trying to make.
01:53:55
Speaker
But I think that most people, if you serve this blind to them, they would not tell you it's young whiskey. End of discussion as far as I'm concerned. I think as well, I mean, we'd love to engage in discussion with listeners as well, hearing how they have maybe worked around.
Listener Interaction and Feedback
01:54:15
Speaker
So some of their challenges, but also, yes, we still love sharing ideas and hearing how other people are approaching
01:54:22
Speaker
similar issues because there's so much more for us to learn as well and we're more than open to share our ideas or go in depth on certain subjects if they feel that they want to know more about something or you know we also have done research that you're able to read. Yeah. So I mean we just get in touch with us as well.
01:54:47
Speaker
For sure. I'll make sure to let you guys know when this is going out. So if you want to jump into the comments section and see what people are asking, you can either take that as inspiration and maybe we can, you know, let this marinate for a little while and we can do another podcast later on to follow up.
01:55:03
Speaker
or jump in there and just answer people directly. But if people are trying to find you, I'll make sure to put this in the intro as well so the info is stacked right up at the front. But where should people find your products? Where are your products available? Website, where should people go to check your stuff out? So we have a website called etoh.dk. Another alternative is just typing in, this is now whiskey.com.
01:55:33
Speaker
Awesome. That will also bring them to us. Right now we're able to ship from our own webshop in most of Europe. We're currently working actually with some people in Australia to see if they'd like to bring it in.
01:55:50
Speaker
But then again, if people in New Zealand, Australia, wherever the listener are, if they're interested, talk to your distributor as well, and then we'd love to send some samples. But also, if you're outside of our shipping range, we can definitely look into making something work as well.
01:56:11
Speaker
a peat drink I reckon I can recommend. Which was it? It was the... I might. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, guys. Yeah, I can't say thank you enough for this. This has been an absolute, absolute privilege to be able to talk to you. Best part of my job is being able to just talk to random people like you. Thank you so much for listening and asking questions and engaging. It's
01:56:39
Speaker
think what we'd both love to be doing. So a huge, huge thank you to the team from ETOH. I'm really looking forward to testing these things out and seeing if we can borrow some of the techniques, whether some of the techniques are applicable for home distilling, how that's going to work. In fact, I've got a video coming up on that soon. So thank you so much Tobias. Thank you so much Johan.
01:57:00
Speaker
Thank you also to the sponsor of this video, Into the AM. Thank you so much, guys, for the kick-ass shirt. If you want one of these awesome shirts for yourself, you can go to intotheam.com slash chase, C-H-A-S-E, to get 10% off and pick up a sweet shirt. And don't forget to subscribe to the new podcast channel on YouTube, because if you're watching on YouTube, you're not going to see any more of these if you don't. All right, guys, have a kick-ass week. I'll catch you later. See ya.