The seemingly innocuous headline: “Why More and More Bourbon Producers Are Cleaning Their Used Barrels,” explains Suzanne Skiver Barton in her article in Whiskey Magazine, since bourbon must be aged in new casks, just like producers of other types of aged products. in barrels, such as scotch tape, reuse them.
But then the problems started. “Over the past decade,” Barton writes, “the American whiskey industry has adopted a bottling technique that changes the behavior of casks as they enter their next life cycle. “washes away” excess alcohol (sometimes by pressure or flushing) and uses this liquid in the proofing process. This saves money for them – they get more alcohol – but is potentially disastrous for Scotch whisky, as single malt whiskey matures very differently in washed casks. than standard barrels.
First of all, this word is “wash”. Bourbon producers always wash their barrels. When the bucket that had just been thrown out stopped flowing, the worker poured some water into it from the hose, turned it over again, and poured the water out. This is mainly done to wash away loose sediment, but also some whiskey.
This is not the topic of this article. It’s nothing new that they use “gargle” as a euphemism to describe something completely different. Jack Daniels started doing it 16 years ago. This is how I described the process in The Bourbon Country Reader in 2007 when I saw them do it.
“When whiskey barrels are thrown away, they never release 100% of their contents. A small amount of whiskey remains in the wood.
“In a new facility next to a warehouse complex a few miles from tourist attractions, Jack Daniel’s is doing what no other distillery has tried to recover lost product.
“After being dumped, each empty barrel is sent to a building (a large, unremarkable, steel-lined industrial structure) where it is filled with about 20 gallons of water at this level, with the barrel standing upright. not quite made it to the now open garbage pit yet.
“After they get the water, the buckets are placed on pallets, nine at a time, and stacked ten stories high in the storage section of the building, where they lie for three to four weeks.
“There was a previous system in which the barrels were only washed. This new system produced an additional product with five times the alcohol content.”
Jim Beam started doing something similar in 2011. They passed it on to Maker’s Mark in 2013. Their process uses heat and agitation, which is similar to the practice known as “wetting” barrels, favored by young people in whiskey country. The kids would “empty” a freshly discarded barrel from a local brewery, fill it with several gallons of water, stopper the corks, and roll the barrel around in the hot sun until they got bored. The resulting liquid usually contains enough alcohol to create a slight hum.
If one cannot put a group of thirsty teenagers into service, special means will be required for this process. It is not cheap. That is why this practice is not universal. Who is to blame for the fact that Scotch whiskey producers buy used bourbon barrels without finding out how they were processed?
Charles C. Cowdery is an internationally renowned whiskey writer specializing in American whiskey. He is a Kentucky colonel (Patton, 206) and a member of the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame (2009). He is the author of several books on bourbon, including Bourbon Whiskey, Strange: The Amazing History of American Whiskey.