Cask Strength 1:1

Posted on July 11, 2009
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Sylvan Thompson is a cocktail drinker and maker in Portland, OR, who occasionally posts at TastyLibations.com.

I have always been fascinated by the changes that a spirit undergoes as it ages in wood and the effects of time and temperature on our favorite spirits. So I was thrilled to be able attend a seminar on just that – Cask Strength 1:1.

The moderator was Francesco Lafranconi and the presenters were César Cestari from Cabana cachaça, Larry Kass from Heaven Hill and David Blackmore from Glenmorangie. Too much information was given to repeat it all here (much as I would like to!), so here is a summary of some interesting highlights.

César Cestari – Cachaça

Cesari briefly went through the production method for regular Cabana, which is aged less than a year in neutral Jequitibá rosa wood barrels of various sizes. While cachaça is not commonly thought of as aged in America, there are many aged examples in Brazil and César brought us two examples of his own to taste. One was aged less than 2 years in Jequitibá rosa barrels and one in American oak. The first had ‘an elegant cedar-wood’ quality while the second started to taste a bit like a whiskey. I don’t believe that they are bottled yet.

Since he doesn’t want to cut down live trees, Cesari has been slowly sourcing used Brazilian woods to make barrels from. He plans to continue his experiments with different woods and barrel sizes.

The very high humidity in Cabana’s riverside aging house reduced the amount lost to evaporation. Lafranconi added that in the Caribbean, barrel losses can be as much as 8-10% (I assume per year).

Larry Kass – Bourbon

We then watched a slick video on the current state of largely automated barrel making for the US bourbon industry. It was quite a contrast to the British Isles where most of those jobs are still done by hand.

Kass then covered some basics on Heaven Hill and the legal definitions of straight whiskey, but for this seminar, the main point was that the aging prescription is constrained by law to new charred white oak barrels for a minimum of 2 years. Of the eight major bourbon producers, all use a #3 char, while Wild Turkey is alone in using the #4 char (heaviest).

This doesn’t seem to leave all that many variables, so he talked about the rickhouse structure that is common to the US industry. These are 7 story uninsulated buildings with a thin metal skin and a number of windows  that Heaven Hill opens in April and closes in November. He told us that it stays cool throughout the hot summer on the first floor, but gets up to about 110-114°F on the top floor! This dramatically affects aging and evaporation rates floor by floor. For example, the 27 year old Parker Heritage Collection whiskeys were taken from the lower floors and are not overaged, but on the upper floors that point can be reached in 19-20 years.

David Blackmore – Scotch

Scotch whisky makers rarely use brand-new barrels, preferring to use barrels that have already held something else and had the edge taken off of their initial aggressive activity. In fact, Glenmorangie have their own barrels made in America from Ozarks oak they have rights to, but lease them to Jack Daniels to have American whiskey aged in them for 4-6 years before shipping them to Scotland to be filled with their own products. Since they also air-dry the staves for 2 years (as opposed to faster kiln drying), that means that it takes 7 years to get a barrel ready to be filled! It wasn’t clear if this process was for all of their whisky, or just the ‘designer cask’ specification used for their Astar product that was brought for our tasting. We got to taste some Glenmorangie new-make spirit (white dog), some Astar that was aged in new charred barrels and the release Astar aged in the post-Jack barrels. The new barrel example was interesting but really much more aggressive like a bourbon, while the one from used barrels tasted like a premium single malt.

Barrel aging is really a fascinating topic (to some of us, anyway), and one that holds such complexity and yields its secrets so slowly that no one can really claim to have mastered it all. Thankfully, these spirits can be fully enjoyed even without understanding all that goes into making them!