Ageing fine whisky overnight

There is an old joke about business that gets told a lot in Napa Valley: How do you make a small fortune in wine? Start with a large fortune.

The same goes for making whisky. Equipment, barrels and enough space to keep them all can cost millions, money that cannot be recouped until years later, when the spirit has matured.

In the meantime, 20 per cent or more of the product will have been lost to evaporation as it ages - what distillers wistfully call "the angel's share".

Whisky, in other words, is ready to be "hacked" - at least according to Mr Stuart Aaron and Mr Martin Janousek.

Their company, Bespoken Spirits, in Menlo Park, California, says it can make whisky in just a few days, using heat and pressure to force alcohol in and out of small pieces of wood that give the spirit its characteristic flavour and colour. "With modern material science and data analytics, we can change this antiquated industry," Mr Aaron said.

Bespoken, whose first bottles appeared in stores last autumn, joins a crowded field.

Nearly a dozen companies claim that they can speed, or even bypass, the ageing process.

Many have attracted significant attention from investors.

Endless West in San Francisco has received nearly US$13 million (S$17.2 million) in funding since it was founded in 2015. Bespoken's backers include retired New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter.

Some of these whiskies are better than others. While several have won awards at spirits competitions, critics have so far largely dismissed them.

But as whisky sales grow by double-digit percentages each year, and as consumers - and investors - clamour for more than establishment distilleries can provide, companies like Bespoken may be here to stay.

The question is this: Where does whisky made overnight fit in a business built on tradition and prestige?

For almost as long as distillers have been putting spirits in barrels to mature, people have been trying to speed up the process.

Traditionally, ageing involves letting the rise and fall of seasonal temperatures push whisky into a barrel's wood, then out again, leaching flavour and colour along the way - a process that might last a few years to several decades.

Before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 imposed regulations on how whisky could be made, "speeding up" often meant dosing clear alcohol with caramel and soot - or worse - to make it taste old.

But other techniques developed in the late 19th century - like heated warehouses that could replicate a full quartet of seasons several times a year - became an accepted and common practice.

Over the past decade, some distillers have taken to using barrels much smaller than the standard 200-litre size, increasing the surface-to-volume ratio inside and thus the rate at which whisky cycles in and out of the wood.

Bespoken's technology is, in some ways, the next step. Instead of a full barrel, the company uses thousands of half-pinky-size wood chunks it calls "microstaves", which it places, along with unaged or partly aged whisky, in a steel tank.

By rapidly raising and lowering the pressure and heat inside, the device, which Mr Aaron and Mr Janousek call the "activator", forces the whisky in and out of the wood several times a day.

Another distillery, Lost Spirits, based in Los Angeles, takes a similar approach by loading whisky and wood into what its founder, Mr Bryan Davis, calls the reactor.

One key difference is light.

In addition to fluctuating the heat, Mr Davis bombards the wood with intense light, which he says rejiggers the molecular structure of the wood, helping to create the sort of complex flavours one associates with well-matured spirits.

Endless West does it differently. By analysing the molecular components of a whisky, drawing them from natural sources such as plants and yeast, and essentially infusing them into an alcohol base, the company claims to be able to reverse-engineer not just bourbon or scotch, but any beverage, even wine.

It says it can fashion the equivalent of a spirit aged five years or longer overnight, opening the possibility of mimicking, say, a 30-year-old Balvenie single malt scotch for a fraction of the Balvenie's US$1,300 retail price.

Bottles of its flagship whisky, Glyph, cost about US$40 each, while Bespoken's bourbon sells for about US$35. Lost Spirits' rum, available only at the distillery or online, costs about US$40.

Spirits experts tend to agree whiskies from the likes of Bespoken have a way to go before they can compete with conventional labels.

"From my analysis, while someone can create a good product, I don't get the same kind of complexity as you get from, say, an old bourbon," said Ms Nancy Fraley, a veteran freelance blender.

It may be a matter of time before people see a whisky from Endless West beat a bottle of The Macallan in a taste test, the same way the Deep Blue computer bested Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997.

But this may not be the point.

The high end of the spirits market is huge and growing, but in terms of sheer volume, the real money is still in lower-shelf spirits, as well as flavoured whiskies and "ready to drink" canned cocktails.

In that sense, a whisky like Bespoken's need not taste like the best bourbon to succeed. It just has to be better than the worst, at a competitive price.

And there is the international market.

As fast as spirits sales are rising in the United States - according to Nielsen, they were up 25.1 per cent last year over the previous year - they are nothing compared with the potential that some companies in the US and Europe see in places such as China and India.

Mr Davis of Lost Spirits has rejected offers from investors because he is more interested in creating new flavours than in finding a way to beat established distilleries at their own game.

A decade ago, no one could have imagined how large the whisky industry would grow. And companies like Bespoken and Endless West seem more interested in occupying future markets than in fighting over existing ones.

For a traditional whisky blender like Ms Fraley, that is fine.

"From what I have seen and tasted, I don't see it replicating a 20-year-old whisky," she said.

"Does that mean it's bad? No. Does it have a place in the market? Yes. Just as long as we're clear that it's not the same thing."

NYTIMES