Traditionally, alcoholic beverages were shaped by the environment around them.
The reason that Scotch Whisky uses peat smoked malt was that there wasn't coal available for them to use instead. It was aged in used barrels for economic reasons, rather than taste.
It's the same for beer, different styles of beer largely came about due to differences in water chemistry.
It seems weird to try and artificially define American Whiskey by trying to force a terroir in the product using selective breeding. That's backwards from how the process has historically happened, it's artificial.
The whole artisan American Whiskey market is bullshit anyway. Most "craft distilleries" just buy bulk white spirit or pre-aged spirit from a wholesaler [1], then finish it in their own barrels. The usually use smaller barrels too, to try an impart as much flavour in as short a time, leaving you with an unbalanced whiskey that just tastes like an oak barrel. Sometimes they even use tricks like artificially heating and cooling the ageing warehouse or using ultrasound to try and speed up the process. But you can't rush time.
In fairness, it's not just American Whiskey that has this problem. It's luxury spirits as a market. Luxury alcohol is a marketing industry that sells alcohol. Vodka is especially egregious, where the bottle the spirit comes in is often more expensive than the contents. Only 10 of around 130 Scotch Whisky distilleries are independent, the rest owned by international conglomerates like Pernod Ricard.
> Only 10 of around 130 Scotch Whisky distilleries are independent, the rest owned by international conglomerates like Pernod Ricard.
Why does that matter? What's in the bottle is either good or not, and whoever signs the paychecks of the people who make it is not relevant. Many of the distilleries owned by LVMH or Pernod or Suntory/Beam make an excellent product, and they would have gone out of business years ago if they had not been saved by large conglomerates. Many of them have total control over their distilling operations and benefit from the marketing and distribution know-how of their corporate owners.
In terms of the variety and quality available at all price points, there has never been a better time to be a consumer of whiskey. That would not have happened without all of these luxury liquor conglomerates.
You make a valid argument; my kneejerk reaction to the grandparent was to go "damn corporations!11", but at the same time, a lot of those hundreds of years old brands wouldn't be around anymore if it wasn't for those. As long as they leave the distilleries to do their thing I guess I'm okay with it.
Plus they can much more efficiently handle distribution. I mean I don't think an independent Scottish distillery would easily send representatives to e.g. Japan to create new markets there. If representatives representing 130 brands at a time goes there, however...
The impact has been negative for the following reasons.
First, the groups made whisky into a luxury good, expanding the customer base away from the amateur who bought the bottle for its contents. In certain industries, a bubble is a good thing as it draws a lot of talent into the industry. However, whisky is supply constrained - the older stuff is limited in quantity by the smaller market when they were bottled. The result has been a global rise in prices and cut in quality. See the NAS on all Japanese entry and many mid-level bottles, and Japanese houses importing after exhausting their own reserves; or the newly purchased and restructured Mortlach, which is also NAS despite its premium price tag. There is also a shortage of actual casks, particularly sherry, in this case limited by the Spanish wine market, leading to "creative" finishes or sub-par casks being systematically used to meet demand.
Second, from the POV of the house doing the acquisition, a brand has to fit in a portfolio of brands, and this can lead to intentional downgrading. For a well-known, non-whisky example, Longines has suffered post-acquisition, because the Swatch Group has decided that Omega should be their flagship mass market premium brand. You do not retain strategic independence or the ability to just "produce good stuff" after acquisition - the so called synergies can be negative for you.
Third, the massive influx of money into the industry has all but killed the apprenticeship model which is still alive and well in the wine world. If a distiller should show even a hint of skill, they will be rapidly discovered and acquired before they can grow. There is a parallel today in the startup world where everyone seems to be gunning for acqui-hires rather than building a company the scale of PayPal or Amazon (and WhatsApp showed that everyone has a price, and the industry will pay it); and Google etc.'s talent safari leads to a corresponding drop in great people contributing to open source research, which harms the commons (the advancement of collective human knowledge is slowed). There are hints of what could be; for some reason Australia has somewhat escaped the sights of M&A divisions, and Tasmanian whisky, not exactly the most well known thing to put in your shelf, is bid up to over $500/bottle (in Heartwood's case, for example) by amateurs with means. I wonder what a whisky market closer to France's wine industry would look like...
Fourth, the Veblen good buyer may actually have so much impact on the industry as to change the product itself. The explosion in popularity of Bordeaux premier cru wines in the new world as part of a well balanced portfolio has led to a move towards massively tannic wines that lack the balance and elegance that used to be prized amongst the French experts (who by and large are priced out anyway). We have witnessed a similar drive in whisky towards peat, not just in the Scottish islands but globally. Peat can be measured, and bigger is better, after all: just ask Ardbeg (owned by LVMH).
Fifth, the marketing money screws with information discovery. The big brands can completely cover any buzz about independents with noise by paying for thousands of journalists (whether experts or not) to write reviews on their products, by sending free samples to anything that looks like it talks about whisky, by organising frequent events, through the usual SEO Google-undermining process, and so on. Censorship through abundance. Until one finds a good gatekeeper, it can be difficult to find good value, and most gatekeepers are co-opted.
Sullivan's Cove was best whisky and one of the Limeburners best international whisky.
Despite this, you can't find the former at Sydney Airport's duty free (Heinemann) and only two NAS of the latter. These NAS are not even on sale on Limeburners' own website.
In comparison, both Kavalan and Amrut were widely, internationally distributed and marketed after their awards. I've seen both being aggressively pushed at whisky bars all around the world. The former is owned by a Taiwanese family group allegedly clearing half a billion a year in revenue, the latter by an Indian conglomerate specialising in the low end, high volume part of the market for half a century until they launched the eponymous single malt. And of course the Japanese names are all backed by giant keiretsus with the means to go big and global and even acquire the competition [1].
I wonder if the endgame will be starting with something like everclear, adding whatever aromas you feel like, diluting it down to 80 proof and finally bottling it.
That's exactly what Frank-Lin Distillers Products in Fairfield, CA does.[1] Ethanol arrives in tank cars from refineries in the Midwest, and is delivered to their railroad siding. Water come from the water main. The ethanol goes through some additional distillation and filtering. The water goes through a de-ionizing plant. Water, ethanol, and flavoring are mixed and bottled, to produce over a thousand different brands of booze, using many different types of bottles. The bottle factory is conveniently located across the street. Only a hundred different recipes are used. Few people notice.
Many brands of booze are purely marketing operations, with the production outsourced. Frank-Lin used to make Skyy Vodka. Skyy, the company, just provided the hype. That line was bought by Campari, which has their own in-house production facilities. Frank-Lin still makes Beyond Vodka.
Frank-Lin has a cost advantage. In the US, booze production is separated into distillers, distributors, and retailers for tax purposes. Frank-Lin is a distributor. The distiller is a refinery-scale operation back in the Midwest which makes industrial and beverage alcohol. So Frank-Lin handles the distribution of all those brands directly, bypassing a level of warehousing. Most of the low-end booze, and some of the high-end booze on the West Coast comes from Frank-Lin's plant.
That's largely what most homebrewers who make spirits do.
You get 90% ethanol out out of the still, water it down to 40%, and add a bottle of whatever flavour you want.
If you're drinking it neat, it's fairly obvious it's not the real thing, but if you're drinking it with coke or other mixers it's pretty passable, and not a bad deal at less than $5 per litre.
Yes, there are quite a few esters and acids that will hitch a ride with some of the alcohol and water molecules that make it up the column. This certainly depends on the type of still (eg plate vs alambic and continuous vs pot), but there are a lot of flavors transfered. The distiller's job is to choose which ones (eg at least remove the heads and tails).
One easy example is apple brandy which has a very distinct nose. It's not until you multiple distill and charcoal filter that vodka loses its flavor (you can actually detect potato, if you care to).
I should also mention that low pH (acidic) environment is important to the proportion of many flavors being transmitted. That means that distillers (looking for flavor) will often prefer lower alcohol but fully fermented brew, which usually means starting with lower sugar (less ripe fruit or less malted grains). Corn usually starts high sugar so I'm not sure about them.
The types of grains certainly do; rye, bourbon (corn), and un-peated scotch (barley) taste different. I don't know about the types of corn, though; the types of barley don't seem to make a big difference for scotch.
I live near a small distillery that does tastings and tours. The mash composition is a huge component of the flavor, and it's a lot of fun to taste the different mashes pre-distillation, along with the final product. The percentage of a corn to rye makes a really big difference, but they even pay attention to the source of the grain they use.
Also the new mash smell is the greatest thing in the world.
four roses produces single barrel bourbons - typically through their barrel select program, where you can taste a couple of different mash bills, but more important to the question: yeasts. you can taste the different yeast strains changing the end flavor. everything makes a bit of difference, if you're you're not trying to make neutral grain spirit.
> Why is it relevant if the seed were bred using genetic engineering or conventional?
Julian Van Winkle once made the point that it doesn't matter how you feel about GMO vs non-GMO, if you want to sell in Europe, you need to use non-GMO corn. I'm not sure how much of that was about regulation and how much was about public sentiment.
There's also the risk that regulations or sentiments will get even more unfriendly towards GMO in the time it takes to get the product out the door. It's hard to see how GMO is worth the risk in whiskey. The seed is the cheap part of the manufacturing process.
The same reason scotch whisky needs to be from Scotland despite perfectly good whisky coming from elsewhere. It's social signaling which is the bulk of what you pay for in a luxury good.
Because a large part of the US market believes that GMO are dangerous or potentially unhealthy, and this is probably more common feeling in a traditional product like whiskey.
A bit ironic if the consumption of alcohol itself represents a greater health risk to its drinkers. TBH, I think it has more to do with the idea of being artisanal and “crafted” by tradespeople.
Kind of the same idea as wine from organic grapes.
We've had a few thousand years to work out the health risks of alcohol. The health or environmental risks of GMOs are based on scientific predictions made in the last 50 years, rather than centuries of experience passed down through culture. That seems reason enough for a little more caution.
It doesn't make logical sense in this context to lump all the deaths from doing stupid things while extremely drunk in with the long term health effects, even if it's convenient rhetorically. People concerned with the nuances of fine whisky and the risks of GMOs are likely not the type who are getting blind drunk and winning Darwin awards on a Saturday night.
See I was going about this with the presumption that those results would be studied, reproduced studied more and fully understood before LabCo. Whiskey made it to market.
Aren't those 'different and unpredictable results' sort of the point when one aims to 'redefine U.S. whiskey'?
Usually I would complain about the inanity of this process, but it’s whiskey. The process is the point. It’s a hedonistic venture and should be embraced as one.
The reason that Scotch Whisky uses peat smoked malt was that there wasn't coal available for them to use instead. It was aged in used barrels for economic reasons, rather than taste.
It's the same for beer, different styles of beer largely came about due to differences in water chemistry.
It seems weird to try and artificially define American Whiskey by trying to force a terroir in the product using selective breeding. That's backwards from how the process has historically happened, it's artificial.
The whole artisan American Whiskey market is bullshit anyway. Most "craft distilleries" just buy bulk white spirit or pre-aged spirit from a wholesaler [1], then finish it in their own barrels. The usually use smaller barrels too, to try an impart as much flavour in as short a time, leaving you with an unbalanced whiskey that just tastes like an oak barrel. Sometimes they even use tricks like artificially heating and cooling the ageing warehouse or using ultrasound to try and speed up the process. But you can't rush time.
In fairness, it's not just American Whiskey that has this problem. It's luxury spirits as a market. Luxury alcohol is a marketing industry that sells alcohol. Vodka is especially egregious, where the bottle the spirit comes in is often more expensive than the contents. Only 10 of around 130 Scotch Whisky distilleries are independent, the rest owned by international conglomerates like Pernod Ricard.
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/your-craft-whiskey-is-probably...