Nuclear Testing Helps Identify Fake Vintage Whiskey 366
Hugh Pickens writes "Industry experts claim the market for vintage whiskey has been flooded with fakes that purport to be several hundred years old but instead contain worthless spirit made just a few years ago. Now researchers at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit have developed a method that can pinpoint the date a whiskey was made by detecting traces of radioactive particles created by nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. '"It is easy to tell if whiskey is fake as if it has been produced since the middle of the twentieth century, it has a very distinctive signature," says Dr. Tom Higham, deputy director of the facility. Nuclear bomb testing in the 1950s saw levels of carbon-14 in the atmosphere rise around the world so the amount of isotope absorbed by living organisms since this time has been artificially elevated. Whiskey extracted from antique bottles is sent to the laboratory where scientists burn the liquid and bombard the resulting gas with electrically charged particles so they can measure the carbon-14 in the sample. In one recent case, a bottle of 1856 Macallan Rare Reserve was withdrawn from auction at Christies, where it was expected to sell for up to £20,000, after the scientists found it had actually been produced in 1950. "So far there have probably been more fakes among the samples we've tested than real examples of old whiskey," says Higham.'"
I was bitten by a radioactive whiskey (Score:5, Funny)
And I turned into Whiskeyman. My powers include slurred speech, a drunken lurch, and blackouts.
Re:I was bitten by a radioactive whiskey (Score:5, Funny)
And I turned into Whiskeyman. My powers include slurred speech, a drunken lurch, and blackouts.
You're forgetting your most powerful ability: To turn even the ugliest woman into a supermodel!
Re:I was bitten by a radioactive whiskey (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But it also includes a fail-over mechanism that disables the relevant mechanical parts and evacuates the contents of your abdomen on said female. Of the course the risk that still remains is that you may have had too much too quickly and overshot that threshold and taken home somebody who is so fugly and desperate that neither of those two problems are a game changer for her.
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... played by noone other than rainier wolfcastle!
rainier: "ap ze fisky!"
coach: "UP THE WHISKEY!"
rainier: "up ze wizzki!"
coach: "... better."
Re:I was bitten by a radioactive whiskey (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I was bitten by a radioactive whiskey (Score:4, Funny)
Alcoholic Anonymous
Once a hard-drinking fast-living example of the high life, he had an encounter with a toxic substance... straight water.
Hiding his true identity, he goes from place to place, enlisting the unwary into his army, tempting them into temperance. When he begins to take the first of twelve steps towards his target, the end is near.
When asked why he struck terror into the hearts of oenophiles, whiskey aficionados, and beer drinkers, he said:
"Alcohol goes against my grain."
Taste (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Taste (Score:5, Funny)
According to Pizza Hut, no.
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So... a new status would be started, called the 99% full original verified bottle of vintage whiskey. In fact, unopened full bottles will become the anti-status symbol.
Re:Taste (Score:5, Interesting)
You are correct. This is a useless te.
Opening the bottle destroys the value.
Sort of like Schrodinger's Cat, the mere act of testing destroys the test subject.
An open bottle can never be presumed to be real, and a still sealed one is equally suspect.
Call me back when they can do this right thru th bottle.
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While the age of the cork doesn't guarantee the age of the whiskey, it might be an indication. Hard to say though.
But the amount withdrawn is going to be in the uL range which isn't even a significant portion of a single drop.
Re:Taste (Score:5, Insightful)
What? They can't tell the difference by tasting it?
I suppose they can, but telling the difference is not the same as proving it. You need some kind of proof to accuse somebody of making fakes, not just its subjective taste.
Re:Taste (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Taste (Score:5, Interesting)
Respectfully, B.S.
There is a sharp curve of diminishing returns once you cross the $40 mark in whisk(e)y. However, it doesn't take long to learn
the difference between an Islay and a Highland, or to understand the difference between a younger or older scotch, or to understand that some expressions
of whisky do better with longer casking and some are better when bottled at a younger age.
Plenty is attributable to marketing - I'll take a $50 Lagavulin 16 over a $200 blended Blue Label any day of the week, twice on Sundays, and infinitely more on
a mythical desert island. Those who are looking to impress coworkers, bosses, and clients may tell a different story, but it does not take long to develop a basic palate
when it comes to whisky, nor does it require a ton of cash. Distinguishing between a chipped and truly aged scotch is trickier, but still doable.
Frankly, in the end, it is about taste: if you can make a four year old taste like a 20 year old whiskey cheaply through chipping and good
distilled water (whisky weakens throughout the barreling process as the "angels' share" evaporates), I'll be happy to drink it. To wit, I avoid blends in
general, but a $15 fifth of blended White Horse is a hell of a deal and sits near a Macallan, Oban, Ardbeg, Balvenie 21, and a Lagavulin and a Laphroaig 15 (not to
mention some ryes and borboun) on my shelf.
And yes, I'm, might be fooled between the Lagavulin and Laphroig, but I doubt it when it comes to the others.
I think one has to remember that not everyone who drinks or enjoys alcohol partakes in the American binge drinking culture - including many Americans. /.ers in the sense of experimentation and applied science.
In fact, I have found some American tastes to be far more diverse than other cultures (to which I have been exposed) in fostering mixing, homebrewing,
and modern bootlegging traditions - all of which should be somewhat enticing to
Re:Taste (Score:5, Interesting)
I can, however, explain chipping, making a reply to my own post a little more legitimate. One way to make a younger whiskey (I'm not going to worry about the 'e' from here on) taste or appear older is to put roasted wood chips in the cask. Additionally, agitation may be used. Flavor and color is imparted by the cask over time and surface area (a terrible cheat is to introduce caramel into a casking, a practice which can disqualify the product from being marketed as scotch or whiskey in some areas). These tricks are more common in younger American distilleries, however lots of bad distilleries pull this nonsense.
Now, younger whiskey will always taste "sharper" and less finished than it's older counterpart. It is possible to control this by mixing a younger whiskey with distilled water (for a single or vatted malt) or with older or calmer whiskies (for vatted or blended whiskies). Even so, there is a difference in taste between a whiskey that has matured and one whose alcohol content has been mitigated. Consumers can actually try this on their own, without a trip to a distillery: purchase a younger cask strength whisky (usually >55% ABV) and an older finished expression from the same distillery. Add distilled water until the ABV is the same level. Taste.
Care Package (Score:4, Interesting)
As a gift for newgrouping a Usenet group (alt.archery.traditional, if I remember correctly), I was once sent a scotch whisky care package. In it were twelve baby food jars that were numbered but otherwise not labeled. Only after I had sampled each and given my opinion was I told what each one was. I do not know that you have twelve varieties at your disposal, but this was an enlightening experience for me and could possibly be for some of your friends as well.
Mal-2
Re:Taste (Score:5, Insightful)
If you spend 20,000 pounds on a bottle of whiskey, you're going to taste the difference, even if there isn't one. Belief can have as much an impact on perception as reality.
Penn & Teller did a great experiment in an episode of their show, Bullshit. In one episode, they serve hose water in fancy bottles with fantastic stump lines about how great and rare each different bottle of hose water is. Most of the diners tasted a difference between the various bottles of hose water.
In another, they had a prop design guy use (extremely) cheap ingredients to create tantalizing foods. The waiter would convince diners that stale bread was an exotic french import, receiving rave reviews in the process.
Advertising is all about perception, and a lot of our consumer economy is based on it. My girlfriend works for a high end cosmetics chain... You wouldn't believe what a rip off that stuff can be.
It makes me wish I was in the cosmetics business.
Re:Taste (Score:5, Interesting)
Advertising is all about perception, and a lot of our consumer economy is based on it. My girlfriend works for a high end cosmetics chain... You wouldn't believe what a rip off that stuff can be.
It makes me wish I was in the cosmetics business.
Would you be able to live with yourself though? Constantly lying to people and ripping them off, it would really wear on a person with a conscience.
Re:Taste (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you spend 20,000 pounds on a bottle of whiskey, you're going to taste the difference, even if there isn't one.
Does it taste like hubris?
It tastes like what you imagine it to taste (Score:5, Interesting)
It tastes like whatever you convince yourself that it should taste like.
Probably a better example would be a better documented breed of self-deluded puppies: the kind of audiophiles who'd buy an audiophile-grade ethernet (i.e., digital!) cable for $500 and swear that they hear whatever difference you tell them they should hear, when they play MP3's (again: digital!) over that network. As if a 1 weren't just as much a 1 or a 0 as much a 0 over it. But no, if you tell them they should hear a fuller and richer bass, they'll actually hear it.
There are wooden volume knobs sold out there as doing this or that magic for the music, and (the right kind of) people will actually hear that magic. Even though that volume knob isn't even part of the signal chain at all. It's just a wooden disc on the outside. The potentiometer (variable resistor) that actually controls the volume is something else on the same shaft. But they'll swear they hear the difference.
Someone on another forum at one time actually heard the difference between MP3's played off different brands of hard drives. Once it got into his head that a magnetic disc is really coated in a magnetic layer like a cassette, and that there was this different between sound reproduction between different cassette coatings (e.g., iron versus chrome), he actually started hearing that one hard drive gives better bass and another gives better trebble. And he can hear that difference.
So basically my bet is that it works just the same with anything. Sound, image, taste (since we're at whiskey), or whatever you wish. If the Grimm Brothers' "The Emperor's New Clothes" had happened IRL, people would have actually seen whatever clothes they got it into their head that really smart and superior people see. And no amount of children screaming "the emperor is naked" would change that. And even if you got the emperor and his guards out of the equation, if a hundred years later the country were a republic and the non-existent clothes were in an (empty) glass box at a museum, some people would still go and congratulate each other for being so superior as to see the fabulous clothes in the box.
Re:Taste (Score:4, Insightful)
They also had at least one customer call them on how horrible the food was. And let's forget that they shot a lot of footage and only showed you the parts they wanted to (like the various asking people on the street obvious trivia questions shows). Definately a biased sample. But mostly they could have been praying on the people's nature not to cause a fuss, and to agree with authority. After all, if I tell you that the bitterness in Merlot is a Good Thing, you might not like it, but want to appear sophisticated to me (the waiter), so you claim to. In other words, people lie, especially when they worry their fears aren't warrented.
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Do you really think there are $90,000 worth of parts and labor in an S-Class Mercedes...
For someone that likes to call others stupid, you don't know anything about cars, do you? You really think that a Ford Festiva and a Mercedes have the same performance and quality of parts? This isn't a case of "I THINK my car has better parts/performance". You can actually buy mechanical parts that have higher tolerances, better engineering and longer lasting materials. And you can prove it with testing methods.
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Your point still doesn't answer the question. Just because your Ford Festiva at $10k has $5k worth of parts and the rest is labor and profit doesn't mean that a $90k Mercedes only has $5k, It may have $25k in parts and be 5 times the quality, or even double those. The labor and profits are still much higher.
Re:Anything "high end" is generally a rip off (Score:5, Interesting)
It is better for society if there isn't $90,000 worth of parts and labor in an S-Class Mercedes. The whole point of luxury items is to take a rich person's money and put it back into circulation, in the process reducing the concentration of power that his bankroll represents. The only question is, how much wealth will be consumed in the process?
Selling him a $80,000 Rolex burns about $4,000 in actual wealth to liberate the $80,000. That's efficient.
Him hiring a butler for $80,000 a year burns about $40,000 in actual wealth -- this is the wealth the butler could've created elsewhere, rather than scurrying around making the rich guy feel special. That's not efficient.
So, never criticize super-expensive trinkets; they are far far better for society's total net wealth than servants.
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I'm fairly sure that they're taking a very very small sample of the whiskey if 750ml sells for $20,000.
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What? They can't tell the difference by tasting it?
Not without having an identical sample to compare it to... In the case mentioned here, I doubt that is handy. And while they might be able to easily identify it if the contents was Johnnie Walker Red Label, distinguishing 1950 and 1850 from the same distillery would probably be a lot harder.
Re:Taste (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Taste (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, you might, under the right circumstances [imdb.com].
Shocking. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shocking. (Score:5, Funny)
I never would have expected fakes to outnumber genuine articles in a status driven market with poor verification.
I never thought it possible but this could be a niche market to rival audiophile products in regards to fraud.
Business Opportunity...? (Score:5, Insightful)
But really, who needs anything better than a 16 y.o. Lagavulin, anyway? F'ing Snobs.
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So where's this "business opportunity" you speak of? Well here's mine: decreasing the radioactive content of "fake" whiskey to match that of the "genuinely" old stuff!
Re:Business Opportunity...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well here's mine: decreasing the radioactive content of "fake" whiskey to match that of the "genuinely" old stuff!
Well, if you do manage to invent the nuclear damper [wikia.com] and accelerate the 1/2 life decay of carbon-14, let me know. I can think of a lot of people who'd be interested in forcing accelerated decay of stuff like plutonium.
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But for anyone thinking it could somehow be filtered, that's simply not possible. All the alcohol and the stuff that gives it flavor are organic molecules with carbon making the backbone. There isn't a way to go in and find which are the carbon-14 atoms and selectively replacing them with carbon-12.
The technique used is guaranteed to be mass spectroscopy which destroys the sample because it ha
Carbon-14 and fossil fuels (Score:5, Interesting)
Very simple: grow your grain with the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels. Oil or coal that are millions of years old have very little C-14.
Re:Carbon-14 and fossil fuels (Score:5, Funny)
> But if you harvest the CO2 from fossil fuels, and do it right, you could blow these tester's minds when they find you have 300 million year old whiskey!
Surely this problem can easily be solved by mixing the fossil-fuel CO2 with post 1950s CO2 until you have the desired Carbon-14 concentration.
I like where this is going. Someone should create a "2000 year old" whiskey and claim it was made by Jesus himself, then market it as 'Holy Spirit'.
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Such a waste (Score:2, Informative)
If a bottle of whiskey is supposedly worth $20,000, assuming its a 26oz bottle and they take even 1oz out for burning that drops the value almost a grand.
Seems like an expensive waste to me.
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But, if it turns out to have been created last tuesday, then you're only burning a few cents worth.
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This can likely be done on the order of uL.
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If it turns out to be fake it could have been a $20,000 waste.
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Not much more these days :(
20 000 British pounds = 29 966 U.S. dollars
Used to be nearer 40k USD. Then someone pulled the plug on the world's money supply...
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Eh, whatever, I didn't read the article.
Re:Such a waste (Score:4, Interesting)
A mass spectrometer can operate on a few milligrams of carbon. That means you need perhaps as much as 50 microliters of whiskey, or about 0.0017 oz.
Burning $0.50 worth of whiskey makes sense to me when testing a $20,000 bottle that has a greater than 50% chance of being a fake.
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Then you certainly already know that, in general, it certainly is Scotch and Canadian "whisky" but American and Irish whiskeys are spelled with that pesky extra "e". I should know, I've been to Ireland (once) *and* America and I'm still too drunk to even find a map.
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I suspect that onece the bottle is opened it's worth considerably less. But then I actually know what the fuck I'm talking about, in so far as I can spell "whisky", I've ben to Scotland (twice) and I can point ot it on a map.
Can't spell 'been', or 'or', or 'once', though, apparently.
I'd guess they extract the material they need by inserting a syringe through the cork. When they pull it, it should seal up pretty much the same as it was before they collected the sample. Probably not pulling the cork and ruining the bottle.
Just a guess. I have not been to Scotland, and I do not know how to spell whiskey.
Re:Such a waste (Score:5, Funny)
Strawberry Boones farm, Corona extra lime, and Bacardi Limon w/Cranberry?
It's always so sad to see 12 year old girls become alcoholics.
carbon 14 useless after 1945 (Score:2)
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We have pretty good records going back a long way. My favourite is the core samples taken from the north & south poles etc. They contain atmospheric samples trapped in the ice going back a long way. They can be used to prove C14 CO2 and other stuff.
Re:carbon 14 useless after 1945 (Score:5, Informative)
We can compare C-14 dating to other known dates. For example, C-14 dating agrees with dating from dendrochronology(the fancy word for counting tree rings). C-14 dating also agrees with other forms of radioactive dating and known historical data. We can be very sure there hasn't been any spike in the last 9000 years or so. Sudden spikes would also show and make a lot of archaeology just not look like it made any sense. And if there were any form of spike we'd likely see an impact in the ratios of other isotopes. If there had been substantial nuclear detonations for example, we'd be able to tell.
A spike won't add a uniform extension or contraction to dates. For most forms of spiking, you'll get a lot of stuff looking like it is from a very short time period or you'll get a very large period where you don't see almost anything (depending on whether you have a process adding too much C-14 or reducing C-14 levels). We can be pretty sure that C-14 dating is accurate.
Re:carbon 14 useless after 1945 (Score:4, Informative)
How old is old enough? (Score:2)
Hopefully the test doesn't require burning too much of the purchase ;)
I'm not that experienced when it comes to whiskey, but is there a huge difference (a £20,000 difference) between a 50 year old bottle and a 150 year old bottle in terms of the actual quality of the whiskey or does the price simply reflect the rarity and status? Is there ever a point where the whiskey doesn't get better after more time?
I think I'll stick with J&B.
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Ugh. Blended scotch.
Presumably they weren't very good friends. ;-)
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Also note that many single-malt distilleries are now selling their stock to other labels, and are intentionally "blendin
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Although I never win the whiskey age bragging contests, the penis length contests are a different matt
Re:How old is old enough? (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps you need to hang out at a different bar...
Re:How old is old enough? (Score:5, Informative)
Whiskey (or any liquor that is aged for flavor) only ages "in the barrel". Once it is bottled, it does not age anymore, because glass is inert. So if your grandfather bought a bottle of 12 year old Chivas in 1960 and left it gathering dust in his liquor cabinet for the next 49 years, you do not have 61-year old scotch, you have 12 year old scotch that's been in the bottle for 49 years. The value in these old bottles is not necessarily in their age per se, it's in their rarity - many of these old distilleries have long since ceased production and gone out of business, their recipes are lost, and the old bottles represent a legacy of sorts for the regional producers who thrived before giant corporations took over the production of spirits. It's kind of like buying NOS (new old stock) stickers for your MAME cabinet or arcade build. Only in this case, the "relics", such as they are, are a link to the past that simply can't be recreated once they're gone. The process that's descibed in the article ensure that the unscrupulous among us don't try to take advantage of people's desire to connect with that which came before.
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Beers and wines have yeasts in them that react with sugars remaining from the liquid's previous life as wort / fruit juice. "Aging" in these products refer to flavor changes resulting from the actions of these yeasts. Hard liquor has been distilled, possibly filtered, and the alcohol content is high enough to kill the hardiest yeast. Whiskey is "aged" by storing in charred casks and allowing tannins from the wood to impart flavors to the liquor - the longer the whiskey is in the wood, the more tannins. Put
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Yes, there is absolutely a period where whisky doesn't get better after more time - when you take it out of the barrel and bottle it!
An "1856" Macallan could just ba a "10 year old" that has sat in a bottle for 150 years. And likely wouldn't taste much different (though I do have to say, it would be interesting to see how the overall taste due to production differences may have changed in that time...)
What the hell.. (Score:3, Funny)
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Shroedinger stole it.
Send the "fakes" my way for proper disposal. (Score:4, Funny)
Subject says it all, really. After all, alcohol abuse is bad.
Have they proved that the test is accurate? (Score:2)
I seem to recall a bunch of other tests (fbi bullet matching, dna identification) which were assumed to work for decades. So how do you attempt to disprove this one? Test hundreds of bottles of "known" 150 year old whiskeys?
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Carbon-14 testing is calibrated against other, trusted external indicators. One example is counting tree rings in trees in the vicinity of the sample.
In this case it is actually simpler. Since the test is only verifying that the carbon-14 level is does not exhibit a spike caused by nuclear testing, it doesn't need full calibration. If the carbon-14 level is extraordinarily high, then it's post-1945, if not, then it's pre-1945. I don't think they are currently verifying exact ages.
On a side note, while b
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If the carbon-14 level is extraordinarily high, then it's post-1945, if not, then it's pre-1945.
Aren't there some areas on Earth with sufficiently higher "naturally occuring" radioactivity than normal? Could that skew the results? Or how about places that were more or less shielded from the nuclear testing fallout?
Yes, they do exhibit false matches, and corroborating evidence should be required for a conviction, but they are extremely useful for ruling out suspects that might otherwise be prosecuted.
The
Born on date? (Score:2)
I gotta make sure my Budweiser is fresh!
Just kidding, all Budweiser is crap that I would never let past my lips.
Worthless? (Score:3, Insightful)
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No spirit is worthless if it contains alcohol of the appropriate kind.
Now add a bit radioactivity, and you have an after taste like non-other.
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Ridiculous waste (Score:2)
If you're going to shovel over a truck full of money for a single bottle of hooch, maybe it's time to consider what kind of ego problems you have and whether the money is better spent on therapy.
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Do people that make ~$40k have issues for buying a $40 bottle of whisky?
They dont have issues, they have too much money.
Whiskey and its age (Score:5, Informative)
1. The older a whiskey is the more expensive it gets due to rarity, not quality. Many people have a bias toward older whiskeys (whiskies) because they think they are better. Like wine, some whiskeys age well, others don't.
2. Whiskey must be stored in oak barrels to age. Once it is out of the barrel, and in a bottle or steel vat, it no longer ages. So a 10 year old whiskey sitting in a bottle for 50 years is still a 10 year old whiskey.
3. Whiskeys in barrels lose about 2% a year due to evaporation, known as the angel's share. That 2% is mostly water in hotter climates, but in cooler ones, like Scotland, what is lost is mostly alcohol. Thus a spirit which is put into a barrel at 60% alcohol by volume (ABV) will be reduced to 50% ABV then 40% ABV as time goes one. This is important because once the produce drops below 40% ABV, it can no longer legally be named whiskey. Thus whiskeys are usually never older than 40 years of age to due the angle's share.
4. Whiskey is how it's spelled in the USA (where I am writing this.) In Britain and Canada it is spelled whisky. Since the article discusses whisky from The Macallan distillery (yes the "T" is capitalized), the article's title and summary misspelled "whisky."
Re:Whiskey and its age (Score:5, Funny)
2. Whiskey must be stored in oak barrels to age. Once it is out of the barrel, and in a bottle or steel vat, it no longer ages. So a 10 year old whiskey sitting in a bottle for 50 years is still a 10 year old whiskey.
Are there any other laws of physics that whiskey violates? No wonder there are so many scottish physicists.
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Aging can mean two things. 1) The passage of time. So a whiskey stored in any container gets physically older.
2) But aging a whiskey is a specific process. Whiskey is created by the interaction of a spirit with the wood that it is in contact with. In effect you distill a "solvent" and that solvent dissolves chemicals in the wood. Thus when you remove the whiskey from a barrel you are in effect stopping the "aging process."
When I said "[the whiskey] no longer ages." I mean this specific process (#2)
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Whiskey = American or Irish
Whisky = Canadian or Scotch
Bourbon = Kentucky (nonconformists)
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Tennessee Whiskey = Bourbon for the nonconforming nonconformist.
But just to confuse matters:
Jack Daniels spelled it whiskey
George Dickel spelled it whisky
I prefer the George Dickel No. 12 or the Barrel Select myself.
Another clue (Score:3, Insightful)
creationists (Score:5, Funny)
Creationists, however, deny the accuracy of carbon dating. Therefore, all the fake whiskey will be sold to them at full price.
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It's like detecting fake paintings because the paint uses modern pigments instead of what the contemporary artists used.
So, try again.
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This is not technically "carbon dating", it's detecting the presence of a newer isotope that wasn't present in any quantities prior to a certain date.
Nice try, but they're checking for Carbon-14, discovered five years before the first nuclear bomb was detonated and used for "carbon dating" materials up to about 60,000 years old. 14C is, in fact, the reason it's called "carbon dating".
It's whisky the're testing, not whiskey (Score:2, Informative)
The brown spirit made in other countries (including Ireland, Japan, Canada and the country to the South of Canada) is called "whiskey". This is quite different.
Only whisky attracts idiots to put silly values on bottles of the stuff they are never going to drink.
The only proper thing to do to a bottle of whisky is drink it (not all at once ;-). The same applies to a bottle of whiskey, and after a few, you will no longer mind you don
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Because no-one ever heard of people doing that with antique wines [google.com], right? It's not like Christie's or Sotheby's thinks that selling wine at silly values is much of a market [christies.com] ...
Not just whiskey (Score:5, Informative)
There's No Such Thing As "Worthless" Whiskey (Score:2, Funny)
You insensitive clod!
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
In other news, representatives of whiskey maker, Jim Bean Corp. were arrested Monday trying to buy radioactive materials from radical elements in Darfur. Experts disagree whether this was a plot to produce counterfeit whiskey or to produce a nuclear bomb as part of some plan for world domination. Dr. Evil was unavailable for comment by press time.
Re:The Same Technique Was Used: +1, Informative (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the 'real' applications for this technique are much more interesting, possibly even to whisky drinkers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02cell.html [nytimes.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/science/03heart.html [nytimes.com]
The nuclear powers helpfully performed a gigantic pulse labelling experiment on the DNA of the entire biosphere back in the 50s, which allows the cell 'birthdays' in various tissues of people born in that era to be determined. The measurements can be calibrated by the C-14 content in tree rings, so you can work out if the cells are (e.g.) as old as the person (certain brain cells) or renewed more recently (like heart muscle).