Ultrasonic aging of distilled spirits

edited March 2017 in General

The benefits of ultrasonic aging have been known in the home distilling and micro distillery community for a while, but I stumbled upon a link with an academic paper. Here it is in case anyone else is interested.

Study of a laboratory-scaled new method for the accelerated continuous ageing of wine spirits by applying ultrasound energy

Comments

  • Been discussed on here before in a fair amount of detail...

    Without being mean, that search box over there works ----->

  • I think the link was just that - a link for further reading. I don't recall having read it yet

  • @cothermandistilling. The reason why I posted it is that it had a number of detailed process parameters and its an academic paper. I have read many posts on ultrasonic aging on various forums and this document was more detailed than a lot of them, which say yes I blast it for 8 minutes and it works. I do know how to use the search function on this webpage and have used it a lot, on many of your posts actually. Most if which are better than this one. I was just trying to be helpful.

  • The big difference with this one is the fact that they are exposing both the wood and the distillate to US.

    There have been a few guys who have tried this - with mixed results. Biggest issue on the hobby side is that this is going to create a lot of wood particulate in the distillate that is going to need to be filtered out. Trying to find one example of this that resulted in significant dissociation of the toasted/charred wood - making a dirty mess of the distillate.

  • Thanks Grim. In a few months i will try for myself and post my results.

  • here is a 9 page thread....

  • Final line of the abstract says they compared the trial spirits against unaged spirits. Did they test against aged spirits in the full paper?

  • Tell you my experience exposing dominos in whiskey to US= Fucking mess.

    Maybe I had a bad experience but I won't be trying it again. On the OTHER hand, I put every drop of my rum through a 30 minute cycle BEFORE it goes in the barrel and I am in the believer camp.

  • edited May 2017

    Ponder this.

    What if the reactions caused by ultrasound are partially temporary, and reverse themselves over time?

  • Better drink the shit fast before it can go back........

  • edited May 2017

    New to the forum, sorry if I don't post this correctly. I don't know how the USPTO keeps giving out patents for accelerated aging when this has been in existence for many years. The link below is to a paper written in 1962 titled

    AGING OF WINES AND OTHER SPIRITOUS PRODUCTS, ACCELERATION BY PHYSICAL TREATMENTS (PDF)

    (yes, I tried using the search box). This sure looks like prior art to me. Any bar stool lawyers want to chime in on why folks are being granted patents? There are a lot of other ideas on accelerated aging in the paper if you choose to read it.

  • @tommy. Thanks for the link mate.

  • Pretty sure those guys are reading these threads.

    Just saying..

  • (rant) anyone else tired of everyone and their brother telling you about this aging thing like you don't know, but if you read what they are telling you about you can make Pappy? I need a damn poster for people saying "yes,I know what it is, maybe I will play with it some day, and if you think it can make pappy with it, then YOU should open a distillery for a few hundred grand and make millions... (rant over now)

  • not sure if everyone on this forum here is also a subscriber on ADI...

  • I am talking about people off the street telling you like they found the holy grail...

  • Mike

    I have a factory here in Fiji that does custom manufacturing. I get at least two people a week dropping by with a "great idea" that I should be doing. Most of them leave without buying anything once they hear what it costs to run a factory and what I have to charge for one-offs or small orders.

    Last week it was picture frames and how there was no one making them in town (there are at least 5 woodworking shops in town) and how she wanted to order 10 frames and have me reconstruct a family heirloom. She magically had medical issues three days later and cancelled the order.

    So yeah, I get the whole "what a great idea" thing frequently. Makes my head hurt.

    Any idea how to convert those folks into sales?

  • @fijispirits. Tell them they need to think about over bottle of your booze. At least youll get some money out of them.

  • Kind of funny to me, I visit the ADI forum daily and that is all positive and this has a lot of negative. I hadn't seen the article Unsensibel, so thanks for the post. My family is going to open a commercial distillery and I liked the article because it expresses what we are going to try to do which is to be unique. I'm not trying to be Pappy or anyone else, I'm trying to be me. What I can guarantee is if it doesn't go down smooth, we won't try to sell it. We're going to try Odin's method first and then put it into barrels or totes with chips for as long as it takes. For all the naysayers out there, my only questions is, have you tried it? Well then, post your results and tell us how we are all wrong.

  • edited July 2017

    I'm very much beginning to suspect that some of the reactions generated by ultrasonic treatment are temporary, and reverse over time. Very much like esterification reactions, which are equilibrium transactions and can reverse themselves if the environment changes.

    Bottles that I treated for my double blind study, which showed a clear difference shortly after treatment - this was not better or worse - but a difference. Given three samples, but only two products, a blind taster could identify the two similar samples with a high level of statistical confidence. A year later, this is no longer the case.

    To remind everyone, the ultrasonic treated product was only very slightly preferred over the non-treated product. However, they were very clearly different. Non bourbon drinkers preferred the treated product, self-reported bourbon drinkers preferred the untreated product. This was ever, ever so slight.

    It's quite possible that after 1 year, the untreated product (stored in glass, dark, cool) - has improved somewhat as well - caught up if you will. But, this is impossible for me to test, as I can not guarantee that I'll produce the same identical distillate a second time.

    I suppose I can take two treated bottles, treat one, and run the trial again. If people can identify the pairs...

  • Great info grim, thanks for sharing.

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