A new kind of “gold standard” could soon permeate the whiskey industry.

Whiskey distillers typically age spirits in charred, wooden casks for years, allowing the liquor to gradually absorb flavourful chemicals released from the wood (SN: 10/31/19). Now, researchers have demonstrated that swirling gold ions into a whiskey can reveal how much flavour the liquor has taken in — a quality called agedness. The method could provide master blenders with a quick and inexpensive test for whiskey agedness, researchers report on October 6 in ACS Applied Nano Materials.

“A tiny amount of gold gives you this really bright, strong, red or blue or purple colour,” says William Peveler, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. The stronger the colour, and the quicker that colour arises, the more aged the whiskey, he says.

Master blenders sometimes conduct tasting sessions to gauge agedness, but this process can be labour intensive. Alternatively, laboratory assays can measure agedness by checking whiskeys for flavourful chemicals called congeners, absorbed from wood casks, but such analyses can be expensive.

source sciencenews.com