But Collins found that each spirit contained unique compounds, or unique concentrations of compounds, that he could use to distinguish a scotch from a bourbon, or a Tennessee whiskey from a bourbon, simply by looking at the liquor’s chemistry. Of the thousands of chemical compounds Collins found, there was a fair amount of overlap between the different spirits. We see some components that appear to be grain related, and there are also likely to be components that are derived from the yeast that are used do the fermentation.” “There are components that are barrel derived, as we would expect, but there are also things that are related to the grains that are used to make the distillates in the first place-so the corn and wheat and rye and things that are fermented to form the distillate. “It’s very complex,” Collins says of the chemistry. What they found was a spectacular testament to the spirit’s complex chemistry–over 4,000 different non-volatile compounds across the different samples, results which he presented today at the 246th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. “It sort of seemed a natural extension to look from the chemistry of wine to the chemistry of whiskeys, because the chemistry of oak barrels play a huge role in what you see in whiskeys of all sorts.”Ĭollins and researchers at Davis set out to see if they could determine the chemical differences among 60 different whiskeys: 38 straight bourbon whiskeys, 10 rye whiskeys, five Tennessee whiskeys and seven other American whiskeys, varying in age from two-to-15 years old. “I worked on my Ph.D., and it was a project looking at aroma and flavor chemistry in wine in oak barrels,” Collins explains, crediting the barrels with sparking his initial interest in the chemistry of spirits. It’s an idea that the aptly-named Tom Collins, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, is actively pursuing. When it comes to the magic of whiskey, their complex profiles might be explained by the chemical fingerprints that separate them from one another - and change the way that they taste. Brown liquors - from scotch to bourbon and all the whiskeys in between - are complex spirits that lend themselves to purposeful tasting, creating connoisseurs willing to shell out top dollar for the most peaty scotch or their favorite spicy bourbon. Whiskey drinkers know that the moment they swirl a bit of the smoky spirit in their mouth, they’re bound to find a world of flavors: some oak, some smoke, a little vanilla, maybe a slight bite from tannin.
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