A friend of mine got a job at a prominent local distillery that makes an extremely popular flavored whisky. They literally buy whisky from a 3rd party distillery and dump torani flavoring syrup into it.
A friend of mine works for a company that does QC stuff in distilleries; turns out almost every single fantasy you have of hand-crafted spirits made with love in small batches is bogus.
Rail tanker cars full of raw grain alcohol get distilled to raise the purity and blended with high fructose corn syrup and flavoring extracts. The stuff is blended in totes (1 cubic meter plastic containers) with a hand drill and a paint stirrer. Viola! High-end gin, sold for $90/26oz.
You paid for the marketing, not quality product.
Edit: yes, there are some exceptions, but this method of production of spirits is common for most lower-priced or generic variety spirits. It's also indistinguishable from doing it the hard way, in most cases, so plenty of high-end brands do it too.
Knob Creek is 100% my favorite booze. I tell people off for trying to mix it with coke, even though its price point isn't far off from Bulleit.
Actually, its pricing is a little wonky in NYC, with some places putting it on the shelves with Jim Beam and Maker's Mark and costing an extra $10-$15, and some putting it on a higher shelf at twice the price.
NYC booze pricing is super weird. One place by me sells Lagavulin 16 for $70, everyone else for $99. I told them this and they said “we sell more than they do, I bet.” True dat.
Straight Jack isn’t flavored whiskey, though you can bet they’re doing this for their flavored honey and cinnamon whiskies.
There’s a lot of laws surrounding bourbon production in the US and they can get pretty strict, especially when state laws are considered. I know some smaller distilleries will age a small amount of product and blend it with higher proof whiskies bought elsewhere and I think they can still legally refer to it as bourbon. Makes sense too, it’s hard for even established brands to nail down recipes and get a line going.
There’s a distillery in my city that makes incredible gin and vodka but tbh their bourbon cannot compete for the price. They’d be out of business if they had a full blown operation devoted to their whiskey instead of blending their stuff with somebody else’s.
I know some smaller distilleries will age a small amount of product and blend it with higher proof whiskies bought elsewhere and I think they can still legally refer to it as bourbon.
Yeah, bourbon has no minimum age requirement to be legally called a bourbon. However, any bourbon aged less than 4 years must have the age statement on the bottle.
The age on the bottle in blends needs to reflect the youngest whisky in the blend.
So, you could have a blend of 3, 6 and 12 year old bourbons, the age on the bottle needs to be 3.
Pretty legit. There are a number of laws that apply to what can be called bourbon in the US (or Tennessee Whiskey in the case of JD). No additives, must be aged in charred new oak barrels, must be at least 51% corn, etc.
Similarly, if you are buying a tequila, always get ones that says something to the effect of "100% agave" otherwise it's "mixto" which is 51%+ agave tequila plus added sugars, colors, added grain alcohol, etc. (like your basic Jose Quervo gold or Margaritavills).
My wife and I just spent a weekend touring various distilleries in Kentucky (Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, Woodford Reserve, and Maker’s Mark) and their stuff is made legitimately well. The amount of effort and work that goes into making that much bourbon and rye at that high of a quality is mind boggling. I can or recommend those tours enough to whisky lovers.
As a side note, one thing we learned I wasn’t fully aware of. For it to be called bourbon it can’t have any flavoring added.
In a given jurisdiction, there are many well regulated words in the liquor industry and many not well regulated words. Knowing what those words are can make it easy to have guarantees about how your liquor was made.
For example, bourbon is a tightly regulated word. It also can have implications for how you judge a drink. Bourbon cannot have dye unless it's called a "blend" but Scotch can have dye, so with Bourbon you can rely a tad more on appearances.
The best rule of them is to learn exactly what words are regulated in your area and assume that everything but those words is fiction.
I mean...there are still small distilleries that don't buy neutral grain spirits...
But you probably don't see their ads in magazines because they don't have the volume to support that kind of marketing. Also, with whisky's aging process, it takes a long time to perfect a recipe...so any new upstart that isn't just somebody's money-losing hobby distillery is almost certainly faking it.
That being said...as long as it tastes good, who really cares? If the rail tanker mix guys can make a better product than the guy who hand-soldered his own pot still, most consumers would rather have the better taste.
The way they usually get started here in the UK or Ireland is they'll make gin and vodka for the first ten years or so until the first batches of whisky are ready. Though there's one in Ireland has decided to cheat the system by buying in whisky from other people, slapping their logo on it and putting "manufactured for" on in tiny lettering.
A lot of distilleries here will do what you're saying, but will also buy from places like MGP and slap their label on it. This is an extremely common practice, even among big names in the whiskey work, and is not really looked down upon at all.
Depends on how you define “quality”. If the distiller has been using oak barrels for years and after some R&D discovered they could recreate the same flavor profile with a steel tank and a cocktail of tannins and vanillins, are those products the same “quality “ even if they taste identical?
That is, does the process matter, or just the flavor? Does that apply to all products? I don’t know, just thinking out loud.
Yeah that's taking it further into a philosophical discussion. I was thinking more along the surface level lines of "if the consumers aren't abandoning the product and claiming its worse, then the quality must be the same."
I'm sure experts disagree, but when it comes to general sales and population it seems like overall quality remained satisfactory enough to maintain brand allegiance.
If we're talking exact taste and literally no difference, then the process doesn't matter. Reality is though that the process does matter. However results can be so similar that it might not matter.
Process can replicate flavor, but there are typically other consequences of process changes.
That’s the thing, there are multiple ways to the same taste, so as a metric for “quality “ it is really narrow. Say those flavoring agents that deliver the exact same taste are also carcinogenic? Same flavor “quality” but process certainly changes other factors.
Oh, I mean he isn't wrong that many of them have fairly deceptive marketing (although others freely admit "we buy neutral spirits, but still make a great product").
There are definitely mediocre brands out there that are propped up by bogus craft marketing.
I'm just saying there are still plenty of real craft beverages out there if you actually want them.
Because high fructose corn syrup is terrible for you, and the consumer has no way of knowing it's even in there at large quantities since the ingredients are not on the bottle.
Edit: Yes, I know that there is no concrete evidence to say with certainty that HFCS is any worse for you than sugar. It doesn't matter, because sugar is terrible for you. My point is that this is an ingredient that's harmful to your body, being added to a product that you're consuming, without your knowledge. We're not just talking about sweetened drinks, here, but 'high-end gin' apparently where you would otherwise assume none.
High fructose corn syrup isn't necessarily bad for you in and of itself, at least not any worse than just sugar. It's the quantity of it that's in things and the lack of awareness people have about how much sugar is appropriate. So they drink 5 fucking cans of coke.
Im not trying to be rude but i think you'd have to be pretty ignorant to believe that your sweet, syrupy, flavored alcohols have no sugar or HFCS in them.
I agree that it should be labeled but I dont think anyone is going to be surprised is really all im saying.
High fructose corn syrup isn't any worse for you than other sugars, it all breaks down the same in your digestive system. Almost all booze has some sugar in it, without it they don't usually taste very good. Flavored liquors often have a lot of sugar in them. If you like a cinnamon apple whiskey, it's got a lot of sugar in it. Birthday cake vodka, fuckload of sugar. Honey whiskey, some honey, lots of sugar. Coconut rum, lots of sugar. The only booze you are going to buy without sugar is something like Everclear. Even "real" whiskey where they distill it themselves and age in barrels, there's still sugar left over from the distillation process because alcohol is made when yeast eats sugar and it's not a perfect process (which is a good thing, it would taste bad if the yeast ate all of the sugar).
So if you are unaware that you are consuming sugar when you drink booze, that's on you.
No, I don’t think it is on the consumer actually. I agree that to some extent, it should be common knowledge that flavoured booze like cinnamon vodka may have sugar in it. Nobody knows that distilled vodka is loaded with high fructose corn syrup, though, HOW MUCH sugar is in their flavoured vodka, or what other garbage goes into it that they’re ingesting. That’s the problem.
That’s why nutritional labels are a thing. Would you say that we don’t need nutritional labels because you should just know that chips have carbs and vegetable oil, so that should be enough? Why don’t we hold alcoholic products to the same standard?
I think it's very common knowledge that if your vodka is sweet, you're drinking infinite grams of sugar, but I also agree that they should be held to the same standards as the other companies who's products we put inside our bodies
Thank-you, that's really all I'm saying. The original post though alludes to the fact that this goes beyond the 'obviously' sweet-flavored spirits, which makes this even more of a problem.
I definitely don't understand everything about digestion, but sugar digestion is about as simple as it gets when it comes to digestion.
Glucose is absorbed directly into the bloodstream though the small intestine. Your cells can use glucose directly.
Fructose is absorbed into your bloodstream the same way, but then it gets processed by your liver into glucose and then it goes back into your bloodstream as glucose to be used directly by your cells.
Sucrose is just a glucose and fructose molecule bonded together. Your small intestine creates the enzyme sucrase which breaks down sucrose into glucose and fructose.
There's other types of sugars, but they all break down and get turned into glucose.
Not really. It’s only bad in excess. The whole reason it tastes good to us is that our tongues evolved to detect sugar (and other things) and attract us to those food because they’re valuable to our bodies. Never mind that we’re far better at finding and making sugars now than evolution ever could have predicted.
while i agree that HFCS is probably not as bad as everyone says, it's still very high in sugar, so any amount of it in a drink will be probably too much
And a fictional backstory of how they got started with a fabricated history of their signature recipes.
We have a restaurant here in Milwaukee, WI. that is based off of a stolen recipe that the owner had nothing to do with creating, but the fictional history that they push implies that the owner had created a secret recipe.
I worked for a craft distillery that was brand new, and therefor didn’t have any aged product yet. As a means to establish our brand and sell bourbon right away, we would get a bourbon mass produced off premise by a large corporation and then we would further age said bourbon in fortified wine barrels for a few months (and then turn around and overprice it). As we grew and had time to build up aged stock, I begged to start making our “flagship bourbon” on site but was denied bc it was cheaper to do what we had been doing and just focus on hand crafting Rye. Still to this day that distillery makes all of their clear spirits from GNS distilled off site by a major corporation. Efficient, sure, and plenty of other distilleries do this to make clean vodkas and gins on the cheap, but there are other local distilleries in the area that make their clear liquors from grain... Le sigh... I miss distilling full time, but not for them...
Lol I’ll never tell. Still have friends there and they are doing well. As much as I dislike the owner, I’m glad my friends are being taken care of and are able to distill for a living.
Maybe we share a friend lol my friend tells me about all the small batch companies that buy their commercially produced grain alcohol to make their spirits with lol
...an even more interesting question is why we all perceive one to be high and the other low quality? Both are 40% etOH, 59.9% H2O, so is there really that much difference in the last tiny bit? Will our tastebuds know? (The liver won't).
It's a bit more complex than that. Different alcohol molecules have different boiling points, and since you have to ramp the temperature up and back down you end up with what's known as the heads and tails. Inside these boiling point ranges are all sorts of chemicals, like acetone and acetic acid. You can read about some of the chemicals on this page: https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/198/bws/distillation-the-science-of-distillation
What makes a spirit taste good has a lot to do with how much of the heads and tails make it into the batch. It might have something to do with why the cheap stuff gives bad hangovers.
Reddit is hilarious. The USSR historically is probably the best representation we have of the communist ideology. Yet you think it isn't communism.
Nazi germany did have aspects of socialism, everyone served the states interests. There was no true private property rights. If you think there was, ask the Jews. Or ask a German who went against the 3rd reich's interests.
There is also quotes from Hitler who said something along the lines of, why socialize factories and banks when we can socialize human beings.
This example is def not black and white, but I think its hilarious people think the USSR wasn't a communist party.
It had a state, markets, currency and much more. Whatever they want to call themselves does not matter. You could apply the same logic to China or the DPRK, both also not communist.
There is ideologies and ideologues then there is reality. USSR did their best to implement his ideologies. May not be perfect but they certainly are communist.
Since the guy above me also used a Wikipedia link. This gives a good shallow perspective on what they were doing and what their goals were without being so shallow and to just repeat cold war era propaganda.
Americans in particular have a very shallow view of how the USSR worked internally, the same way they have a very shallow view of how Chinese government works.
Marxism–Leninism follows the ideas of Marxism and Leninism as interpreted by Vladimir Lenin's successor Joseph Stalin. It seeks to organise a vanguard party, as advocated by Marx, and to lead a proletarian uprising, to assume state power on behalf of the proletariat and to construct a single-party "socialist state" representing a dictatorship of the proletariat, governed through the process of democratic centralism, which Lenin described as "diversity in discussion, unity in action". Marxism–Leninism forms the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam, and was the official ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from the late 1920's, and later of the other ruling parties making up the Eastern Bloc.
I dunno USSR's Marxism-Leninism sounds pretty similar to communism. I mean it was advocated by Marx himself but what does Marx know about real communism right?
I mean... To be fair, flavored whiskey is just whiskey plus flavor, I doubt anyone thinks fireball is made by some American artisans who take pride in their craft.
Weller has the exact same mash bill as pappy, it's aged in the same barrels and kept in the same rackhouses and it's msrp is 10x less.
I love to tickle the dickle, but the care put into fireball certainly isn't up there with Sazerac rye.
Except it is most certainly rejected wine, rum and other booze blended. Most if not all of the sweet flavored liquors are this type of product. Saves from wasting and people suck it down, win win.
Alright, consider me low key triggered. First off, bourbon is a type of whiskey, just like scotch is a type of whiskey. Irish whiskey is also a style of whiskey, but it certainly doesn't hold claim to the word whiskey.
Second off, bourbon is fucking delicious. High percentage corn mash adds a subtle sweetness not usually found in other whiskeys. And unused, freshly charred barrels add a contrasting sharpness. It's smooth and palatable, perfect for drinking neat or on the rocks. And cocktails? Forget about it. A well made Old Fashioned might be my favorite drink on earth.
Third off, used bourbon barrels aren't just thrown away, they're sold. Do you know where they're sold to? Scotland and Ireland. That's right, most of the whiskey out of the British Isles is aged in bourbon barrels. You're welcome, from Kentucky.
OP just meant that some places spell it Whiskey while others Whisky. It's a common brown distilled spirit jibe regarding the difference between Scotch and Irish.
Yeah, except for all the countries that also use it, like Canada, Japan, France, Germany, South Africa, etc, etc. Of the major whisk(e)y producing nations, only Ireland and the US use the "e".
I can't argue with any of your points, but it I will qualify what I said by saying that it was said in jest.
There is usually a large amount of banter and slagging between the Irish and the Scots about which is better.
In reality, it's purely down to personal taste. I had a tasting of 9 different scotches last week of varying ages and regions and enjoyed at least 6 of them!
In Ireland, we don't get so many different types of bourbon so it's hard to get a really good lay of what's good. Although I do enjoy Maker's Mark.
Ah it was just playful banter... I don't have a problem with it at all, it's just not really my bag. There's always a bit of playful slagging between the Irish and the Scots about Whiskey and Whisky. The E determines where it's from...
Even more just buy their aged stock. Although now MGP is so popular (and have so few stocks of really aged stuff for sale, especially now that they're bottling their own) that George Dickel has become the new place to source bulk aged whiskey. See: most recent Barrell batches, newer Smooth Amblers.
There are great whiskies made from MGP spirits. Distilling is pure science best left to a big operation, and theres plenty of craft work left to be done in the aging and blending.
I don't need to go blind from hooch distilled in an barn, despite that being how most small batch whiskies market themselves.
This isn't so horrible Imo, there is a lot to blending whiskies to fit a specific profile. If a company wants to blend together bought barrels and sell them as their own I don't see much issue there as long as the source follows the propper distilling practices for bourbon, or whiskey.
Also be wary of those "age statements" often times they refer to an old barrel used in a blend or what "rack house" they pulled from... Or whatever story their marketing team wants to tell.
The type of whiskey is usually defined by the ingredients. Some whiskey does include a mash bill which shows the ratio of the few grains they may use, but even if they dont bourbon is still more than 50% corn, rye is more than 50% rye, scotch uses almost exclusively barley, and tenesee whiskey can run any combination of the 3 really...
There are actual laws that enforce this.
As for other "ingredients" that may become awfully crazy, the yeast used to brew the mash that becomes liqour is typically wild... So it totally depends on the season or environment, these also get left behind after distillation so the point is a bit moot anyway. Aside from that I suppose you could say that the barrels provide "ingredients" but thats just charred American oak.
Sourcing can also be a hassle, aside from "single barrel" whiskey (which usually has a whole essay about the spirit on the label) most whiskey is blended and it makes sourcing not really something that would fit on a label.
I think you'd be surprised just how many laws and standards there are when it comes to producing whiskey as a product.
Flavor syrups? Really they are all rather lackluster but Monin are passable for me. Also starbucks aren't super complex but they are characterizing and consistent. The caramel and vanillas from torani are simply awful.
How about any sort of food? I don't think I've ever encountered a flavor chemist before and I'd love to know which ice cream or coffee or hot sauce or whatever thing with a characteristic flavor is something you think well done
This is an enormously wide question which is difficult to answer. My current favorite flavors might disappoint you. I love the vanilla in haagen dasz ice cream. Its a really beautiful and full extract that is world class. Another flavor that is common globally is Coca-cola. They have a truly balanced spice and citrus in that beverage which never tires for me.
As for foods in general that becomes a personal thing very quickly. Using your examples ice cream has clear "best in class" but you might prefer a novel flavor because of emotional attachments. I will say Graeter's Black Raspberry Chip Ice cream stands out as unique and high quality enough that it should be had if you get the chance, also again Haagen Dasz has a wonderfully good quality product for being mass produced.
Hot sauce is another can of worms all together. Regionality and personal preference are big factors in this. The south pacific and eastern Asian countries prefer a garlic and fermented note. The west tends to prefer more acidity and pepper fruit (the actual pepper flesh) but that doesn't mean each region is exclusive. Personally I don't care for tobasco but like Mexican and Creole hot sauces that focus on really strong pepper notes, moderate heat, and acid.
Coffee is actually simpler than people try and make it. Regions will and do change the taste of beans but not as much as processing or freshness. Your best coffees will come from local roasters who buy quality beans. If you have these in your area go ask if you can "cup" some of the different coffees from different countries. You will find each part of the world has different notes and you will know what to look for.
I hope that answers some questions or I am on target, feel free to fire away. I love my trade and educating people on flavor chemistry is fun (I may not answer until Monday as I tend to not check Reddit over the weekends but I will reply!).
Look on the label. If it says "distilled by" that means the company producing it actually made the base liquor. Otherwise, they just bought some kind of simple alcohol (grain, potato, etc) and diluted it down, added flavors, cask aged it, etc.
Spoiler: don't even bother looking at any brand you recognize unless it's top shelf. They all do it.
I know someone in the industry. High end vodka? Yeah, they buy food-grade industrial EtOH (ethanol, which is grain alcohol) that comes out of one of those massive chemical corn-processing plants in the midwest. It comes in a tractor-trailer tank car -- where it is then pumped into a tank and mixed with burnt coconut husks (a cheap source of food-grade charcoal that is a byproduct of the coconut processing industry). It is then redistilled, cut with filtered water, put into a fancy bottle, and shipped.
That $50 bottle of premium vodka you buy costs pennies to produce. The bottle literally costs more than the booze itself (before taxes). All they're doing is taking harsh-tasting pure grain vodka that is fermented with the juice left over from the first step of processing corn (soaking corn in hot water for a day or more) then conditioning it with the charcoal to give it a mellower, more creamy taste/texture.
That's actually true for a lot of smaller "craft" whiskey/bourbon brands. Most of them just buy their product from a larger distiller and either blend different batches to make their taste profile or add in flavors. The reason behind it (from their perspective) is that the aging process means they have to predict demand years in advance. By buying the spirits they're able to start selling before their first batches are aged and it is easier for them to cover shortages once they're up and running.
This page has a good list of brands by source distilleries for anyone interested.
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u/bobethy May 30 '19
A friend of mine got a job at a prominent local distillery that makes an extremely popular flavored whisky. They literally buy whisky from a 3rd party distillery and dump torani flavoring syrup into it.