A brand new form of “gold standard” may quickly permeate the whiskey business.
Whiskey distillers sometimes age spirits in charred, picket casks for years, permitting the liquor to steadily take up flavorful chemical substances launched from the wooden (SN: 10/31/19). Now, researchers have demonstrated that swirling gold ions right into a whiskey can reveal how a lot taste the liquor has taken in — a top quality known as agedness. The methodology may present grasp blenders with a fast and cheap take a look at for whiskey agedness, researchers report October 6 in ACS Applied Nano Materials.
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“A tiny amount of gold gives you this really bright, strong, red or blue or purple color,” says William Peveler, a chemist on the University of Glasgow in Scotland. The stronger the colour, and the faster that coloration arises, the extra aged the whiskey, he says.
Master blenders generally conduct tasting periods to gauge agedness, however this course of could be labor intensive. Alternatively, laboratory assays can measure agedness by checking whiskeys for flavorful chemical substances known as congeners, absorbed from wooden casks, however such analyses could be costly.
Past analysis has proven that numerous chemical substances, from neurotransmitters to poor-tasting compounds in maple syrup, may set off gold ions in an answer to coalesce into ultra-tiny gold nuggets, or nanoparticles. So Peveler and colleagues blended options containing lower than a penny’s value of gold ions into completely different whiskey blends and a vodka. While no nanoparticles fashioned within the vodka, the ions reacted with whiskey congeners to type nanoparticles in minutes. The measurement and form of the nanoparticles various between whiskeys, inflicting the spirits to flourish with completely different colours.
The researchers plan to additional examine how gold nanoparticles develop alongside alcohols and sugars in whiskeys to develop an much more complete take a look at for agedness.