A brand new form of “gold normal” may quickly permeate the whiskey trade.
Whiskey distillers sometimes age spirits in charred, picket casks for years, permitting the liquor to step by step take up flavorful chemical compounds 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 tactic may present grasp blenders with a fast and cheap check for whiskey agedness, researchers report October 6 in ACS Utilized Nano Supplies.
“A tiny quantity of gold offers you this actually brilliant, sturdy, pink or blue or purple colour,” says William Peveler, a chemist on the College of Glasgow in Scotland. The stronger the colour, and the faster that colour arises, the extra aged the whiskey, he says.
Grasp blenders typically conduct tasting classes to gauge agedness, however this course of will be labor intensive. Alternatively, laboratory assays can measure agedness by checking whiskeys for flavorful chemical compounds known as congeners, absorbed from wooden casks, however such analyses will be costly.
Previous analysis has proven that varied chemical compounds, 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 price of gold ions into totally different whiskey blends and a vodka. Whereas no nanoparticles shaped within the vodka, the ions reacted with whiskey congeners to type nanoparticles in minutes. The scale and form of the nanoparticles assorted between whiskeys, inflicting the spirits to flourish with totally different colours.
The researchers plan to additional examine how gold nanoparticles develop alongside alcohols and sugars in whiskeys to develop an much more complete check for agedness.
