Читать книгу Irish Whiskey: Ireland’s best-known and most-loved whiskeys - Gary Quinn - Страница 8

Wood, spirit, and maturation

Maturation warehouses are incredibly special places. Stacked to the ceiling with wooden casks slowly maturing new spirit into whiskey, they release a rich aroma that simply can’t be bottled. This is the fabled angel’s share; that part of the spirit that evaporates through the wood as it matures. The air in these warehouses is heavy with a sweet perfume that escapes through the wood of the cask or barrel as the wood “breathes”. It’s a wonderful alchemy that not only matures the spirit, allowing it to become whiskey, but also creates an incredible range of flavour profiles, depth of colour, and aromas.

Irish whiskey must be matured in wood and in the majority of cases that wood is oak, American Oak to be precise. Since, in the USA, there is a strict policy of using only new, unseasoned oak to make bourbon there is a ready supply of ex-bourbon casks for the Irish whiskey market.

The time spent maturing that bourbon will have stripped some of the minerals from the wood that create flavour, but the bourbon in turn will have passed its own flavour properties back into the wood, and they then get transferred into the new spirit, maturing into Irish whiskey.

Irish whiskey makers also use casks that have previously stored other drinks, such as sherry or port. Each of these will have left their own signature on the wood and this too will be transferred into the new spirit. Throughout this book you will find references to the type of cask the whiskey is matured or “finished” in. Irish whiskey has to mature for at least three years in cask but it is often much longer. Once mature, a whiskey can then be “finished” in another cask or barrel, to impart new flavour profiles. Different wood types can also be introduced at this stage.

The new make spirit that goes into a cask is a clear liquid. Its final identity, once it matures, is determined by the chemical reactions that occur between the wood of the cask and the spirit itself. Once bottled, ageing stops and the whiskey is complete but, until then, it’s a wonderfully slow and exciting part of the whiskey-making process.

Anyone who journeys down the whiskey path is likely to become fascinated by this process, not least because it is an act of trust between the distiller and nature itself. The distiller and blender understand the process, choose the type of wood, and have an expectation of the result, but they can rarely predict the outcome with 100 per cent certainty. They simply have to wait and let the wood do its work.