Using carbon isotopes to fight the rise in fraudulent whisky | Hacker News Reader

Using carbon isotopes to fight the rise in fraudulent whisky

cambridge.org

46 pointsSomeone9 comments

I wonder if dealers in fraudulent art/whisky/whatever have started purchasing samples of 13C or 14C to try to fool this kind of analysis. I don't know what the cost would be, but it would only need very small quantities (and very, very careful measurement.)

That would only help if you wanted to present something old as being newer.

It's been a while since I've interpreted delta 13C measurements but it seems like adding 13C could mimic older materials, however you are correct about 14C unless you want to make something modern look like its ~1960s era. You would need to reduce 14C (either by dilution with depleted ethanol [quick search doesn't find a source for this] or somehow purify the scotch itself) to make it look pre-1950s.

I have heard of seeding DNA id snippets in materials to prevent counterfeiting. DNA read and write technology is now robust and cheap.

When I googled 'DNA stability in ethanol' I was surprised to see that it was being used to store DNA, albeit at cool temperatures. So that might work.

The snippets won't be present in the old bottles. You could just take some recent stuff (without snippets) and still pass it off as really old.

The thing is that the age-thing is pure marketing, if someone's making whisky that tastes the same and has the same amount of alcohol I don't really think it's a fraud, it's not like you can taste the C14

No, as long as you prepare whisky in the traditional way, as in aging in barrels, aging is not marketing. Older whiskys tend to be smoother and have more complexity in their taste. While there are good younger ones, 12 years is the default for a good whisky with 15-20 years adding quite a bit quality to that on average.

There are alternative ways to create a whisky, I recently had quite an interesting burbon, where the barrels would be subjected to pressure cycles quickly - seems a huge factor in aging is the seasonal changes to the barrel, with the pressure cycles they emulated seasons in a fraction of the time. They got the equivalent of a 12 year old burbon in a couple of months.

Also, quite a few large distilleries started whisky editions without a stated age on the label. There they use a mix of barrels, old and young to achieve the taste. But, they either don't state an age or the age of the youngest barrel involved.

In any case, stating the wrong age on the label, is plain fraud.

Our world-spanning civilization confronts an existential crisis, threatening collapse and radical depopulation, and they worry about protecting privileged whisky producers.

This is not actually different from what almost all of us are doing. It makes me ashamed.

I don't drink much, but when I do, I prefer pure 95% ethanol. It's poisonous enough as it is, without impurities.

Back in the day, that was spectrophotometric grade ethanol.

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