Tennessee town completely smothered by black whiskey fungus | Hacker News Reader

Tennessee town completely smothered by black whiskey fungus

dailymail.co.uk

95 pointsBender59 comments

For anyone wondering what this article doesn't really tell:

Baudoinia compniacensis is a sac fungus which has been observed on a variety of substrates in the vicinity of distilleries, spirits maturation facilities, bonded warehouses, and bakeries. The fungus is a habitat colonist with a preference for airborne alcohol, earning it the nickname whiskey fungus.[1]

There's photos on that wiki article of other distilleries in Kentucky and Scotland with the same issue, interestingly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudoinia_compniacensis

This must be the original story picked up by others?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/us/whiskey-fungus-jack-da...

Here's the non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/g6NHM

> Ms. Willis also said that air filters could hurt the flavor that Jack Daniel’s whiskey acquires during the aging process. Distillers refer poetically to the liquor that evaporates during that process as “the angel’s share.”

This seems like an odd claim by the company.

I know some people believe the fungus growing in the barrels lends some flavor to the whiskey and therefore killing it would have a potentially negative effect on the product.

No one's asking them to eradicate the fungus. They're being asked to filter the outgoing air ventilation on the barrelhouses so it doesn't spray fungus (and fungus food, in the form of ethanol fumes) over the nearby community.

Done at a small scale nature can handle some excess fungus overgrowth. Done at a large scale and it becomes too toxic and destroys life.

It reminds me of the fisheries. Catch too many and the fish never return

Strikes me as an industry run mostly be ad hoc rules and this-is-how-it-has-always-been-done. Which, for a historical product that people enjoy is a fair enough stance. Especially if it takes four years (!!!) before you see the outcome of an experiment.

I have no doubt they employ plenty of food scientists and specialized analytical techniques to monitor the product, but at the end of the day, making a change has got to be scary.

This past summer I visited a cognac distillery, and when in an aging room the same thing was mentioned (also called the angel's share). You can actually tell which buildings hold aging barrels, because you can see this black fungus growing on the outside of those buildings.

Odd, and downright disingenuous. Scrubbing the air won't stop evaporation from the barrels. I guess you could make an argument about how changing partial pressure causes a change in equilibrium vapor pressure. But if such a subtle effect is so important, there would already be much more tight controls on the warehouse environment.

Just another penny pinching company with externalized consequences...

“If stuff can get out, stuff can get in”. A filter setup that stops ethanol vapors from escaping is more precisely “a setup that applies the installed filters to all incoming and outgoing air”, if those filters block more than just ethanol vapor, you’re losing out on whatever those filters do block. Maybe it turns out some important bacteria can’t get in and so the whiskey doesn’t develop right. That spoils roughly four years of the warehouse’s capacity which is a lot.

There no reason incoming and outgoing air have to have the same pathways. Fans that suck out inside air will not bring in outside air. This is pretty basic stuff. Your inlets can have absolutely no filters on them and the fans sucking out the air will maintain a pressure differential that makes sure the inlets will mostly only let air in.

To clarify, I don’t think much of their excuse, this is obviously a situation the distilleries should be trying to fix, and so on. Mostly just a caution not to assume the solution is simple, obvious, and risk-free. Making spirits is not a science, nor even an art - it’s luck, and mass-producing spirits is like trying to crystallize that luck and replicate it. It’s like being told to fix a legacy codebase to stop throwing errors, except nobody understands the codebase, not even the people who wrote it. Oh and any subtle change you make can destroy the current production database as well as four years of backups.

Making spirits is a science. Chemistry and biology.

Jack Daniels isn’t meth. It is a complex and specific flavor profile that is enormously successful commercially. This profile was not arrived at via chemistry and biology, and it’s currently infeasible to apply chemistry and biology in a lab to replicate this flavor profile. The same is true of the overwhelming majority of other spirits, too. The only method we have to find your way to these extremely precise locations in high-dimensional flavorspace is to religiously follow the ritual that gets us there. On the road to mass production, spirit distillers have run across many pitfalls that look innocuous, minor changes that seem like they couldn’t possibly affect the outcome but nevertheless do. That’s what I mean by trying to crystallize luck. (Yes, chemistry and biology are the fields of science that _would_ describe this process…)

I'm always amazed that these products can be so accurately locked to an exact flavour for years, regardless of the inputs, which, being plant or animal matter, can vary a lot naturally between batches and between years.

Not only whisky, even things like branded fruit juice, McDonald's burger meat and salad, Nutella and branded chocolate, coffee, to name just a few, seem almost preternaturally consistent.

Juice companies extract the volatile components and them send them to perfumers who transform them into a specific flavor profile which is then added back to the juice. The flavor packs are derived from oranges so they don’t need to be labeled as an ingredient but provide a consistent experience.

> On the road to mass production, spirit distillers have run across many pitfalls that look innocuous, minor changes that seem like they couldn’t possibly affect the outcome but nevertheless do.

Sounds like engineering. They ran into a pitfall, which exposed a process that they can now reproduce in mass production. Follow that up with a hypothesis on why and a way to test it and you've got science. So it is a science.

I’m not trying to claim it is immune to science. I argued it is “luck, not science” in service of the point that it isn’t as easy as “just install some filters”, that carries a bigger risk than commenters might think. Jack Daniels should absolutely do some science to see if installing filters does affect their product. Unfortunately that experiment takes about four years to run, which means four more years of whiskey fungus for the residents.

Why? Presumably one could operate the buildings at slight negative pressure and have separate intake and exhaust vents and fans. The exhaust fans would have whatever kind of filter removes ethanol.

Seems easy enough to test in a smaller room, and in four years get the answer.

They also refer to the liquor that is absorbed by the barrel as the Devil's cut.

Looking at the NYT vs Daily Mail reminds me of why I shell out a coffee a month to avoid ads.

It's hard to explain to a non Brit just how lowly most of society thinks of the Daily mail.

While simultaneously being the most circuited paper heavily driven by women readers.

The ads are likely the good bit of the website.

> just how lowly most of society thinks of the Daily mail.

This is really just a perfect example of how society splinters on certain lines.

I give my mother endless shit for reading the daily mail, it is a pre-clickbait indignation generation machine and the website is probably worse.

However, "most of society" does not ring true to me. I am the outlier not the default.

As a percentage of the population daily mail readers are miniscule.

And aging.

If you asked a hypothetical 100 people their thoughts on the Daily Mail the number who report reading it would be dwarfed by the number calling it trash.

They claim to reach 65% of UK audience, I wouldn't call that minuscule.

Both are true statements.

65% read it. 90% say they don't

I used to work for a newspaper; reach claims are basically bullshit, as they can include things like "saw an article online in the last 30 days" or household multipliers where they assume everyone in a subscribing household reads it. Circulation is much more informative.

If they actually sold 40 million papers a day as this guy believes I wonder how much wood they'd consume in a year.

Hahaha you really think the daily mail sells 40million newspapers a day!

> If you asked a hypothetical 100 people their thoughts on the Daily Mail the number who report reading it would be dwarfed by the number calling it trash.

I think there is more socio economic bias in your belief of the above than you think. Rural vs Urban, young vs old, educational differences etc.

I have no proof, but I reckon the pro-anti numbers are closer than you do and the number of "no strong views" higher.

Mailonline website is editorially separate from the print newspaper last I heard. Not saying it's better or worse.

All the press is a click bait indignation generator, just different ones cater to different tastes in indignation.

Heh I've looked them up to check if they were owned by Rupert Murdoch. They're not, but it looks like they've been sued by various celebrities, including Hugh Grant, Prince Harry and Elton John for libel. Grant won the trial, as expected.

It's not nearly as bad as the daily mail, and the writing is higher quality. But I still get 7 ads in that NYT article and I'm a paying subscriber. I just grab their $5/mo deal and when it expires and wants to charge me $20/mo I unsubscribe with the reason being I'm not paying $20 for a service that still has ads. About 2 weeks later I end up getting an email for another year at $5/mo.

You see that a lot around distilleries everywhere. Any vehicle you work on that's kept at a distillery, whisky bond, or blend house, will be absolutely covered in grotty black shit.

It rots bricks like crazy, and in Dumbarton a little to the west of Glasgow in Scotland people have semi-successfully attempted to sue some large drinks companies because of the damage it has done to houses.

Now, the distillers reckon it doesn't rot bricks, but I've put communications aerials up on their buildings. They build things like the security gatehouse out of "engineering bricks", very hard and strong bricks used for things like manholes. These bricks are normally very hard to drill, especially with something like a 16mm SDS for fitting M10 rawlbolts to support an aerial pole.

I could practically poke the holes in the bricks with my finger. It was like drilling stale chocolate cake.

The title of this submission was altered from the original, and should be:

"EXCLUSIVE: Shocking new DailyMail.com images show Tennessee town completely SMOTHERED by black fungus caused by local Jack Daniel's plant"

I'm joking, but there are less irritating sources of news than the daily mail.

The properties adjacent to the barrelhouses I understand, but how could they possibly be emitting enough alcohol to drive fungal growth in the next county?

For months, some residents have complained that a sooty, dark crust has blanketed homes, cars,

Why has it only become a problem in the last year?

I have not been to the Jack Daniels distillery, but a different vendor, and it is truly unbelievable how much alcohol is in the air surrounding the buildings. While it is unlikely you could become intoxicated just breathing in the air, it certainly feels possible.

I could believe that the vapors from the aging barrels could spread to cover a significant area if the winds were right.

> Why has it only become a problem in the last year?

From the NYT article:

> Ms. Ferry said that since Jack Daniel’s built a barrelhouse next to her house in December, whiskey fungus had been accumulating on the roof of her home and car and on trees on her property. She said she had scrubbed the paint off wooden patio furniture while trying to remove the dark growth.

New construction, and more on the way.

Whiskey must be aged in brand-new oak barrels, and Jack Daniels claims to be one of the only distilleries in the world that makes their own barrels. So…

If they’re expanding rapidly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of their barrels aren’t quite as good as they should be. Less mature trees, less experienced workers, etc.

If you need more barrels this year than you did last year, there are only so many ways to make that happen.

It's not a quality issue with the barrels; the fungus is expected.

The expansion is exposing new areas of the community to that phenomeon, and the company is (reasonably, IMO) being asked to mitigate.

I am surprised they let ethanol escape and don’t capture it to recycle it.

They could put condensers on the ventilation and sell the product for gas or industrial process.

It would be prohibitively expensive to recapture it because the buildings meant to store whiskey for as cheap as possible while it ages. They're little more than sheds made of corrugated sheet metal.

Winemakers in California do sometimes capture ethanol vapour escaping from fermentation tanks:

https://www.aromatica.io/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmBgx-Z5jhg

Although that's an easier problem - higher concentrations, and a smaller volume to collect from.

Please don't link to the Daily Mail. It's the british tabloid equivalent of Fox News.

Closer to Fox+TMZ

I find the picture of the sign to be odd with the perfectly clean signs in the background.

The article does say they replace the signs once they become illegible.

Lynchburg is a population of about 6500. Jack Daniel’s HQs there and has about 500 employees.

Does this town exist because of the distillery? Might be a very hard thing to deal with if the adversarial party is also the core of their economy.

It's not an either or senerio, Jack Daniel's could take some of their profits and spend them on remediation.

Certainly there are many solutions. That’s not in doubt. Companies often don’t like spending money if they don’t have to. Given they haven’t tried to address this for so long suggests as much.

Agreed. To your initial point Jack Daniel's marketing relies so heavily on being "Tennessee Whiskey" I think it would be harder for them than other companies to threaten to move to a state with looser rules (e.g. Boeing in SC).

I don't think anyone believes that the company will do this out of the kindness of their hearts but rather are hoping that this attention spurs new regulations. The company basically admits that's what it would take in the article:

"Melvin Keebler, general manager of the Jack Daniel Distillery, said in a statement that the company 'complies with all local, state, and federal regulations regarding the design, construction, and permitting of our barrelhouses.'"

Which means they have enough political support to stop it

In this case, JD will likely withhold changes to their process at least until they can be held non-liable for the costs incurred by the community due to the fungus.

It's a shame and defect of our legal system that complying with an accusation arguably constitutes agreement, because it creates the perverse incentive to delay or avoid potentially time-sensitive remediation, with the much broader implication that human caused climate change very much has a bill that responsible parties must foot.

Agreed. It’s a tricky part of law.

In Ontario we have the apology act, which makes it possible to apologize for something without implying fault or guilt. I think that demonstrates how tricky and unfortunate it can be that there’s legal disincentives to do the right thing.

> Does this town exist because of the distillery?

More or less. Most of the economy there is related to the distillery and tourists visiting the distillery.

I dunno how they got the pic of the dead pig. If I went to stage such a picture I'd need to let the thing bloat inside for a day or two and then have someone standing over it with firearms to keep the vultures off while getting the picture. Also have to note its not visibly leaking anything; suggests that it was washed.

I've come across carcasses like that that haven't been spoiled before, in Georgia, New York, Puebla Mexico. Distension is a pretty early part of the process before putrefaction.

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