Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com