hello multi magnus maltese maximus and thank you to angelos mikhail or mikeyel i think it's mikhail
or mikhail for the malt mention i'm ralphie in the bothy whiskey time matured spirits
time this is what i do here it's thoroughly enjoyable and i share my research with you
in then extras because this is what this is 933 extras i'm talking about the quality of casks
why we need to understand this we need to know more about casks we need to develop cask awareness
particularly when we're nosing and tasting whiskeys we need to be able to spot good
cask influence we need to be understanding and appreciative of bad cask or poor cask influence
because this helps to justify whether it's a good buy or not a good buy see there's
two things that are changing whiskey one is when it's produced in the pot stills
i'm talking about single malts here but i'm also talking about grain whiskey
to be honest scotch blended scotch as well but really less focus in single malts
and that is that as technology improves and as distillers focus on improving yields and by yield
of production of spirit what they really mean is yield of alcohol they don't mean yield of flavor
but they still need to hold on to some flavor just enough flavor
to keep the identity but the problem is when you over distill or whether when you produce too much
alcohol from your yield of grain you make sacrifices and the sacrifice is that you've got a
variety of grain contemporary grain which is easy to work with gives you a great yield of
alcohol but the alcohol is coming from the breakdown of starch in the seeds of barley
and beside the carbohydrate the starch is some the parts of the barley responsible for flavor
including the husk yeah husk can contribute to flavor they'll tell you exactly why because
when the husk goes into the kiln and you're pitting a whiskey the husk will absorb the
absorb the smoke from the the kilning process and contribute that pittiness
back into the wash into the wart and then into the wash once it's fermented but with
modern technology and science it's very easy for to distill us to to get things so
pinpoint accurate that in fact the producing two percent more alcohol from the yield and therefore
cutting costs but they're losing five percent of flavor because you either get one or the other
ideally you want both in harmony and balance but the more you drive for alcohol the more you lose
the flavor and with many modern techniques particularly when they're industrialized
heavily industrialized and you don't have people actively hands-on making whiskey anymore and using
the experience and the the judgment to for example to to moderate or moderate things when you've got
a summer a summer month instead of a winter month it's a very good example then what you have is
over distillation you have lovely clean fresh new make spirit and yet when you pop it in the cask
you get a less interesting and more boring matured result that's what you get
the other side is casks so here's the two basic ingredients which are going to deliver either a
good whiskey or a bad whiskey the yield from the grain the flavor from the grain and the
percentage of alcohol most important they need to be balanced and then the casks are the good casks
or bad casks and so many casks fall in between they become competent casks they're fit for
purpose but unfortunately for i'm noticing this i'm just sharing this with you because i notice it
modern casks tend to be engineered to produce safe results and not
overly flavor complex results so for example you may have a cask which isn't going to give
much to the whiskey but once it's been rinsed out with the special wash and preparation syrup
there's nothing illegal about it as long as it's emptied out the cask and it becomes an empty cask
then you've got something external influencing the flavor and this can happen for example i'm
just going to give you an example so that you know exactly what i'm talking about here so a
wet casks come and comes in from spain hogs heads and you give the casks a shake and they're empty
because they've been emptied of their sharing but there's just a certain amount left inside
to keep the cask wet to keep the cask fresh and so the maybe there's about a couple of bottles
worth of sherry still inside the cask now the distiller can either absolutely tip them out
to make sure every last drops out the cask or they can regard it as the fact that they've got
empty casks because they ordered empty casks and it says empty casks the invoice and therefore they
can be treated as empty casks and if there's any residual previous content all the better
particularly if that previous content has to be been made to their recipe
this is why good casks are very important for the really successful whiskies
the whiskies that we want to go out and buy again
the reason is slightly lower alcohol yield more of a flavor yield
and then the cask that this flavoursome spirit has gone into has over time this dynamic of maturation
and it produces something intense and complex and it doesn't have to be a first fill cast
it can be a second or even a third fill cask but but it's giving the spirit enough time in the cask
to let the cask work its magic so in a first fill cask you could leave a whiskey in it for 10 years
you might not want to leave it any longer because you may get too much cask influence
alternatively if you've got a second fill cask or even a third fill cask if it's been two
short previous fills you may say i tell you what it's going to take a
while because there's not so much energy in the wood there's not so much residual flavor
due to previous fills of our single malt whiskey therefore we're going to leave this 18 to 21 years
and what we'll get is a more delicate result which is spirit driven less cask influence but
we'll get a different sort of single mold and therefore it can work wonderfully well
so just to give you a point of reference there aren't that many seriously bad casks
in the whiskey industry i mean i'm talking seriously bad casks totally rancid
totally stale totally awful flavoring casks they're not out there because the problem
is you can have one of those casks will be enough to destroy an entire batch of
single malt so you were to put if you were to put a really bad cask in with 50 good casks
that bad cask will bring all the other 49 good casks down dramatically so what you have is
a dis and it happens by the way a dis continuation of whiskey maturing
and really bad casks when it's identified then the cask will be marked with the big
red cross uh customs nexus excise will be approached and yet it has happened the customs
and excise will give permission for a barrel of whiskey to be flushed down the drain free of duty
it does happen not very often see with the quality of casks it's not so much bad casks
it's just average casks that's the main issue casks which they don't bring anything particularly
dynamic to the whiskey during maturation but they don't really do much damage to it either
or alternatively you have an inert cask which over the years doesn't actually do that much
to the whiskey in terms of maturation and let's just be absolutely clear about this
whiskey is not made in distilleries you make spirit or cleric that's made in distilleries
whiskey's made in warehouses and whiskey is more than three simple ingredients of
water yeast and malt and barley if it's single malt it's more than that it's
cask influence and within cask wood you've got about 600 different chemicals but that can vary
see the big problem is as i briefly mentioned but i'm going to repeat it not so much really
bad casks as just mediocre casks because when some distilleries are operating to severe budget
the decision will be made in head office i'll tell you what spend less in the casks and we'll
just paper over the cracks by spending more in marketing as and when we need it big mistake
see the thing is if distilleries become too dependent on marketing
then they're competing with every other distillery that's marketing based and marketing led
and the messages just get boring after a while really really boring because they're so repeated
and so uninspiring fine if you're a passive consumer you see a nice bright blingy box
all good and when you taste the whiskey that tastes nice then they move on shove some icing to
fill up a coca-cola it's all right it's a single malt with coca-cola in it but it's my birthday
sort of thing they come away with the passive consumers and there's i'm as i'm not criticizing
them because we all start as passive consumers but as time goes on as we start to do our self-imposed
expensive apprenticeship learning about good whiskey what it is
and how to identify it and what leads to a good whiskey we quite by default we understand
what bad whiskey is and what leads to bad whiskey particularly in relation to an expensive price tag
so to summarize now when you approach a cask for the first time you take the bung off and you sniff
inside and if it's sweet it's more than likely a decent fresh good quality cask and furthermore
the chances are that if a distillery has gone to the expense of importing the casks whole
then the chances are there are better quality wood to start with wood that's been
harvested and air dried to hold on to these valuable flavor chemicals found in the wood
and not kiln dried for fast results speedy results which greatly diminishes the range of
flavor influence a cask can have on a whiskey so if you're a bourbon producer in the usa and
technically you can only use a in fact by law you can only use a cask once for burp and then
you've got to discard it and your bourbon is only going to be in it for about two years you don't
want to be spending a lot in casks so you want them as cheap and as fast as possible possible
you want great big industrialized production lines and easy access timber forests where the
trees have grown super quick and have less flavor in the wood literally less flavor in the wood
and then preparing these these staves for forming into casks they're put into baker's ovens
that's what they look like they roll through baker's ovens to be dried out super fast
and it always smells lovely because it's like turning fresh coffee into instant coffee it's
exactly the same sort of shorthand process you know we're all coffee drinkers most of us
we prefer the the fresh ground brains ground beans because you get more flavor range and more
satisfaction from it you don't like you can have a spoonful of instant coffee if you want but it's
just not the same it's the same with casks the fast produced cheapy cheapy casks that get turned
into flat packs to fill up shipping containers then they have to be reassembled and if you're
lucky you've got an experienced cooper doing it and if you're unlucky you've got a production line
full of machinery and then thereafter a lot of your cars are just leaking and wasting
your precious liquor it's a false economy see any distillery that doesn't have access to a cooper
they're struggling they're really struggling to do what they need to do to make a premium product
end off
a good cask influence enhances not just the flavor of the whiskey after years maturing in a glass but
the sensation intensity the sensation balance sweet sour salt bitter savory
and the form of the whiskey the fullness of the arrival the big the the depth of the development
and the finesse of the finish you cannot get that from cheap wood inferior wood
kiln dried wood this is why i tend to look more and more towards wine casks european
wine casks for maturing whiskey once you've rinsed out the overt wine influence because
quite a number of casks coming from the usa are are really just spat off a production line
and that's fine if you're going to be creating just a generic off the shelf and on the bar
um liquor that people are going to have as a mixer not a problem but when it becomes an
expensive single mall you need better wooden that is better with there's plenty of better wood out
there just costs more money and see good american oak from from a good location properly harvested
properly air dried for several years what a difference that makes malt makes seriously
when you taste the difference you'll never forget it and this is why the quality of casks
are so important because without casks whiskey is nothing it's nothing it's just a new make spirit
it's just basically a boutique gin that's what it is without the cask influence i'm ralph i hope
you've enjoyed this extras i know i finished in a quite a controversial note there but i try and
you make spirits um and they're nice simple two by dimensional little beings and unfortunately these
days too many of them are over distilled they've got no personality just at a moment in time
when people's palates globally are appreciating personality and character more and more and more
but what do i know like yourself malt mates i'm an enthusiast and we've all got to make
our own journey take what we can from the industry and make sure we just don't swallow
all the information hook like line and sinker because it's our journey our singular journey
the more information we have the better the quality of our journey simple as that the better
equipped we are to make that journey thank you for watching i shall be back again soon i've probably
with a 13 year old whiskey with a wee mousy thing on it quite enjoying it see you soon bye