hello multi monstrous munchings and thank you to willem
killian for that more mention thank you willam um and this is ralphie review 934 extras
and it is the final part of a three-part series on understanding identifying quality casks and
i'm really just passing on the knowledge that i've gained over a few decades of speaking to
coopers visiting distilleries hanging around warehouses listening into conversations in
bars talking to industry professionals talking to industry enthusiastic anorex um and people
who are super keen and whiskey at times it gets a little bit unsettling for the distilleries
when they can get a visitor out of the blue um who knows more about the distillery than they do
this is happening more and more and it's not just whiskey anoraks and geeks knowing more about the
distillery it's knowing more about the whiskey to a degree which is unprecedented historically
it's a few decades ago that by virtue of
availability of supply of serious good quality casks from the usa ex-bourbon casks from the usa
uh occasionally the rye cask occasionally the the corn whiskey casks but probably about 99
of casks coming over still whole and wet from the usa were ex-bourbon casks made of good quality
air-dried wood which had been coopered the old-fashioned way in other words without
too much pressure and productivity levels and basically the people who were coopering just
left to get on with the job for which they were trained without too much stress and pressure
it's very different nowadays everything's all time controlled and coopers in the us many of them are
paid in productivity they're depend on how many casks they actually cooper in a day and therefore
it's in the interests not only of the coopers for their pay but for the some many not some
many of the bourbon producers to get their casks through the system as cheaply and as quickly as
possible because after all by law they're only going to be used once to mature bourbon and 90
of all the bourbon that's matured it's just young stuff it's only about two years old
it's non-age stuff it's not super stuff it's mixing and banging a shot down your
neck in a bar somewhere type liquor you know honestly bourbon is not given due respect
and one and this is one reason why a lot of bourbons out there are very generic and cheap
and they're totally brand lead and you just have to look at jim beam or jack daniels to see whether
it be bourbon or tennessee whiskey call it what you want they're all green whiskeys all of them
are grain whiskeys um they're a fairly generic brand-led experience and rather like coca-cola
it's the label it's selling not the content
but in the old days and you'll notice this if you're in the us and you go to a general auction
or someone's selling clearing out an old cupboard and they discover an old bottle
of bourbon from yesteryear and you taste it you're tasting a different generation where
the corn was not genetically modified and enhanced the way it is now the the yeast
was added the fermentation and the mash and the sour mashes it was a lot slower it was more paced
more measured it's more designed for quality see the good old days particularly after prohibition
see with prohibition there were big competition we want to get people back drinking again so let's
make sure we've got the quality in the bottle and the only reason why you get quality in the bottle
is to get the quality out of the casks and even now around the world you've got some distillers
who claim that casks don't have much influence on whiskey flannel and disingenuous misinformation
ignore what these people are saying casks have an enormous influence
on whiskey because if they didn't they wouldn't even be used and all whiskey would be white
what's really changed over the last 30 years
is the economics of production without doubt in the old days it was a tough job but there was more
i wouldn't say a relaxed pace but there was more of an understanding
that it takes a certain amount of time for a cask to be constructed by a cooper properly
but now we're in a moment in time where casks are thrown together at lightning speed and when it's
only when you actually sit a good cask beside a bad badly made cask and start to look through
the magnifying glass at the quality of the joints of the seals of the caliber of the rings the steel
rims that are going round to hold the container together whether the barrel heads are using
proper wooden rolls or driven galvanized pins to hold them together how thick is the wood how thin
is the wood how neat is the job how fragrant is the wood i mean we've not even got to the point
where we've put anything into these casks yet they're still in the cooperage but you can walk
up to a cast you can you can knock it slightly how does it ring does it have a bell-like note
or is it kind of dull and flat this tells with to a tuned ear an experienced ear it tells you hell
of a lot even the barrel length the the chain around the head of the barrel how thick is it
how thin is it what size is the pore of the wood is it quite rough or is it perhaps smoother is
it a finer fiber in that stave or a coarse fiber coarse fibers are faster growing trees
they grow faster therefore the fibers aren't as tight in the structure of the trunk
wood is not equal trees are not equal you get hundreds of contributing contributing
natural flavor chemicals from wood that go into maturing whiskey and it's not just the chemicals
in the wood it's the caliber of the wood to moderate the oxidization over time of the
contents of the whiskey i mean th this is talking about the quality of the case the knowledge mom
makes it's the knowledge we've not even got to the previous content of the barrel whether it be
sherry or bourbon or pork or madeira or red wine or white wine or whatever we're still in the wood
has that wood been air dried over three to five years to gradually systematically reduce
the moisture level or was it put through a baker's oven at oven temperature to
blast out the excessive moisture in the newly planed wood and in doing so it drives
out half the flavor chemicals because they are literally roasted right out of the wood
and if they're not there when it comes to toasting the cask and then sharing the cask
you just don't have the same quality of of process if you have got half dead wood
from the tree due to the processing cheaply sourced you can toast it all you want but
you're never going to get out anything out of that wood that was never in there in the first place
so fast-growing commercial trees from a massive plantation on a heavy budget are not going to give
you the same results as carefully selected trees which are then selectively harvested
from different altitude locations and then they are better processed better cared for better
harvested better blend better conditioned and then a far better place for passing on as flat packs
pieces of wood to be turned into staves at a cooperage see when you smell the inside
of a really good proper american cask on a french wine cask or a french
cognac cask that's made of llamas and oak it's night and day malt mates it really is
compared to the cheap crap which has been basically out there because it's all that's
needed to produce the cheap crap that's going into the bottle as generic brand lead products
which are then punted onto the masses the passive masses through blingy advertising
now i'm not saying it's wrong it makes a lot of commercial sense to do that
if you're making a cheap product that's reliant on expensive marketing there's no need to be sourcing
decent wood you just don't need it problem is when these casks whether intact or are
dismantled in heaven help us ship flat pack over to scotland are then reassembled if you've got
bad wood in that cask in the staves you can only get a bad cask no matter how well it's coopered
and don't get me wrong inert wood has its place i use inert wood
for one of my little cask projects i'm doing on my patreon channel but
that's because i'm using inner staves and i want a more dramatic return and smell and taste for
using these inner staves because i can do that because it's my cask and it's not in scotland
but see over time as you are chatting to people at distilleries
you pick up general information from your tour guides but there's only so much now it doesn't
matter which distillery you're visiting anywhere in the world your tour guides are doing their job
and generally they're doing a good job to the best of their ability it's a very repetitive job in
the some now and again some someone's going to ask stupid questions be a bit of an [ __ ] and they've
got to just get over it and get on with their day it's not a job that's particularly glamorous
but being polite and considerate to these people and say is there anyone here at
the distillery that i can talk to about casks just purely about casks and wood
and perhaps if i'm if the manager's not busy or our supervisor is not busy or the warehouse
for foreman or forward is not busy they will actually take you into the warehouse seeing
a show you're showing interest and you're asking questions that general public do not ask in tours
then they're going to show an interest and they're going to show you that you know we've
got these casks this is the reason that we've bought these casks because the type of wood
and the influence of previous content if this cask is still wet suits our style of liquor and
it suits it in this way because we're looking for a certain result for example illustrative example
if it's a scotch whiskey distillery and it's in space side and it's a light whiskey you do not
want great big heavy sherry impact if it doesn't suit the style of single mod you're producing
example ben reynolds splendid example glenn finnick brilliant example balvani good example so
they're going to be basically saying the majority of our casks are ex-bourbon casks from say for
roses distillery or heaven hell distillery so better quality distilleries better quality casks
simples because these these distilleries bottle more bourbons and more whiskeys for sipping
the higher-end stuff and it shows in the smell and taste when you buy them they say we get these
casks in because they're slightly sweeter they're the vanilla notes from the american oak they're
slightly aromatic and that suits the particular signature we're getting off are still illustrative
examples of contortion without a doubt ochentoshen absolutely bourbon daffmill bourbon other examples
tam the villain bourbon
i'm now thinking of all these distilleries that use a combination of american oak
and european oak egg another bourbon and sherry casks together in different ratios who said it
was easy malt mates if it was easy anybody could open a distillery the thing is at this moment in
time there's people without experience and without the contacts opening distillery they're struggling
to get the casks they need they can get casks but they're not necessarily casks they need
they'll be adequate they'll hold they'll hold the liquor but they won't work the magic
um and it's the distilleries anywhere in the world that i've got a bit more experience behind them
and that have understood their mission statement before they even start that are sourcing better
casks ensure they're charging more for the product fine because they're investing in
the price through the quality so i hope this really helps you get more of an understanding
of the quality of casks it's not just about bad casks smell sour and look rubbish and good casts
smell sweet and look amazing it doesn't work that way you can have some scabby old cast that'll work
a miracle on whiskey and some spanking new lovely golden boy looking cask that absolutely wrecks a
whiskey simply because it was left sitting in a warehouse too long and the inside went rancid so
you can't go in appearances with casks absolutely not i'm going to conclude by just mentioning that
when you're smelling and tasting whiskey over time you will pick up on notes in the whiskey
which you're not sure whether you like them or you don't like them and what you're really needing to
do is give yourself more time to become more familiar with these notes to understand them
and frequently particularly with age whatever a whiskey tastes like is coming less and less
from the still signature from the actual new make spirit and it's becoming more and more
from the cask the individuality the singularity the provenance the pedigree the caliber of that
cask and when you identify distilleries which are consistent in their use of quality casks
mark it in your diary for future purposes because if they're producing good whiskey today in their
first fill casks they'll be producing good whiskey tomorrow in their second full casks
which are the first fill casks which were good being refilled and they're still good
i'm ralphie thank you for watching i hope you found this cask knowledge and quality of cass
useful informative and uh helping you with your mob mission i'm ralphie over and out bye