A new kind of “gold standard” could soon permeate the whiskey industry. No,

Whiskey is typically aged in charred, wooden casks for years, allowing the liquor to gradually absorb flavorful chemicals released from the wood. Now, researchers have demonstrated that swirling gold ions into a whiskey can reveal how much flavor the liquor has taken in - a quality called agedness. The method could provide master blenders with a quick and inexpensive test for whiskey agedness, researchers report October 6 in ACS Applied Nano

Whiskey gets its distinct coloring from the interaction of its unique ingredients with oxygen. When whiskey is first distilled, it is clear. But as it ages in oak barrels, it slowly takes on a deep golden hue. The longer whiskey is aged, the darker

Aging whiskey in oak casks is a practice that has been used for centuries in order to give the spirit a unique flavor profile. Congeners are chemicals that are absorbed from the wood during the aging process, and they play a big role

Past research has shown that various chemicals, from neurotransmitters to poor-tasting compounds in maple syrup, could trigger gold ions in a solution to coalesce into ultra-tiny gold nuggets, or nanoparticles. So Peveler and colleagues mixed solutions containing less than a penny’s worth of gold ions into different whiskey blends and a vodka. While no nanoparticles formed in the vodka, the ions reacted with whiskey congeners to form nanoparticles in minutes. The

Whiskey is typically aged in oak barrels, which imparts distinct flavors to the spirit. One of the key components of these flavors is vanillin, a natural