The James B. Beam Institute at the University of Kentucky hosted their 5th annual industry conference last week.

Oak staves and heading should be seasoned for a minimum of 3-to-6-months, but the real differences begin to manifest when you go beyond that timeframe.

Esters are fascinating little compounds in the sense that they are responsible for some of the more distinguishable and potent aromas that most of us run into on a frequent basis, not just in our glass of favorite whiskey or wine.

Update on our 2019 warehouse maturation experiment

Read about how ISC Barrels helped one company bring a new luxury American Single Malt Whiskey to life

Visit a distillery anywhere in the world and you’ll likely hear your tour guide talk about the influence climate has on whiskey maturation. While there has been much speculation on the effects, I was not able to find any hard data or documentation of a proper barrel experiment aimed at studying this variable, so we decided it was time to lay the groundwork and begin our own barrel experiment.

Have we been busy at the ISC Research Center? Indeed, we have! Our experimental barrel program has grown by leaps and bounds over the past seven years. We now have over thirty different experiments covering nearly three thousand experimental barrels.

Our last post about aging whiskey on different levels of a warehouse sparked some questions from our readers about how the results we receive from our chemical analysis relate to the overall quality of the whiskey being tested.

Whiskey barrel warehouses come in a variety of different styles and configurations. Palletized, dunnage, traditional rick, and all kinds of variations within. Here in Kentucky, the most common style you see is traditional rick warehouses or otherwise known as a rick house.

Guest Post by Nathen Gabriel, Balcones Distilling. In 2009, Balcones Distilling released the first Texas whisky since Prohibition. With no template or rubric for how to make whisky in Texas, experimentation has always been integral to who we are as a distillery.

If you read the recent blog post about the Small Batch Toasted Barrels, you knew I was scheduled to conduct a tasting and presentation on the new collection of barrels at the 2020 American Craft Spirits Association Convention. Unfortunately, that convention has been postponed until August due to COVID-19.

A little over four years ago, we began to experiment with a barrel now known as our Wave Stave barrel; named for the unique wave-like pattern on the interior surface of each stave. Depending on the goals of an experiment, we usually monitor the maturation for a period of four years.

At Kentucky Research Center, most of our efforts are geared towards sensory analysis, customer product development and flavor discovery. However, thanks to a new piece of equipment that we acquired earlier this year, we can now study another very important aspect of barrel aged spirits: maturation dynamics.

Earlier this summer, we successfully completed our inaugural maturation class at Moonshine University. The new class, entitled “Age-ucation” was a joint effort by ISC and our good friends at Moonshine University.

In mid-April, ISC team members from around the world convened at our new Research Center located in Lebanon, Kentucky. Attendees came from as far as Germany, France, South America, and Australia. Others represented Mexico, Asia, and the United States.

In Barrel Profiling – Part 1, we touched on a few topics relating to the heat treatment of oak barrels. Specifically, we outlined the unique benefits of ISC’s barrel profiling system and the effects it can have on flavor development in oak-matured spirits. In this post, we will dive deeper by analyzing the results of a recent ISC experiment which utilized profiled barrels.

The thing about crafting good whiskey is it takes a long time – years aging in oak barrels – before it reaches full maturity. Aging whiskey in oak will always be necessary as three very important changes happen while the whiskey sits.