HAPPINESS for me is a few good friends, a selection of unusual whiskies – and definitely no ice. When I lift a glass to my nose, it is a portal to a different world of perception. There could be scents of vanilla, fruit, smoke and even freshly cut grass, all of which act like clues to the story behind the spirit. Sniff carefully, and I might discern the myriad choices the drink’s makers made as they carefully crafted it over many years.
Lately, however, I have found myself asking whether the prodigious efforts of distillers are entirely necessary. Ageing spirits in barrels for years is painstaking stuff. Is it possible to make a dram without all that faff? After all, there are people on the whisky scene who claim to be able to produce a delicious version in a single night.
Their secret sauce is flavour chemistry. If you can work out the molecules that produce the complex taste and smell of a great whisky and combine them in the right proportions, they argue, you should be able to create a drink that tastes just as good. But is it really possible to make a convincing whisky within hours in a lab? Together with a group of flavour experts and fellow żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ staff, I braced my taste buds and put overnight whisky to the test.
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The traditional way of making whiskies involves soaking and heating cereal grains to convert their starch into sugars that can be fermented into alcohol. The mixture is then distilled so that the alcohol and other volatile compounds are concentrated, producing a fiery spirit that has a high alcohol content.
Most of the flavour tends to come from what happens next. The spirit is poured into wooden casks and left to mature, sometimes for decades. The molecules in the liquid react with each other, the wood and any residues left in the casks to produce hundreds or even thousands of different substances that can affect the drink’s smell and taste. If distillers use casks that once held sherry, for example, they tend to impart flavours of figs and raisins. Some makers go even further, blending different whiskies to marry their profiles.
These complex flavours are what makes whisky – or whiskey, if it is made in the US or Ireland – so popular. In 2019, global sales hit a reported $80 billion. Which is why new players with new ideas want in.
One is , based in San Francisco. The firm’s chemists map the molecular profiles of alcoholic drinks to identify substances responsible for particular flavours and scents. Then they come up with a “recipe” for a tipple they want to create, source the required chemicals and combine them. Molecules called esters, such as the pineapple-tasting ethyl butyrate, could come from fruits. Sugars can come from sugar cane or maize. Whisky lactone, which has a creamy flavour and normally comes from casks, could instead be sourced from nuts. One of the results of these endeavours is a whiskey called . Its flavour molecules are mixed up in a neutral-tasting spirit overnight and the drink is ready for bottling in the morning.
Yet a whisky is more than the sum of its parts. If you take a particular molecule, it might smell citrusy on its own. But with other compounds around, your smell receptors might cease to detect that molecule or tell you it has a different scent. No one fully understands how and why the combinations exert such effects. “Odour-mixing chemistry is super difficult,” says at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.
A sip of nostalgia
This wouldn’t be such a barrier if we knew the identities of every compound that ends up in a traditional dram. But we don’t, says at the University of Oxford. “Up to 1200 different compounds could be connected to the drink’s flavour. It is unlikely that they could be fully recreated,” he says. Some put it more strongly. “That poignant sense of nostalgia as you sip on a whisky that was distilled while you were in school, or even before you were born, simply can’t be recreated in a lab,” says Becky Paskin, a whisky writer and the founder of the community.
Endless West will only reveal a few of the molecules in its recipe, so I can’t know how Glyph stands up in terms of the number of compounds used. The only way to judge it was to do what makes me happy: get some people together and have a drink. I set up a panel to see how it tickled their taste buds (see “All about the taste”). It had scents of apricot and butter, and tastes of vanilla, caramel and oak. It didn’t convince everyone, but most agreed it was better than they had expected.
Those preconceptions turn out to be important. I offered Glyph alongside traditional whiskies and although no one knew which drink was which, our tasters did know they would be encountering an overnight whiskey and most people guessed which it was. “As soon as you know the brand, price or method of creation, it tastes different to you,” says Spence. The environment we drank in – our homes in this case – might also have affected the taste. Spence has shown that people think a whisky tastes different if they drink it in a different setting: for example, sitting in a room with more wood in it can make the tipple taste woodier.
Endless West is aware of these issues. People who try Glyph blind say they enjoy it, says Alec Lee, the firm’s co-founder and CEO. “We are facing a social problem not just a technical problem. When you aren’t drinking Glyph blind, your perception of it drops considerably.”
But if we see drinks like Glyph as lacking the human touch, perhaps that needs to change. The world is beginning to turn to chemistry for help in making all sorts of other comestibles, including lab-grown meat with a smaller carbon footprint than the real thing. Lee’s firm may operate differently from a Scottish distillery, but its people are still lavishing care on a product. “What we do is also craft,” says Lee. “We aren’t choosing barrels, but we are choosing molecules.”
The taste test
One dark Wednesday night, a select group of tasters lined up five small bottles, each labelled only with a letter of the alphabet. Led by Billy Abbott from retailer The Whisky Exchange, we had assembled digitally to sample two highly unusual drinks. The first was Glyph, a spirit made using molecular profiling to taste like whiskey (see main story). The second was Sayers of the Law, a peaty young spirit put in a “reactor” by its Californian creators Lost Spirits to make it taste older. We also tried three traditional Scottish drams – strictly to make it a fair test, you understand.
Sensory science experts Barry Smith at the University of London and Charles Spence at the University of Oxford were part of the panel, as were whisky writer Becky Paskin and a selection of all-too-eager żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ staff. It didn’t take long to work out which drinks hadn’t been aged in a conventional manner. Here are some of the things the panel said about them:
Glyph
Our verdict: 4/10
“It’s got the smell of a badly made mandarin sorbet.”
“That smells so chemically to me that it really is something I’d use to service my bike.”
“Artificial sweetener but sherberty like dip dabs.”
“Like overstewed tea.”
“I would be tempted to buy it.”
Sayers of the Law
Our verdict: 6/10
“Soapy, sweet, rubber tyres and something clove-like.”
“Kind of like blackcurrant Tunes.”
“Very, very intense even though I’ve watered it down.”
“If you’ve ever chewed on birch bark, it tastes a bit like that.”
