What Makes Tennessee Whiskey Unique?
Here’s What Makes Tennessee Whiskey Unique, According to Science
When it comes to Tennessee whiskey, it’s all about the Lincoln County Process, aka LCP. Basically, wood from sugar maple trees is chopped, stacked in piles, and burned to create charcoal. Freshly distilled whiskey is then filtered through the charcoal, imparting the mysterious flavor that makes Tennessee whiskey, well, Tennessee whiskey.
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But what’s really going on here? Researchers from the University of Tennessee believe they have found out and presented their findings at the American Chemical Society Spring 2019 National Meeting & Exposition. It’s the first time someone has systematically studied the effects of the LCP process.
“Although Tennessee whiskey and traditional bourbon both have to be made from 51 percent corn and aged in charred oak barrels, the distinction is really this filtration step,” Trenton Kerley, graduate student and key member of the research team, said in a news release.
The Science in the Art
Leading the research was John Munafo, Ph.D., from the University of Tennessee. Munafo and Kerley wanted to probe the fundamental chemistry behind LCP, but to do that, they’d need a distilling partner. Enter the Sugarlands Distilling Co. (from Gatlinburg, Tennessee) and its Roaming Man Tennessee whiskey.
Researchers took some unfiltered Roaming Man and began by identifying all of the aroma-active molecules (odorants) in the spirit using a technique where scientists can basically smell the individual components as they separate them out of a sample. They then determined the flavor importance of each of these compounds by diluting them until their odor could no longer be detected. Finally, they determined the quantity of the key odorants using a technique called stable isotope dilution.
The researchers then chucked the whiskey in with sugar maple charcoal, provided by Sugarlands, and left various batches to soak for one to five days. Afterward, the team spiked the batches with the previously identified odorants to determine how much of each had been removed by the LCP step.
Kerley mentions in the news release that it wasn’t the fact that the whiskey underwent a change in chemical composition that surprised him, but the degree of change. “I was expecting [the charcoal] to have an effect, but I wasn't expecting as large of an effect as we saw in some of the compounds … levels of some compounds declined by up to 30 percent after LCP,” he said.
With this understanding, Munafo and Kerley now want to fiddle with the parameters of the filtration process, varying the contact time between the whiskey and the charcoal, and the whiskey-to-charcoal ratio. They also want to look at the sensory impact of different compound combinations.
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“There are some ‘strong’ flavor compounds present in low concentrations, but then there are ‘weaker’ aroma-active compounds such as branched alcohols that are present at high concentrations,” Munafo said in the news release. “Even though they might not be potent aroma-active compounds, they could have an effect like a perception of burning that our senses pick up.”
What’s the Point?
You might be wondering if all this science is really any use. Does it have the capacity to improve whiskey? Munafo believes it does, saying he and Kerley are trying to provide distillers the tools to produce better and more unique whiskey. “We want to give them levers to pull so they are not blindly trying to get the flavor target they want,” he said in the news release.
We can all drink to that.
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