Airing out before bottling

[whiskeytango]

Been reading a lot on the home distilling sites about airing out their product prior to proofing/drinking/bottling. Just wondering in the commercial world if this is common practice of if you just go strait to the bottle after proofing?

Or are them specific spirits that you will air out, maybe your white whiskeys but not necessarily your vodka due to the filtering?

[Sherman]

Short answer. Do you see any of the commercial producers advertising that they are doing this? If they were this would be a big selling point. Have you seen it advertised?

Scientifically, introducing oxygen into your product oxidizes good organics to bad organics. ethyl acetate becomes acetaldehyde and so on. With alcohol you need to be thinking anti-oxidant.

There is one exception. Barrel aging. You definitely want to get the proper surface to wood ratio and the proper oxidation to develop the wood tannins. I believe because of my life time conditioning to the flavor profile to the 53 gallon barrel, I can't accept the more tannin and woodier small barrels. It is just conditioning.

[Mike Fiore]

One thing is for sure I always learn somthing from my buddy Sherman. I have a theroy on wine making air is wine's worst enemy but in every rule there are exceptions. At what point in time do you introduce oxygen and for what reason, we introduce oxygen to wine almost immediately after fermentation simply to eliminate traces of H2S that was hidden in the wine. Whiskey and high alcohol spirits, I do not know. Thats when i depend on friends like you Sherman to set me straight. I bought a 30 gallon barrel from a reputable barrel co. to test it and see what it would do to my brandy, & personally i think in two years it did a great job. I was so excited that i ordered 4 more barrels from the same people, and boy what a dissappointment. The 4 brand new barrells didnt even hold a candle to the first one. Some questions that came to mind were, what is the desired ABV prefered when you first put it in wood and secondlly i have some french oak barrells that were used for chardonnay wine, they are medium toasted but if you look at them you would probably call them very light toasted, would you recommend useing them for rye whiskey. Personally i do not think they are toasted enough to do what i want it to but i understand that people are buying used wine barrells to age whiskey. What is your opinion on that sherman? Thanks.

[nick jones]

Been reading a lot on the home distilling sites about airing out their product prior to proofing/drinking/bottling. Just wondering in the commercial world if this is common practice of if you just go strait to the bottle after proofing?

A distiller would have to go to great lengths to keep his spirit from touching air. I haven't heard of any (other than the liquorists) that attempt to exclude air from their products.

A home distiller's practice of "airing out" his spirit may or may not have some effect on home-distilled spirits, but I suspect that due to the (typically) superior distillation techniques used by pros, and the inevitable exposure to air during proofing (proofing water is chock full of air) and bottling (empty bottles are pretty full of air as well), most pros don't find any benefit in such tediousness.

That being said, in my experience a freshly bottled spirit undergoes significant changes within the first 2-6 weeks immediately following bottling (both desirable and undesirable), and my guess would be that the introduction of oxygen has something to do with it.

Sherman, I'm not all that averse to acetaldehyde, and I tend to despise ethyl acetate, but I recognize that they both can have their place in a well made spirit. While calling one "good" and the other "bad" is certainly bold, I'd hardly call it scientific. And are you sure that acetaldehyde is the product of an oxidative reaction with ethyl acetate? For some reason, I remember it being the other way around... something like acetaldehyde oxidizes to acetic acid which esterifies with ethanol to produce ethyl acetate? (or to use the more approachable flavor descriptors: green apple skin oxidizes to vinegar which esterifies with ethanol to produce solvent-like)?

Nick

[PeteB]

I suspect "airing out" is not just oxidation. It is also evaporation of some of the more volatile components of spirit just off the still.

If new spirit is immediately sealed in glass then I assume these volatiles are trapped.

If any of you more scientific types can tell us what is happening I would like to know more.

[Mike Fiore]

Nick, you are bringing up some very good points thinking about it we aireate our spirits from beginning to end probably more then once. from when it falls from the parrot to the holding tank to proofing until we bottle it. so i dont think it has that big of an input, simply because the large amount of alcohol will protect it from extreme oxidization as a matter of fact one would have to be very careless to do some damage. What i want to point out to you is, let me explain to you how we messure VA in wine, we simply take 10 mls of wine pour it into a catch still, we collect 100 mls of distillation, and we titrate that product to messure the right amount of va that exists in that wine. there is a number that is acceptable all over the world i always had a theory that if you can smell it or you can taste it you have already exceeded that number, however i have seen some pretty good brandys made from wines that had traces of VA. can you explain what is taking place. another problem that wine makers experience occassionally is h2s. what do we do to get rid of h2s, we use copper sulfate i have seen wines with a h2s problem go into a copper still and with some good airiation come out of there 100% clean. i remember when i was a young boy and studying hearing one of my teachers saying "i dont messure a great winemaker on how many gold medals he wins but on how many wines he brings to the market." yeah sometimes you have to work to get fine results... if its not broken dont fix it.

[JohninWV]

From what I've always heard, aldehydes turn to acids and acids turn to esters. You need lots of oxygen and alcohol to make it all happen. But those esters can be both good and bad.

I haven't found a case where limited oxygen has made a finished spirit turn worse, given it stays clean.

[PeteB]

Here is a link to a similar discussion I started a couple of years ago

http://adiforums.com/index.php?showtopic=2071&hl=