For almost as long as distillers have been putting spirits in barrels to mature, people have been trying to speed up the process. Traditionally, aging involves letting the rise and fall of seasonal temperatures push whiskey into a barrel’s wood, then out again, leaching flavor and color along the way, a process which might last anywhere from a few years to several decades.
Before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 imposed regulations on how whiskey could be made, “speeding up” often meant dosing clear alcohol with caramel and soot, or worse, to make it taste old. But other techniques that were developed in the late 19th century — like heated warehouses that could replicate a full quartet of seasons several times a year — became accepted, and even a common practice among established distilleries.
Over the last decade, some distillers have taken to using barrels much smaller than the standard 53-gallon size, increasing the surface-to-volume ratio inside and thus the rate at which whiskey cycles in and out of the wood.
Bespoken’s technology is in some ways the next step in this evolution. Instead of a full barrel, the company uses thousands of half-pinky-size wood chunks it calls “microstaves,” which it places, along with unaged or partly aged whiskey, in a steel tank. By rapidly raising and lowering the pressure and heat inside, the device, which Mr. Aaron and Mr. Janousek call the “activator,” forces the whiskey in and out of the wood several times a day.
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