Can 20-Year-Old Booze Be Made in a Week? Science Says Yes.

Meet the company that now has the patents to prove it

April 3, 2017 9:00 am

As an older person I agree: Older is better. Usually.

But what if we didn’t have to do the whole agonizing aging part to get to that “better” place? One booze company’s figured out how to, well, get in with the old, and quickly.

Lost Spirits, the tech-forward booze company that’s probably the only distillery to ever get a shoutout from Wired (“could end up rebooting the entire [distillery] industry) and its own TEDx Talk, just won two key patents for its “fast-ageing” process.

Using a proprietary Thea One reactor, the company claims it can force a chemical reaction within an unaged spirit to give it the same molecular structure as a 20-year old rum in about a week’s time.

Should the booze industry freak out? Not yet.

The company is at an early stage, for starters. And rigid legal guidelines about different spirits mean that you won’t be able to simply label your booze as aged if it’s not, you know, actually aged.

That said, a number doesn’t always equal quality (see our preference for Scotches with no age statement). And we’re all for a rather strict industry that continually looking to its past—and not its future—coming up with some savvy, tech-focused solutions.

But if Lost Spirits still isn’t delivering your age appropriate spirits in time, we suggest these other quick-age hacks:

The Whiskey Stick
Take your younger, lesser spirits, throw in this American white oak stick, instantly add the illusion of char and oak flavors.

Oak Bottle
Infuse your beer, cocktails and wine with oak-aged flavors in a few hours.

Wasmund’s Barrel Kit
The Virginia distillery Copper Fox, which already speeds up their spirits aging process by adding apple wood and oak chips inside their barrels, offers up a two-liter American White Oak mini-barrel that’ll get you proper aging in just 4-6 months.

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