Home Distiller

Hey all,

Got a bit of a puzzling question for you guys...

We all know wood aging smooths out liquors, and from what I understand (have read on this site) its due to two main reasons:
1) volatiles evaporation through the porous wood
2) The addition of vanillins and tannins (and other flavors) from the wood itself

Now, I have heard that the way Jack Daniels ages their whiskey is by rotating barrels every year from a warmer to colder environments, in order to facilitate mixing of the liquor and wood. Yet at the same time i have heard barrel aging in a warmer climate allows the liquour to smooth out and age faster.

My question is, what method would you use if you wanted to smooth out your liquor in the two ways mentioned above, but as fast as possible. Would you just store in a very very hot place? or would you try and temperature cycle it from very hot to very cold temperature?

Thanks in advance guys

What you are refering to is some aspect of distress aging.
Read through some of these threads for more on the subject

I think that whole 'distress aging' is a bunch of nonsense.


I think you will find that any homedistilled hootch is going to age just fine in a small barrel no matter what you do with it. The only way you are going to detect any difference is if you are sampling identical recipes aged in thousands of different barrels. You just can't make comparisons with no real baseline... put well make likker in a quality small barrel and just set it aside for a while... It'll be fine. You won't be able to discern any difference from keeping it in a certain environment or not.

I tried once - I kept my hooch and oak chunks quite warm and after a couple of days it was way too astringent. It's like the warmer temperature helped suck out all of the wood tannins in two days I think it was kept @ 90 F.