Bourbon Barrel Nose

[buflowing]

To me, there's nothing like nosing a glencairn of what I consider a good off the shelf bourbon, like Woodford or a Four Roses. Stick your nose in. Sniiiiiffffff. Aaahhhhh. Damn. That's gooood. Like sticking your nose into a freshly dumped barrel.

Anybody able to achieve that at home? If so, how do you do it? Big barrel, long time?

[MDH]

What happens in the barrel is exactly what would happen if you took some toasted / charred oak pieces, threw them in home distilled spirit which was left in a carboy/demijon with a piece of cloth over the lid, and left it away somewhere for several years.

Aging is not just extracting oak into spirit, it's also the spirit reacting with the extracted oak chemically over time, and also reacting with oxygen in the air .