Reade Huddleston

Water is an essential component to producing high-quality spirits. Knowing how it affects your mash is what can take your products from good to great.

• water
• mash water
• water analysis

Distillers need to understand the potential for variability when taking batches from small scale to large scale, and vice-versa.

• scaling recipes
• lab still
• nano distillation

There are multiple ways to accomplish the critical task of measuring alcohol content in the distillery. Here are four newer methods that are gaining popularity.

• distilling
• measuring alcohol
• proofing

Properly gauging ethanol in a distilled spirit is essential to ensuring proper reporting and avoiding heavy fines from the TTB.

• Measurement
• Ethanol
• Proof

While ABV and proof are the most common methods for measuring spirit strength, they aren’t the only ones. Here’s a look at two alternative methods that you should know.

• ABV
• Distilling
• Proof

For distillers of any size, the concept of flavor drift can be confusing and worrisome—yet it’s an inevitable part of any product’s life cycle. Here’s what to know about flavor drift and how it can affect your products.

• sensory
• distilling
• flavor

It’s important to know the specs, but take nothing for granted. In-house quality testing and monitoring of ingredients can help you ensure consistent spirits and avoid big headaches down the road.

• distilling
• sensory analysis
• quality testing

The spicy compound 4-vinyl-guaiacol occurs in many drinks, but among distillers, it’s best known as a flavor component of certain whiskeys—especially ryes. Whether you want to dial it up, dial it down, or just dial it in, here’s what to know.

• Rye Whiskey
• 4VG
• Fermentation

It can be time-consuming and expensive to establish and train a well-run descriptive tasting panel—but it’s a powerful tool for craft distillers to assess their products for flavor, aroma, and consistency.

• Testing
• Descriptive Analysis
• Quality assurance

While there are limitations—and scoring high on likeability is no guarantee that a product will succeed—properly conducted hedonic testing can be a powerful tool for distillers and others in the beverage business.

• sensory science
• hedonic testing

When distillers need sensory evaluation to identify outliers or differences in samples, look no further than discriminative testing. Here’s how it works.

• Sensory
• Sensory Evaluation
• Discriminative Testing

When it comes to analyzing the results of sensory evaluation, statistics can be a complicated yet powerful tool to use in the pursuit of higher-quality spirits.

• Analysis
• sensory