barrel rotation

is the practice, largely confined to the whisky industry, of moving barrels around in the warehouse during maturation. The placement of a newly filled barrel in the warehouse can have a great effect on the mature whisky, especially in large distilleries with multiple warehouses or warehouses of great size, like the nine-floor behemoths in Kentucky. Temperature and humidity differences among warehouses in sometimes far-flung areas or in the different floors of a large warehouse can make the whisky in a barrel evaporate faster, extract more or less from the wood (and at varying rates), or even allow the whisky to mature to an age beyond normal.Barrel rotation is one way to balance these effects, albeit a labor-intensive one. The warehouse manager will devise a scheme to shift the barrels in lots from one area to another. The rotation evens out the effects of being in a cool bottom floor with some time in a hot, dry top floor, or balances a few years in the south side of the warehouse with a few in the north. The desire is to have the whiskies coming out of the barrel be as similar as possible.

Barrel rotation is not widely used, especially in non-palletized warehouses, because of the labor and risks involved in manhandling the heavy barrels. Other methods for achieving aging similarity include tightly spaced single-story warehouses, where smaller groups of barrels experience a relatively similar environment, and heated warehouses, which artificially create a uniform temperature and humidity throughout.

See also barrel; élevage; maturation;, whisky.

Broom, Dave. The World Atlas of Whisky: The New Edition. London: Mitchell Beazley, 2014.

By: Lew Bryson