What's All This Then?

Where to start? At the beginning, I guess. In the beginning, the universe expanded rapidly. Then, the dust collected into galaxies and stars and planets, and then the planets cooled and corn grew and people mashed it up and turned it into whiskey. Eventually, someone made a barrel. People found that the whiskey stored in this barrel turned in the something magically delicious, and they called it Bourbon. Sure, there’s more to it than that, but for the purposes of this blog, that’s all you really need to know.

It's so cute!

This past Christmas, my buddy Jim bought me my very own whiskey barrel. It’s a cute little thing, two liters big and, well, barrel shaped, this own little stand and spigot and bunghole (no giggling). Now, Jim has had a barrel for a while now, so I get the principle of it, and I’ve had Bourbon and other beverages that he produced. However, the only experience I have with any sort of home brewing is chatting with Troy at work about his efforts in brewing his own beer. All I really knew about the barrel was that Jim put stuff in it, and tasty stuff came out. So, I knew that if I was going to produce anything at all I would need to do some research.

In the course of this research, I read a blog that suggested not just putting alcohol in the barrel and letting it age, but taking a more scientific approach, taste testing the contents of the barrel weekly, and taking notes and making observations on the progress of the product. Something about this approach resonated with me. Partly, I think, because I consider myself a scientist, both by profession and in nature. Also, I like the idea of keeping track of everything, keeping everything organized, not just throwing booze in a barrel and waiting three months in seeing what happens. If the bourbon comes out bad, or strange color, with no continual record of what happened during that time, I have no idea what went wrong, or how to fix it. Even aside from that, even if the bourbon comes out good, or even just passable, I would like to be old to see what goes on when so that if I want to change part of the process next time, I know that maybe in week six the colors start to darken more or even out, or whatever.

I will be keeping my scientific journal in a physical notebook, but I also wanted to transcribe my notes into something more permanent on my computer working also include photos that will be hard to insert into a physical notebook, and also expand on the quick notes jotted down in pencil. I figured that if I was going to put all this in Word, I might as well just blog it. That way, perhaps others can read about my experiences, and either learn something from what I’ve done, give me advice on how to proceed in the future, or just be entertained by my attempts to make bourbon.

So, this blog will be the record of my attempts to aid bourbon in my very own 2-liter oak barrel. I am a few weeks in already, but I will post my first a few observations as separate entries just for the sake of simplicity and uniformity.