Bison Shit Dept: Brugal 1888's "Horizontal Aging"

[Capn Jimbo]

And here we go again...


Recently the "Rum of the Month" over at Hamilton's commercial joint was/is the super-duper-premium Brugal 1888. If you've hung around here much you should know that the super-dupers have to promote something super-duper special to justify the super-duper price.

So what are Brugal 1888 and their faithful servant, the Preacher, saying?

Distilled from 100% Dominican Republic molasses in the company's continuous, two-column still, the fresh distillate is aged in used, medium-toasted, American white oak casks between five and fourteen years. After aging in American oak casks, the maturation process continues in select European first-filled sherry casks.

Unlike most of the other Brugal rums, the casks for Brugal 1888 are aged horizontally, ensuring more contact between the wood and the spirit.

Hoop, there it is! Special, super-duper horizontal aging, unlike all those ordinary, cheap vertically aged rums. And why is this special? Well, it's because it offers "more contact with the wood" - implying, of course, some kind of super-duper aging to produce their super-duper premium rum. Sure.


Oh boy!!

Now to a skeptic like me, that's like a steaming fresh one drawing horse flies in the barnyard. Of course I had to explore this marketing claim and see if maybe, possibly this was actually true. I doubted it.

My first contact was with Chuck Cowdery, a true bourbon expert.

Now if anyone knows about barrel aging, it's Chuck Cowdery. When I posed Brugal's proposition (and my skepticism), he agreed that the choice of horizontal or vertical aging has everything to do with the efficient use of warehouse space, and barrel moving, but not with aging itself. Good stuff, but that wasn't quite definitive enough.

So I entered Phase II of the horizontal vs vertical debate.

As always, I went to the net using my trademarked and very professional research techniques and voila! Mississippi State University Agricultural Division actually publishes a page of container shapes including barrels, pyramids, spheres and the like, with plug-in formulas for volumes of differing fill levels. Go Bulldogs!

Using MSU's keen program, plus my own calculation and conversion programs, I started at what would be a minimal angel's loss of about 1%, and calculated the wood contact for three different angel share losses, and headspace...


The Results

Wood contact at 1.2% angel's loss and headspace

Horizontal: 2940 sq in.
. . vs . .
Vertical: 2913 sq. in.

Result: at a minimal angel's share loss, there is no practical difference with horizontal showing a tiny 0.9% advantage. But a 1% angel's share in the tropics is really quite unrealistic. Let's try this on for size...

Wood contact at 8.1% angel's loss and headspace

Horizontal: 2320 sq in.
. . vs . .
Vertical: 2715 sq. in.

A dramatic change. Advantage is clearly vertical storage, with a huge, 7.2% advantage! But then again, an 8.1% angel's loss and storage headspace is a bit extreme. So let's pick a realistic loss...

Wood contact at 4% angel's loss and headspace

Horizontal: 2732 sq in.
. . vs . .
Vertical: 2843 sq. in.

And yup, once again vertical storage shows a clear and substantial advantage of 4% (actually 3.92)! Interesting note: it seems for every 1% increase in angel's losses, vertical storage gains a near equal percent of wood contact.

Fascinating!


Bottom Line

The real truth is that the only time the barrels are really even is when they're both absolutely full or nearly so. At a 1% loss they are for all practical purposes the same, but after that vertical storage takes a clear lead, and keeps pulling away as the angel's share increases. If wood contact is the name of the game, the super-duper premium Brugal 1888 has it super-duper backwards. Put that in your breakfast grits.

BTW the storage position for distillers is usually determined by warehouse space, moving ease and/or use of pallets. You'll find both vertical and horizontal used, but with one important difference. The other distillers haven't tried to make a marketing claim out of it.

They know better.

By now if you don't understand that distiller hype, dutifully regurgitated by their butt kissing web shillers, should not be accepted - all hope is lost for you. Go with the program, spend your money, pretend that the hype is gospel, allow your expections to control your experience and...

Brag about your horizontally aged 1888. Delicious!

BTW, MRI studies have shown that expectations alone increase pleasurability. But that's another post...

[RT]

I was up at Premier Liquors last week looking for something new and different to buy and try. Almost pulled the trigger on this stuff, but then I noticed that the bottles were all stored vertically on the shelf. Presume that would neutralize any advantage gained from the horizontal barrels.


*******
Capn's Log: I was just thinking about "RT", and wondering why he hadn't left the reservation lately and, poof! Hoop, there he is. Very funny post. But remember the bottle goes horizontal again when you drink it, lol...

[Capn Jimbo]

A word from Chuck Cowdery...


There are only a few great spirits writers and observers who also stay active and accessible to us ordinary mortals. Chuck Cowdery is one of them, and earns my highest respect and appreciation for his talent, experience, knowledge and honesty.

Bravo!

Please recall that it was this man who I first thought of, and contacted on this matter of Brugal 1888's ridiculous claim that their "horizontal aging" for "increased wood contact" justified their super-duper premium price and marketing. But I've been around the pond a few times and if it walks like a duck...

Cowdery verified that Brugal's claim was unsubstantiated in his experience, and it was then I actually analyzed their claim for various angel shares (1, 4 and 8%) and made an amazing discovery. Not only was Chuck right on the money, but their claim was exactly backwards.

Actually vertical storage showed more wood contact (not that it matters anyway). Of course, I sent Chuck the link, and he honored me with a couple of very informative emails, to wit:

Cowdery: FYI, aging barrels vertically is practiced within the whiskey industry, but no one claims it is for the sake of the whiskey. The claim is that it ages the same, orientation is irrelevant. Producers who age barrels vertically do it primarily so they don’t need ricks and can move the barrels on pallets with a forklift.

He then cited a number of well known Canadian and American distillers who use vertical storage. Even more interesting...

Cowdery: Also, wood contact applies to extraction, nothing else, and if they’re using used barrels, extraction is minimal at any event, as 86% of the compounds in the barrel are extracted during the first use. Evaporation, oxidation, and other chemical changes simply happen in time. Wood contact is irrelevant.

A Summary for Monkeys


1. Horizontal or vertical aging is meaningless. If anything, vertical storage offers more wood contact. Brugal is full of it.

2. Storage position has everything to do with warehouse efficiency and movement of barrels, and nothing to do with aging results.

3. Wood contact is an extraction process relevent for the first fill, but quickly becomes irrelevent after that. Most of what the wood has to offer is gone after the first fill.

4. It is time, oxidation, and other chemical reactions (encouraged by the breathing of the barrel), more than wood extraction that improves a spirit.


*******
Special Note: I defer to Cowdery on most of this, which my own research confirms to a large degree. However, there are certainly differences between ex-bourbon and ex-sherry barrels, if not between individual barrels which need to be considered as well.

As has been well said elsewhere, no two barrels are alike. Each, like human beings, vary from one another and each has a different effect on the aging spirit.

[Uisge]

If you weren't aware (and you should be aware of this), Buffalo Trace is in the midst of a project started in 2001 with the selection of 96 oak trees from Missouri to be part of "Single Oak project "http://www.singleoakproject.com/, where every part of the tree is used for barrels, with the wood being cut into staves with coarse grain or fine grain, and from top and bottom part of the tree for a total of 192 unique sections, different types of char where used, and different locations used for maturing.

The control group in the project is the 2 types of whiskies poured into the said unique barrels. The bottles were recently released to the public.

Chuck Cowdery had a blog post about it back in May (here).

I would think this experiment and it's results blows Brugal's claim out of the water.


*******
Capn's Log: What?! You doubt the Capn? Buffalo Trace's ongoing, magnificent and massive experiment was covered long ago in the "From Cane to Glass" section, in a post entitled "Oak... Part Four" (here). In Trace's ongoing experiment they will have examined 1,396 different combinations of wood, with all results being carefully logged and examined.

Not that it matters, but horizontal vs vertical aging was not one of them (although they did compare storage on wooden ricks vs concrete floors). Blowing out of the water, or blowing in general, is the Capn's specialty.

[Uisge]

D'oh! I should have had faith that the Single Oak Project was already known and discussed here...I'll do better due diligence in the future.