Tag: bottling

A demineralised water can be certified at 18.2 MΩ·cm, sub-ppb on metals and sterile on plate count, and still arrive holding about eight milligrams of dissolved oxygen per litre — because no purification step on a distillery skid is designed to remove it. Here is how much oxygen proofing water actually delivers into a bottle, why it almost never matters in whisky and sometimes matters a great deal elsewhere, and what other drinks industries do about it.

A distillery can specify blending water to a few parts per million and then undo the work in the final ninety seconds, by rinsing the empty bottle with whatever comes out of the mains. Residual rinse water dilutes the spirit in one direction only, and whatever was dissolved in it stays in the bottle after the water has gone. Here is the arithmetic, and why the industry rinses with air or with spirit instead.

A large share of the whisky that crosses an ocean does so as spirit in a steel tank, not as bottles in a case. The water that takes it down to bottling strength is then added at the destination — which means the last and largest ingredient in the bottle was sourced thousands of kilometres from the distillery, by a company whose name is not on the front label.