Tag: taint

A cask is a water-handling vessel long before it is a spirit-handling one. Staves are seasoned in the open air for years of rainfall, bent with steam or hot water, leak-tested with water and pressurised air, and rehydrated with water when they dry out — and the wood taint that ruins a barrel is now traced to the seasoning yard. Every one of those waters has a specification, and the first line of it is the same as the one on a blending water certificate.

Every municipal supply is required to carry residual chlorine. Chlorine reacts with phenols to make chlorophenols, and microbes turn chlorophenols into chloroanisoles — taint compounds that whisky panellists detect at a few nanograms per litre, below the limit of detection of routine GC-MS. This is why free chlorine in blending water is written as a hard zero rather than a number.