CoCo Bottle Club #Four

Project U#1972KV

Sep 06, 2022

The Soul—what CoCo Bottle Club is all about

As promised, in this edition, we will discuss the bottle of our first project: Karuizawa Vintage 1972. As part of their Vintage Cask range at 39 years old, this is one of only 523 bottles that were available worldwide.

The website Whisky Base gives a 91.83 rating out of 100 points and shows that it is only found on one online shop at € 45,279.35.

What to expect from this bottle:

Website: Hedonism

Nose: Notes of coconut, raisins, rubber, caramel, vanilla and mixed grains.

Palate: Dominated by spices in sherry, with a tendency towards petroleum and rubber.

Finish: Long and spicy, before it turns down to a sweet vanilla and oaky aftertaste.

Website: Keypingers Blog

Nose: Leather dominates! In addition there are nut and cereal flavors, brittle, caramel, a few fruity flavors and a stronger salty spice. Slightly smoky underlaid and actually, relatively untypical compared to the darker karu's. Soft lime juice and wet cardboard come in addition to it.

Palate: Wow ... full, fat, spicy and very peppery with chilli, orange pepper and china grass. Sweet, more and more assertive honey character. Oak wood. Herbs and here too little fruit. However, packed together, it results in a very ingenious combination and taste - TOP!

Finish: Long - sweet and still powerful. Honey, vanilla, salt, white pepper, some leather and cardboard, as well as caramelized sugar. Polarizing with a lot of spice until the end!

Our next edition will discuss the artist collaborating with CoCo for this project.

The Road of Santiago — a journey from curiosity to connoisseurship

I have decided to share with you my road into the whisky world. My name is Santiago, so that's how "The Road of Santiago” was born.

If you want to read our previous post, go to this link.

This time let's finish what we started in the last newsletter, analyzing the maturation process, this is a bit technical, but I will try to make it easy.

Today let's start with the anatomy of the tree. This point surprise me a lot, I did not imagine this was even a thing. I mean most of us know that wood contains annual rings, but it also contains vessels that lead from the core to the bark. These transport water and nutrients, it is logical once you think about it. But for whisky, these vessels are not good since they make the cask staves leaky. So the wood must be cut in special patterns so the annual rings stand vertically. These types of cuts waste more wood than a normal cut for planks, making the staves for the casks more expensive.

Normal cut for timber Specila pattern for staves

Then the staves are cut into trapezoidal wanes, the angle of the cuts depends on the diameter of the cask, and then the wood must be dried until it reaches a level of less than 10% of residual moisture. This process can be done in modern drying chambers or left mother nature, and solar heat, it does not affect the final result.

Now for more technical stuff. Another critical step comes into the scene.

Once the wood is less than 10% moisture. A thermal treatment is needed for the production of the cask, to achieve the typical shape, and for the whisky to mature properly. This treatment also brings to life the wood, making it suitable for the maturation process.

This thermal treatment consists of two steps. First, the "toasting" of the wood when it is heated up to 200ºC for about 30 min, to be able to bend, but this also brakes the structure of the wood, this makes the cellulose split into wood sugar and caramelizes, and the lignin partially converted into vanillin. In the second step, after the barrel is created, the inside has to be burned for 3 to 5 min to extinguish the remaining water.

The amazing part is that all of this is visible if we cut a stave that suffered this process, we can see a red ring in the wood beside the charcoal layer, this can be several millimeters in depth, this is called the "red layer". And is the separation between the activated and the natural wood. Up to this layer, the heat has penetrated and the wood is activated for flavor extraction.

The casks can be used more than one time, but the process deteriorates the inside of the cask a lot! So there is a process of rejuvenation that consists of removing the old inner charcoal layer and charring the inside again. This procedure releases the vanillin and caramel taste in the wood again. This process can be done only a few times but it helps to reduce the costs of the final product.

With all this technical information we can now grasp the chemical reactions that take place inside the cask. Between the alcohol, and the wood. These reactions basically what they do is to increase the amount of esters and aldehydes in the whisky. The alcohol also extracts tannins, vanillin, and caramel from the wood.

All of this creates the final flavor of the spirit, but for this, we also have to consider the finishing process, which extracts the remains that exist on the casks from the original use, for example, bourbon, oloroso, port, etc.

The final thing to take into consideration for the maturation process and a personal favorite is the so-called "Angels Share". This is due to the liquid "breathing" through the wood, this is just so mystical, that a liquid can breathe!

But since in the hotter months, the liquid expands, and in the colder months the liquid contracts, causing the inevitable evaporation of water and alcohol, we can say the liquid is breathing.

This "Angel Share" depends a lot on the specific temperatures and location of the warehouse, so from one distillery to another, it can change a lot.

On average the liquid can lose between 0.5% - 1% of its alcoholic strength and about -2% of water per year. And one of the regulations that come with the name is that to be called whisky it has to have more than 40% abv. This is important to take into consideration from the beginning of the process because the longer the maturation the more alcohol it loses.

After all of this, we can see why the years on the cask are so important, and why they are used as a marketing selling point!

I guess the phrase "the good things in life, take time" has its place in the whisky industry!

Meme of the week: