This video clip is of me raking barley at the Bowmore Distillery in Bowmore, Islay, Scotland, in March of 2007. In it, I am stating my opinion that raking barley in Scotland is a much better Spring Break activity than going to the beach. It is very humorous to me that, in less than a year's time, this pleasure trip became valuable career experience.
In case anyone does not know yet, I am now a chemist at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) National Laboratory Center in Beltsville, Maryland. There are two main projects on which I work: pre-import and Alcohol Beverage Sampling Program, as well as personal research. On any given day I may be determining alcohol content by distillation, solids content by evaporation, fusel oil content by gas chromatography (GC), synthetic color by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and/or organoleptic flavor or characterization determination (by taste), etc. I have not had much of a chance to
become immersed in my personal research, as I have only been on board for a little over three months, but I am having a great time optimizing and working toward validating some pre-existing HPLC methods.
The myriad Scotches I tried while in Scotland (in particular in this cute little establishment with the best bartenders on Islay) have helped develop my palate, and so is helping me distinguish between Scotches and bourbons. Not too long before the trip to Scotland, I thought one might as well suck on landscaping as drink a Scotch. How wrong I was. My acceptance of Scotch has really opened my palate to so many things that I had previously thought were inedible (olives, aged cheeses, many types of quality alcohols...).
I also attribute my open mindedness to a friend who shared our former home for a few months in the summer of 2004. He was always setting up, or having others set up, blind taste tests, in order to challenge any preconceptions of how something should taste. At the pub mentioned above, I had the bartenders give me a blended Scotch and the most "user friendly" single malt Scotch to see if I could tell the difference between the two. I could (for the record, I preferred the single malt). Before my job at TTB, I had never tried a bourbon. Now I set up taste tests to experience the difference between different brands and to see if I can tell the difference between bourbons and other whiskeys. It is always an adventure.
This picture is really dark, but it is of Arbeg's mascot dog "Shorty" and a fill flask. I did not know at the time that it was a fill flask, I thought it was a cool volumetric flask for people who can't hit the single mark (I have thought about such designs before, especially when diluting the very last obtainable 5 mg of a proprietary standard...). But now I know that it is for checking the fill volume of bottles of alcohol. Interestingly, of my first set of ten samples that required this test, two were Scotches.
In this close-up picture of the flask, you can see the graduations on the neck if you look closely.
(Also, a picture of the real, live Shorty.)
I have been told that, of my eight lab mates, I am the only
one who has toured a functional distillery (not to mention five in two days!). The stills we saw were stunning. Every distillery that we toured has a slightly different shape to their stills, which they claim contributes to the unique flavors in their particular product. Also, each keeps the stills nice and polished. It is the law in Maryland that alcohols greater than 24% alcohol by volume cannot be disposed of down the drain. As we have to dispose of many samples with higher alcohol content, the waste alcohol is recycled (distilled and then denatured for use as fuel) using a still. Our still is not anywhere near as big, but it is also copper, and I am tempted to polish it to the shine that it deserves.
Due to the nature of the products, I rarely get to try wines or malt beverages (the spirits keep just fine on the room temperature shelves of the lab, not so much for wines and malt beverages). Also, part of the mission is to collect revenue, and much more revenue is collected from distilled spirits than wines and malt beverages due to the alcohol content. Historically, I have been good at detecting different notes in wines and beers, but to be able to tell one grape from another or one region from another is impossible for me right now. But equally as intriguing is the potential for developing instrumental methods for such classifications. This is a really exciting field, and each day I am happy to be a part of it.
