In case you missed it, there’s a cottage trade on the market of devices and doohickeys that allow you to age your individual whiskey, rum, or whatnot, all with out the trouble of getting to construct a warehouse and fill it filled with hooch. These gadgets tackle many kinds: tiny barrels that look cool in your bar high, items of wooden you drop into your bottle, and different kinds of gizmos that every one revolve round quickly exposing a spirit to oak.
Now you possibly can add one other, higher-tech choice to the combo. Modern Barrel Company’s Moba Smart Barrel is a plug-in, Wi-Fi-enabled urn that ingests a bottle of booze and spits out a barrel-aged model after every week.
How does it work? If you’re aware of the sorcery of commercial-scale accelerated growing older operations like Lost Spirits, you’re heading in the right direction. Moba retains a few of its tech near its vest, however one in every of its founders—it is a aspect hustle for him and one other skilled chemist—says it entails warmth, oxygen, and wooden, “just like in a real barrel.”
I’ll attempt to describe it as a cross between a stress cooker and a pint-size water heater. A small block of wooden known as an M-Stack (extra on this in a second) attaches to the top of a slim metallic pole, which dangles into the middle of a metallic flask that you just fill along with your chosen spirit. You seal it up and hit the ability button, then the unit gently heats the wooden and, apparently, agitates the spirit with vibration or another sort of motion.
Modern Barrel presents 5 kinds of M-Stacks ($13 every, single-use), all produced from American white oak however handled otherwise earlier than they’re prepared to be used. Sweet, Smooth, Baking Spice, Oak, and Smoke aren’t essentially the most intuitive names, however Modern Barrel supplies some concepts on how every is greatest used and a beneficial sort of spirit for every. The firm despatched me two wooden tiles to make use of for testing together with the Moba itself.
Curiously, the Moba was initially designed for growing older blanco tequila, although the founders say they’ve tried it on every thing from baijiu to Southern Comfort and have had good outcomes growing older mezcal, Everclear, and “barreled” cocktails just like the Manhattan.
For my testing, I began with the OG: a cheap however one hundred pc agave blanco tequila, paired with the Baking Spices tile. After one week within the Moba, what emerged from the canister was certainly a big shade of brown, in line color-wise with a reposado or añejo tequila. I tasted the earlier than and after spirits aspect by aspect. The unique, unaged tequila was clear and evenly lemony, with touches of white pepper and a recent end that helped it punch effectively above its price ticket. After the Moba growing older, I discovered your entire character had modified, and never for the higher. The nostril had develop into decidedly smoky, nearly like a forest hearth was burning within the distance. The similar went for the palate: Tannic wooden and burning underbrush dominated, and the sweetness one expects to search out in a reposado tequila was wholly absent. I had a powerful choice for the blanco right here, and I didn’t discover the aged model pleasant by itself or as a mixer.
For spherical two, I reached for a traditional: a bottle of Old Crow bourbon, as an experiment in “extra aging” one thing that’s already frolicked within the barrel. Out of the bottle, Old Crow is pushed by its cereal origins, with dominant notes of peanuts and popcorn. It’s a innocent sufficient whiskey, however may or not it’s improved by every week within the Moba with the Sweet M-Stack? This time I skilled totally different outcomes: The aged Old Crow—I wish to name it Older Crow—was decidedly darker in colour and featured a way more aggressive wooden affect on each nostril and palate. This was a very good factor and a nasty factor. While the whiskey wasn’t smoky the way in which the tequila was, the wooden parts have been fairly heavy: drying and tannic, stripping away a number of the pure sweetness of the bourbon. On the opposite hand, the aged whiskey discovered its nuttiness amped up, and even generated some thrilling notes of cinnamon and clove—traditional parts you’d discover in an actual whiskey barrel. The catch was that I didn’t actually benefit from the aged model extra, discovering it a bit unbalanced and too centered on considerably harsh, uncooked wooden parts. While I appreciated the added complexity, I’d say quality-wise the 2 whiskeys resulted in a tie.
