My friend is a chemist and we both like whiskey so we thought experimented this.
You can speed up the aging of whiskey by increasing the surface area of charred wood. It takes 3 years in a barrel, a couple days (hours? maybe? I'm an engineer not a scientist) if you splinter it into wood chips and char them first and agitate the solution.
What you can't really speed up is the oxidation of the tannins which for all we know (barring experimentation) are a key part of the flavor profile. What you could do is mix in oxidizers like bubbling oxygen through it.
The combination of oxygen and ethanol has a name though: "liquid rocket fuel." The idea of combining heat, ethanol, oxygen, and agitating at bottling volumes sounded kinda scary.
I hope people don't try it at home without knowing what they're doing.
More realistically though, the biggest danger comes from leaky apparatus and an open flame. The horror stories come from home distillation over gas burners. Electric heat is plentiful and home stills would most likely be basically kettles.
I think an ultrasonic cleaner can speed it up, just make sure your vessel with the alcohol in it is sealed first, so no vapors come out. I've tried it before, it isn't perfect, but it works better than you'd expect for maybe an hour or two of time spent.
My friend is a chemist and we both like whiskey so we thought experimented this.
You can speed up the aging of whiskey by increasing the surface area of charred wood. It takes 3 years in a barrel, a couple days (hours? maybe? I'm an engineer not a scientist) if you splinter it into wood chips and char them first and agitate the solution.
What you can't really speed up is the oxidation of the tannins which for all we know (barring experimentation) are a key part of the flavor profile. What you could do is mix in oxidizers like bubbling oxygen through it.
The combination of oxygen and ethanol has a name though: "liquid rocket fuel." The idea of combining heat, ethanol, oxygen, and agitating at bottling volumes sounded kinda scary.
I hope people don't try it at home without knowing what they're doing.
More realistically though, the biggest danger comes from leaky apparatus and an open flame. The horror stories come from home distillation over gas burners. Electric heat is plentiful and home stills would most likely be basically kettles.