The modern whisky business is driven forward by innovation, and distillers have many avenues to explore in creating bold and dynamic flavors. Sometimes the focus is on the mashbill, using uncommon grains like rice or quinoa, or employing unique strains of grains like Jimmy Red corn or Orkney-grown Bere barley. Some smoke their grains with things other than peat—including mesquite wood and even sheep dung. Others play around with finishes, tapping casks that previously held unusual contents or virgin barrels made from exotic woods.
One area that’s seen great attention recently is maturation. It seems like a simple enough process without much room for innovation: Barrels are loaded into a warehouse where they’re stored until coming of age. But some whisky makers have turned that notion on its head—putting their distillate through unconventional aging regimens, which run the gamut from gimmicky to far outside the box. Here we’ve rounded up some of the strangest examples.
The Great Outdoors
Many distillers boast that their whiskies showcase distinct terroir, meaning their location, climate, and geography influence their flavors. But some from rural Canada try to take that notion to the next level—literally aging their whisky in the wilderness.
Over in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Black Fox Farm & Distillery eschews rickhouses altogether and stores its barrels outside. Black Fox’s barrels are rested out in the open, braving heavy rain, snowfall, and temperatures ranging from -44°–101℉. Based in bear country near the Canadian Rockies, Bearface has a process called “elemental aging.” While its barrels are not left to open air, they are matured in ventilated and repurposed shipping containers that are placed outdoors, exposed to the harsh Canadian elements.
Sea Changes
Rather than focusing on temperature swings, some distillers are more concerned with introducing motion—finding a way to make the whisky slosh around inside the barrels more, leading to greater flavor extraction from the wood. Traditionally, distillers do that by rolling their barrels regularly, but one of the more far-flung alternative methods involves using cargo liners and ocean waves.
These whisky makers pack their barrels into shipping containers, which are loaded onto transport ships that tour the globe on voyages that can last for months on end. Jefferson’s is one of the foremost brands that taps this process, sending each of its Ocean Aged batches on a long voyage that can encompass up to 30 ports on 5 continents. Japanese brand Kaiyō keeps its whiskies at sea for three months, departing Osaka and traveling eastwards through the Panama Canal before making landfall in Liverpool, England. There’s also Never Say Die, a brand from the UK that ages its whiskey in both Kentucky and England, broken up by a six-week-long journey across the Atlantic.
Learn more about ship-aged whiskies here.
Staying Afloat
Water-aged whiskeys are something of a rare bird. Unlike their ship-aged cousins, which sail around the world, these whiskeys instead stay in rickhouses that float on water. The barrels themselves don’t actually travel anywhere, but they are still exposed to the ebb and flow of the water beneath them.
The main player in water aging is O.H. Ingram, a whiskey company based out of the small riverbank town of Columbus, Kentucky, near the Tennessee border. Ingram’s whiskeys are all aged entirely on floating barrelhouses: retrofitted barges that are moored to the banks of the Mississippi River. The brand says that, in addition to the waves, the barrels also benefit from day-night temperature shifts and greater exposure to inclement weather, which creates a distinctive flavor profile.
Indiana craft distillery Hard Truth cut its teeth on the process in September, releasing Grounded in Truth: a single barrel of rye whiskey that spent time on the water. After aging for a year and a half in Hard Truth’s Rackhouse No.1, the whiskey was transferred to a floating rickhouse—a windowed structure large enough for one barrel, built on a pontoon floating on the distillery’s pond—where it rested for around 4 years.
Staring at the Abyss
On the topic of odd maturations involving water, there's also the curious case of Maison Benjamin Kuentz, a French outfit that partly ages its whisky under the sea. After an initial maturation on dry land, the label's Uisce de Profundis French single malt was taken to the Iroise Sea—a section of the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Ushant, and isle near southwestern tip of the English Channel—where it was plunged over 65 feet below sea level and remained for up to a year.
The concept borrows heavily from a practice in the wine world, with several winemakers aging their expressions in underwater abysses where UV rays from sunlight can't reach and temperatures are constantly cold. Notable examples of deep sea abyssal-aged wines include Tenuta Del Paguro, which has been aging wine underwater since 2008; Wine of the Sea, a brand based out of Wisconsin that ages its wine in the Adriatic Sea; Greek brand Gaia Wines, which ages its Thalassitis Submurged for several years in cages deep beneath the Agean Sea; and Leclerc Briant's Abyss Champagne.
Taking the Long Road
Other brands have solved the motion problem by turning not to water, but to the open road. These distillers have employed tractor trailers to take cross-country trips with whiskey barrels in their cargo hold.
Country music superstar Brad Paisley’s whiskey brand, the aptly named American Highway Reserve, is one example. Made in partnership with Bardstown Bourbon Co., the whiskey was partly blended from some 90 barrels that spent 11 months being hauled in a “rolling rickhouse”— a semi-truck that was legally bonded as a whiskey warehouse in Kentucky—that followed Paisley on tour across the country, spanning 7,314 miles across 25 states. The trailer was padlocked and had to remain sealed the whole time, so the whiskey couldn’t be sampled until it arrived back in Kentucky.
Vermont-based WhistlePig is known for pushing the boundaries, so its 2022 road-aging project naturally pulled out all the stops. Roadstock rye started its life as a selection of rye whiskeys, half were finished in Bordeaux barrels and the other half were aged entirely in virgin oak. All of the barrels were loaded onto a truck that headed west along Route 66, making stops along the way. After arriving in California, the truck was taken to Firestone Walker Brewing Company in Paso Robles, where some of the whiskey was transferred into beer casks before hitting the road for the long trek home. The whole trip accounted for around 6,000 miles.
Facing the Music
One of the more esoteric maturation methods uses sound, rather than physical motion, to promote interaction between the whiskey and the barrel. The exact process differs from producer to producer, but generally it involves hooking up speakers to barrels and blasting them with loud sounds—typically music, but not always—at very low frequencies. The idea is to use sound waves to create vibrations and ripples within the whiskey, agitating it and achieving a similar outcome to what’s seen in ship-aged or road-aged whiskies.
Blackened, the whiskey label made in collaboration with metal band Metallica and master distiller & blender Rob Dietrich, notoriously uses a process called Black Noise Sonic Enhancement. The team uses a proprietary device co-developed by speaker manufacturer Meyer Sound Laboratories to continuously pummel Blackened whiskey with music from Metallica at low frequencies throughout the finishing process.
But Blackened isn’t alone in harnessing the power of sound to influence whiskey. Louisville-based Copper & Kings has long employed sonic maturation as part of its brandy production, filling its aging cellar with a steady stream of music 24/7. When the distillery entered the whiskey game in 2023, the team decided to apply that same process to its very first bourbon, which is still in production today. There’s also American Metal, which finished its The Disciple Sonic Aged whiskey using amplified engine sounds from a custom-built motorcycle.
