Thursday July 29th - Started my whisky cask by rinsing it out and filling it up with hot tap water. This process is supposed to help swell the staves on the barrel so that a water tight seal is created. The barrel company claims you only need 4-6 hours...but they say it may take up to 7 days. So I decided I was just going to let it roll for the full seven days. The cask never leaked to the point where water was dripping out. It really just seeped out so the edges of the barrel and the spout looked wet.
Wednesday August 4th - Went down to the Holiday Wine Cellar and stood in the whisky isle for a while searching for the perfect whisky to put in my mini cask. Decided on the Bruichladdich Rocks, a Islay single malt whisky. I chose this one based on the fact that it is a single malt, its non chill-filtered and it has no coloring added. I didn't want anything compromising the whiskies color or taste right off the bat. This whisky is also a non peated Islay. So I broght that home and loaded it into the cask, making sure I kept a little bit of the original for comparison and then I sealed it up. Now we wait. The glorious thing about this little experiment is that I don't have to wait years for results. Since the cask is so small it will produce results in weeks/months so I don't have to wait years. So my plans are to wait and take a small sample for comparison every two weeks. Once the changes start to dwindle I'll pull the plug and empty the cask. I imagine that it will only take a few months to tap out and be as good as its going to get.
Just an interesting side note...I saved some of the water that I used to prep the cask and the smell of the water is pretty crazy. It actually smells like whisky. The color had also changed to a very faint amber color. I let a few of my friends smell it without telling them what it is and they all thought it was alcohol. So with that being said I guess that is a small lesson in why the maturation of whisky in barrels is so important. If it can impart that kind of aroma on water I can't wait to see what it does to the whisky.
So as it stands now the first tasting/comparison will be on August 18th...more to come.
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