Education

An American Standard bourbon barrel will hold 200L of spirit, a normal butt will hold 500L, a Sherry Hogshead can hold 245L, and a Cognac type cask will hold 300L.

Distillers live in a world where their mistakes don't catch up to them until many years after they have made them. This is because, at the very heart of distillation, lies a mystical and esoteric art called maturation.

Sampling is a method that is used in the whiskey industry to collect a small taster from the already aged whiskey that is stored safely in the oak barrels. It all begins by opening the barrel at its bung hole, where a device known as a bung puller, is attached, and twisted clockwise to remove the bung that is used to seal the hole on the side of the barrel.

In the first of a series of educational articles, Anthony Gannon one of the final year brewing and distilling students from IT Carlow writes about the gauging process which we recently used to determine ABV, volumes and determine dry goods volumes required.