Bespoken Spirits - the startup that's using tech to age whiskey

by Startacus Admin

Bespoken Spirits is an innovative Silicon Valley startup that has created technology to tailor spirits for aroma, colour and taste in a matter of days

The spirits industry is a $500 billion one that isn’t overly fond of change or disruption. Disruption is what startups are good at, however, so when today’s startup decided that waiting a minimum of 3 years for a whiskey to be matured and ready to drink was an outdated method, the industry was not too welcoming.

You don’t have to be a whiskey connoisseur to be aware of the notion that the older a spirit, the better; we hear characters in TV praising whiskey all the time for its age, so it would be difficult not to have absorbed that knowledge. What is harder to passively learn is that being slowly matured in wooden barrels means that much of the taste of the spirit comes from that barrel - anywhere from 50% to 80%, in fact. 

Silicon Valley-based startup Bespoken Spirits has decided, however, that this is simply unnecessary. Rather than waiting years, even decades for a whiskey to mature and be drinkable with the taste you want, why not use science and technology to speed up what they refer to as an antiquated process?

Bespoken Spirits can extract the elements of barrel maturation that are key to the whiskey - aroma, colour, and taste - in a matter of days instead of years. They can also do so with more precision and control over the result. They do this by exposing the spirit to different woods under pressure which, as well as cutting the time it takes, also cuts the amount of wood used by a huge 97% and increases spirit yield by 20%.

This method means that there are a massive number of unique, bespoke tastes that can be made in short time, and as well as their own line of spirits, the startup is offering ‘maturation as a service’ and ‘customisation as a service’, so anyone can have their own personalised spirit without waiting a decade.

Bespoken Spirits has already won several awards, including Double Gold at San Francisco’s World Spirits Competition. In October, they raised $2.6m in seed funding from investors including Clos de la Tech owner T.J. Rodgers and Derek Jeter, a name you might know from baseball.

Perhaps we need a new page on the site to sell our Startacus single malt.

 

 

 

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• #innovation
• #alcohol
• #whiskey
• #food tech

Published on: 21st December 2020