In case you missed it, there’s a cottage trade on the market of devices and doohickeys that allow you to age your individual whiskey, rum, or whatnot, all with out the trouble of getting to construct a warehouse and fill it stuffed with hooch. These units tackle many kinds: tiny barrels that look cool in your bar prime, items of wooden you drop into your bottle, and different sorts of gizmos that each one revolve round quickly exposing a spirit to oak.
Now you may add one other, higher-tech choice to the combination. Fashionable Barrel Firm’s Moba Sensible Barrel is a plug-in, Wi-Fi-enabled urn that ingests a bottle of booze and spits out a barrel-aged model after per week.
How does it work? In the event you’re accustomed to the sorcery of commercial-scale accelerated getting old operations like Misplaced Spirits, you’re heading in the right direction. Moba retains a few of its tech near its vest, however one in every of its founders—this can be a facet hustle for him and one other skilled chemist—says it includes warmth, oxygen, and wooden, “similar to in an actual barrel.”
I’ll attempt to describe it as a cross between a stress cooker and a pint-size water heater. A small block of wooden referred to as an M-Stack (extra on this in a second) attaches to the top of a slim metallic pole, which dangles into the middle of a metallic flask that you just fill together with your chosen spirit. You seal it up and hit the ability button, then the unit gently heats the wooden and, apparently, agitates the spirit with vibration or another sort of motion.
Fashionable Barrel presents 5 sorts of M-Stacks ($13 every, single-use), all constructed from American white oak however handled in another way earlier than they’re prepared to be used. Candy, Easy, Baking Spice, Oak, and Smoke aren’t probably the most intuitive names, however Fashionable Barrel gives some concepts on how every is greatest used and a really useful sort of spirit for every. The corporate despatched me two wooden tiles to make use of for testing together with the Moba itself.
Curiously, the Moba was initially designed for getting old blanco tequila, although the founders say they’ve tried it on all the pieces from baijiu to Southern Consolation and have had good outcomes getting old mezcal, Everclear, and “barreled” cocktails just like the Manhattan.
For my testing, I began with the OG: a cheap however one hundred pc agave blanco tequila, paired with the Baking Spices tile. After one week within the Moba, what emerged from the canister was certainly a big shade of brown, in line color-wise with a reposado or añejo tequila. I tasted the earlier than and after spirits facet by facet. The unique, unaged tequila was clear and flippantly lemony, with touches of white pepper and a recent end that helped it punch nicely above its price ticket. After the Moba getting old, I discovered the complete character had modified, and never for the higher. The nostril had change into decidedly smoky, nearly like a forest hearth was burning within the distance. The identical went for the palate: Tannic wooden and burning underbrush dominated, and the sweetness one expects to search out in a reposado tequila was wholly absent. I had a robust choice for the blanco right here, and I didn’t discover the aged model pleasant by itself or as a mixer.
For spherical two, I reached for a basic: a bottle of Previous Crow bourbon, as an experiment in “further getting old” one thing that’s already hung out within the barrel. Out of the bottle, Previous Crow is pushed by its cereal origins, with dominant notes of peanuts and popcorn. It’s a innocent sufficient whiskey, however may it’s improved by per week within the Moba with the Candy M-Stack? This time I skilled completely different outcomes: The aged Previous Crow—I prefer to name it Older Crow—was decidedly darker in coloration and featured a way more aggressive wooden affect on each nostril and palate. This was a superb factor and a foul factor. Whereas the whiskey wasn’t smoky the best way the tequila was, the wooden components have been fairly heavy: drying and tannic, stripping away a number of the pure sweetness of the bourbon. Then again, the aged whiskey discovered its nuttiness amped up, and even generated some thrilling notes of cinnamon and clove—basic components you’d discover in an actual whiskey barrel. The catch was that I didn’t actually benefit from the aged model extra, discovering it a bit unbalanced and too targeted on considerably harsh, uncooked wooden components. Whereas I appreciated the added complexity, I might say quality-wise the 2 whiskeys resulted in a tie.