When You Add Water to Spirits (Almost Never)
Why did Whiskey Invite its Enemy to the Tasting?
“We have met the enemy and they are us – and all our friends.” The whisky industry extended an unwitting “invitation” to the whisky Trojan Horse in the 1960’s, sealing its fate. It will remain until industry leaders wake up to smell the smoke. How do we know? Adding water to whisky is a common practice today, yet few realize how it devastates evaluation.
More to the point, adding water significantly destroys both casual tasting and sensory evaluation. Drinkers have no idea why or how, and all are complicit as long as they ignore the science. We will relate the story chronologically, so everyone can understand how water crept in to replace sensory logic.
A Clues and Evidence of the Betrayal
Many whisk(e)y drinkers add a little water to their spirit when tasting. Some add a lot of water, and some get very peculiar about counting drops with an eyedropper. Some drinkers believe they use vials of water from the exact same stream the distillery uses for distillation and reduction to maintain pH and minerality.
What’s wrong with this picture? Adding water has become a necessity for most novices, aficionados, professionals, and sensory evaluators alike. If everyone does it can it be a bad thing? The answer is yes.
How a Simple Decision Changed the Trajectory of Whiskey
The Historic Timeline Part I
1700s: Jerez, Spain. Copita: Tiny, wharf-side “proof-of-quality” tool verifies and seals sherry trade deals, nicknamed “dock glass.” The worldwide distributors of ports and sherries are England, Scotland and the Dutch. The dock glass copita is adopted right along with the fortified wines.
1800s: Copita (tulip) is accepted as popular UK standard household wine/sherry/port glass. Small size perfect for single serving of fortified wines (22% ABV). On the recommendations of the distributors, along with the customs already in place in Europe, the copita becomes the glass of choice.
1900s: Tulip quickly becomes scotch lovers’ chosen glass with its convenient serving size, existing design, and widespread availability made possible through sherry and port popularity. Nearly every household who could afford to drink even the cheapest port and sherry, had copitas at the ready.
“Why do we need another glass?” they asked. “Our scotch demographic already has them,” they said. “Copita holds the right amount for a single serving of scotch,” they said. “New designs would take years to gain popularity and would cost more,” they said. Then they invited copita to come to the whisky tasting. “It’s a no-brainer,” they said.
1900s: Tulips (copitas) quickly becomes scotch lovers’ chosen glass with its convenient serving size, existing design, and widespread availability made possible through sherry and port popularity.
1950s: Scotch, sherry, and tulip (copita) glass gain international acceptance. Malted barley spirits are also distilled in Japan, India, USA, whose drinkers follow scotch protocols. This expansion further enhances the popularity of the “official” tulip glass.
The Historic Timeline Part II
1960s: Scotland hits a roadblock in marketing Scotch to the USA. There was never a problem in Europe, because they have been drinking straight spirits, warm, for centuries. Americans have taken a different turn. Bad booze in the prohibition era was unpalatable. Americans have converted to ice, water, soda, fruit juice mixtures called “cocktails” to escape the horrible taste of illegal alcohol. “Let’s fix this, so we can sell Scotch,” they said.
Industry leaders had the opportunity to step back and take stock of the situation at this point in the timeline. A different glass could have solved the problem. Irrefutable proof: Tumblers were the glass of choice for many bourbon and rye lovers and distillers. Tumblers do not concentrate olfactory ethanol.
We are not sure when evaluators actually adopted these “fixes.” We are convinced they would have been in common practice in England and Scotland prior to the 1960s.
The “Fixes” Involve Adding Water
However, evaluators developed a standard tasting procedure to reduce the numbing effects of strong ethanol concentrated by the tulip glass. New tasting procedures preserved the now-iconic tulip. Over the decades, “safeguards” against nose-numbing appeared in the ritual of tasting and evaluating whisky and other spirits:
- Waft aromas toward the nose with the free hand to acclimate the nose to the strong burn of ethanol. However, this numbs the nose gradually, avoiding the initial olfactory spike of pungency/pain, it still does not prevent numbing.
- Place the glass in successively closer positions to the nose while sniffing to acclimate. This may avoid the pungency, but it does not stop desensitization of the trigeminal nerve endings
- Breathing simultaneously through nose and open mouth reduces inhalation and the number of ethanol molecules impinging on olfactory nerve endings. However, this method dilutes the sample by funneling aromas to the mouth, inhibiting aroma detection with fewer aroma molecules.
- Recommending “do not swirl” the spirit. Fact: swirling promotes quick evaporation of ethanol which numbs the nose. Swirling releases other aromas needed to detect and determine flavor.
- Do not smell. Taste only. Let the retro-nasal do the aroma detecting (much less effective in detecting aromas than combining with ortho-nasal sniffing). Saliva in the mouth dilutes ethanol palate burn. However, the olfactory aroma sample is less than with the ortho-nasal.
- Add a few drops of water to “open up” the spirit. The impression may “open up” because ethanol burn is less. However, added water shuts down all aromas.
“Fixes” Including Adding Water are “Crutches” to Enable Tulip Usage
Most drinkers do not care about the quick ethanol effect, as they do not see or feel the onset of olfactory numbing, and readily adopt the “fixes” to follow the leaders and continue using the iconic tulip glasses. Watch the tasters or experience it yourself. You think everything is all right. Your nose stops detecting pungency after the first strong sniff. However, your nose is not working with nearly the same efficiency, you just think it is. Scotch sales flourish in the American market.
The Historic Timeline Part III
The Glencairn tulip variation derives from the copita, and five Scotch master blenders endorsed it. It became the most widely popular spirits glass ever. Glencairn won Queen’s Awards and serves as an official tasting glass for many leading spirits societies. As a result, glassware manufacturers learned a valuable lesson: any design that departs from the copita or Glencairn will probably fail in the spirits world. Future designers keep the bowl height and diameter as close to the established dimensions as possible to encourage acceptance of minor stylistic changes. How can this possibly be a bad thing?
The tulip takes the world by storm. Every spirit drinker everywhere is convinced by its wide-spread use, popularity and quick adoption by other spirits, that the tulip-ethanol-nose-cannon is the final word in spirits glassware. Adding water will not fix it.
The Final betrayal: Your Favorite Tasting Partner is a Problem
The invitation to the party formed a long-term relationship that is difficult to break. It’s like going to bed every night with a partner of 40 years and thinking “I love-hate him/her so much. How did I get here?”
I love my tulip but I don’t smell what everyone else is talking about.
The betrayal leaves everyone stuck with a traditional glass they love, even though it reduces their ability to smell the aromas that drive much of flavor perception. The diagram shows how a tulip glass concentrates ethanol. We have to ask, “If you would pay $100 or more for a choice bottle of whiskey, why wouldn’t you want to experience the flavor you paid for?” Oh yeah—and a $12 glass can deliver it. Comfortable mindsets and habits shamefully interfere with rational priorities. Forget adding water.
Ancient Chinese Proverb
Three men can make a tiger (repetition can create fact from fantasy). Likewise, two centuries of repetition can make a sherry glass appear scientifically suited to whiskey. To be fair, until recently, even sensory science researchers believed adding water was the only answer. The “fixes” are only contrivances to alleviate ethanol burn. They are evidence enough that the tulip simply does not work as well as we need it to. Science stepped in to late as the alliance was formed.
The scientific community does strange things. They write research papers to describe their findings, but they fail to address practical application in most cases. They write for each other in a language which outsiders cannot understand. The public only finds out about scientific progress when someone on the outside discovers and points it out to everyone. At this point, we at Arsilica, Inc. may be the only supporters of applied glassware science, but only time will tell.
Science Steps In: About Adding Water
The evidence was too important to accept or ignore, so Arsilica, Inc. designed and released the NEAT glass. NEAT diffuses ethanol and keeps the olfactory neurons and nerve receptors available for detection and identification of aromas.
The Physical Science of Adding Water to Whisky: Adding water reduces the ethanol mole fraction at the surface, lowering the surface vapor pressure and reducing the volatile mass transfer across the boundary layer. The perceived opening up results from reduced ethanol vapor and trigeminal olfactory load, not enhanced aroma evaporation. Less of everything evaporated, means less ethanol and aromas. The absence of the ethanol is noticed as the greatest effect because ethanol irritation also subsides. Additionally, a second factor is surface tension which resists molecular evaporation. Water has a three times higher surface tension than ethanol.
Evaporation of long-chain character aromas (higher mass) is restricted more by adding water than are ethanol molecules (lowest mass). At high dilutions to 20% ABV, the process is reversed, as a continuum of water and ethanol releases the esters, but masks other aromas, changing the aroma profile. Scotch blenders take heed, this dilution affects your results.
The Biological Science of Ethanol on the Olfactory
Ethanol is a trigeminal nerve irritant which decreases the ability to detect and identify key aromas in spirits. Studies at University of Illinois prove that ethanol decreases smell-ability.
Adding Water is the Blender’s “Crutch” to Enable Tulip Usage
In a previous presentation, we discussed the blenders’ preference to dilute their blending samples to 20% ABV to save their noses during the blending process. Most whisky drinkers do not know that the reduction of a spirit of 40%ABV to 20%ABV requires the addition of water in an amount equal to the amount of spirit being diluted. This is a 50% dilution. Who drinks it that way? Why blend differently?
In the attempt of the whisky-drinking public to use the same glassware and procedures as many scotch blenders, they have skipped over the significantly high dilution ratio when adding water with an eye dropper to add only a few drops. The higher the ABV of the spirit, the more water would be required to dilute to 20%ABV. If the sample were a 60% ABV spirit, dilution would have to be over 3 ml of water to 1 ml of spirit to achieve 20%ABV. Who drinks it that way? We know of no consumer who adds that much water to their spirit for drinking enjoyment, but it is standard blender practice to save the nose during a long, involved evaluation process. We don’t share that logic.
The problem with diluting to these levels is that it has been proven that dilution to 20% ABV changes the aroma profile of the spirit, and the blenders are a profile that no one understands except the blenders themselves, since most whisky drinkers who add water, only add a few drops. Further information is available in the journal paper cited in the exhibit below.
What Can I Do Instead of Adding Water?
If your reason is “I like it that way,” so be it, but be open to other approaches. We would really look like a bunch of idiots if we said you can’t have it your way. However, remember that you like it that way because there is less burn. Get a better glass. You are sacrificing too much in flavor by adding water to continue drinking from a tulip. The cute little eye dropper trick is a show for the pretentious. ‘Nuff said.
If your reason to add water is palate burn, change your evaluation procedure. Nose the spirit first in an open-rim glass, then determine your formula for just how much water will alleviate palate burn. Note that when the spirit is introduced into the oral cavity, saliva will quickly begin to dilute the spirit.
Taste the sample from a separate glass in which some of the full-strength spirit has been diluted enough to alleviate sharp palate burn. Keep the sample in your preferred nosing glass for reference back to the nose if needed. An alternative is to take satisfactory notes from the nosing glass and then add water to taste, but that eliminates the possibility of returning to the original nosing sample. How NEAT Works
Summary
In summary, tulip glasses concentrate ethanol, and concentrated ethanol impairs your ability to smell. You love your tulip, and you love your whiskey—but which do you love more? A flavorful experience is priceless, and the right glass can transform it. Adding water cannot restore the aromas and flavors that the wrong glass conceals. To recover the full experience, change the glass—not the whiskey.
Understanding and teaching are the key to resolving discussion disputes and combatting ignorance. We are not here to make you feel good. “I like it that way,” is now a statement synonymous with “I am not open to any other ways to enjoy my whiskey (spirit).” We are here to tell you the truth. Do with it whatever you wish.
One more caution: There are many companies out there selling water to unsuspecting drinkers which is purported to be the same as the water used to make the spirit. This is not true. Special treatment is given to water prior to distillation, fermentation, maturation, and final proofing. There will be no bottles of that same water. Attempting to match pH and minerality is a guessing game. Caveat Emptor.
