In case you missed it, there’s a cottage business on the market of devices and doohickeys that allow you to age your personal whiskey, rum, or whatnot, all with out the effort of getting to construct a warehouse and fill it filled with hooch. These units tackle many kinds: tiny barrels that look cool in your bar high, items of wooden you drop into your bottle, and different kinds of gizmos that each one revolve round quickly exposing a spirit to oak.

Now you’ll be able to add one other, higher-tech choice to the combination. Modern Barrel Company’s Moba Smart Barrel is a plug-in, Wi-Fi-enabled urn that ingests a bottle of booze and spits out a barrel-aged model after every week.

How does it work? If you’re acquainted with the sorcery of commercial-scale accelerated getting old operations like Lost Spirits, you’re heading in the right direction. Moba retains a few of its tech near its vest, however one in all its founders—it is a facet hustle for him and one other skilled chemist—says it entails warmth, oxygen, and wooden, “just like in a real 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 steel pole, which dangles into the middle of a steel flask that you just fill along 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 kind of motion.

Modern Barrel provides 5 kinds of M-Stacks ($13 every, single-use), all constituted of American white oak however handled in another way earlier than they’re prepared to be used. Sweet, Smooth, Baking Spice, Oak, and Smoke aren’t essentially the most intuitive names, however Modern Barrel gives some concepts on how every is finest used and a really useful kind of spirit for every. The firm 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 every part from baijiu to Southern Comfort 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 authentic, unaged tequila was clear and flippantly lemony, with touches of white pepper and a contemporary end that helped it punch properly above its price ticket. After the Moba getting old, I discovered the whole character had modified, and never for the higher. The nostril had turn out to be decidedly smoky, nearly like a forest fireplace was burning within the distance. The similar 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 powerful desire for the blanco right here, and I didn’t discover the aged model fulfilling by itself or as a mixer.

For spherical two, I reached for a traditional: a bottle of Old Crow bourbon, as an experiment in “extra aging” one thing that’s already hung out within the barrel. Out of the bottle, Old Crow is pushed by its cereal origins, with dominant notes of peanuts and popcorn. It’s a innocent sufficient whiskey, however might it’s improved by every week within the Moba with the Sweet M-Stack? This time I skilled completely different outcomes: The aged Old Crow—I wish to name it Older Crow—was decidedly darker in colour and featured a way more aggressive wooden affect on each nostril and palate. This was a superb factor and a nasty factor. While the whiskey wasn’t smoky the way in which the tequila was, the wooden parts had been fairly heavy: drying and tannic, stripping away among the pure sweetness of the bourbon. On the opposite hand, the aged whiskey discovered its nuttiness amped up, and even generated some thrilling notes of cinnamon and clove—traditional parts 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 centered on considerably harsh, uncooked wooden parts. While I appreciated the added complexity, I’d say quality-wise the 2 whiskeys led to a tie.