Invention takes edge off cheap liquor
Medieval alchemists tried to turn water into an elixir of immortality; at an Alvin industrial park, Persedo Spirits is perfecting the only slightly-less-difficult task of turning bad liquor into good.
Craft distillers are popping up across the country and looking for ways to make their young whiskeys and volatile vodkas more drinkable. Persedo’s invention fine-tunes the flavors into something much more enjoyable.
Anyone who has taken a shot of cheap booze knows the burning flavor and searing smell of low-quality liquor. Even if you don’t drink, you’ve probably seen an old man take a swig and grimace as he chokes down his tough-guy beverage.
Most people assume alcohol causes that unpleasant burn. But the real culprits are aldehydes, ketones and other nasty chemicals. Persedo has figured out how to remove them and enhance the liquor’s pleasant flavors.
“We take that burn, that edge, and we put that to the back and let some of the underlying distillate flavors come to the front,” explained Ricky Ford, Persedo’s founder. “Most people don’t want that burn anymore; they want something that they can
taste.”
Ford’s father was the first in the family to experiment with removing whiskey’s burn in the 1980s by passing it through a vacuum device that aerated the liquid. Anyone who has decanted red wine knows that allowing it to breathe allows some of those negative flavors to escape.
“He was able to strip out some of those harsh impurities and distilled spirits like methanol, butanol, propanol and aldehydes,” Ford said. His father called his device the Satinizer, since it created a smooth finish, and obtained a patent in 1998.
Aeration, though, exposes the drink to oxygen, which will degrade it over time. Ford took the device to Texas A&M University’s chemistry department to better understand how it worked, and how to make it better.
Benjamin Moser, an award-winning professor who worked with NASA and has 50 patents, put before and after samples through a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer. He found that in addition to removing impurities, Ford’s machine removed 10 percent of the alcohol.
“Well, that’s no good,” Ford said. So he recruited Moser and an assistant,
Greg George, to build a lab in 2007 to improve his father’s device.
That was a dead-end. But Ford, Moser and George developed a new process in 2013 that adjusts sevenparameters of alcoholic beverages. The machine uses a vacuum, low pressure, temperature, ultrasonic waves, nitrogen and carbon dioxide to “polish” the liquor.
“We were allowed to explore, and that sense of discovery and adventure really is what made this project a success,” George said. “The big one is the discovery of the use of ultrasonic energy. The ultrasonic probe produces so much energy that it actually tears water molecules apart.”
Six years and two patents later, Persedo has an industrial-scale device that can process 6,500 gallons in four hours. Ford is building a second device to install next month at a Texas distillery, which does not want to be named.
A master distiller can control each parameter with a control panel to dial in the exact flavor he or she wants, Ford said. Rather than purchase the machine, distillers pay Ford $3 for every gallon they polish, and Persedo maintains the equipment.
Ford is betting his machine will help distillers make more appealing products and boost sales, allowing Persedo to make back the capital expenditure. As a self-identified whiskey nerd, I was skeptical.
I watched the machine polish a mid-range bourbon and tasted before and after samples. The processed bourbon was considerably smoother with richer flavors.
To see if it would last, I tried the samples again several weeks later, and the polished version still tasted good. But to be clear, polishing will not turn a burning 5-year-old Evan Williams Black Label into a 23-yearold Blue Label, with its subtle vanilla, tobacco and leather flavors.
Other companies try to instill those flavors using questionable techniques such as adding wood chips. But Ford insists his process only strips compounds out or transforms them, it doesn’t introduce any new substances. Subtraction and transformation, though, can produce unusual characteristics, such as mango.
“We’re not simply matching some better-quality whiskey; we are actually producing a wholly unique profile. A unique expression,” George said.
Polished liquors will appeal to consumers who don’t like the burn. The right distillation could lead to dramatically improved sales to this under-served market.
To me, creating new kinds of whiskey, rum, tequila and vodka is a much more exciting prospect than imitating existing drinks. Persedo’s polishing offers distillers a new tool to create something unique in little Alvin, Texas.