Jack Daniel’s warehouse project halted as whiskey fungus infests local town
fortune.com
fortune.com
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/us/whiskey-fungus-jack-da...
The traditional notion of the angels share and the devils cut are basically irrelevant in large scale industrial distilled beverages where they are filtered at many stages and frequently shipped at higher concentrations of alcohol than the consumer will experience and then watered down with distilled/pure water by regional bottlers for tax related reasons. For reference the phrase on the nearest bottle I could grab (a bottle of Captain Morgan Rum) is “Bottled in Australia for Captain Morgan Rum Co by Diego Australia 4 Distillers Place Huntington NSW 2148 From local and imported ingredients”. The key words there being “bottled” not made, and “local and imported” which is basically how they’re describing the combination of imported higher strength original spirits and added local water to get the 37.5% alcohol by volume product that they then know how much money to give the Australian government for when they sell to their distributors. It’s not all done this way of course, you find plenty of more expensive spirits that aren’t watered down, are bottled where they are made and all of that’s very normal. But when Jack Daniel’s talks about their concerns about the flavour being affected by having filters in the airflow of their dry cask storage warehouses, it’s more than a little bit driven by the remaining traditionalism left in their craft… since the eventual watering down of their products by regional bottling plants represents a pretty significant variable in their flavour that they are ok with.
From my understanding almost all spirits are watered down, things like Everclear being the exception. The modern still (which is quite old) produces alcohol over 90%, older less efficient stills use just as much fuel but have a higher methanol content which is not good for drinking and why they have fallen out of favor for distilling alcohol for drinking, still common for things like distilling essential oils.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11812901/New-images...
And I think you are right to be, we see a fence, a fire hydrant and a couple signs and the sign in the background of one of the pictures is clean. The fence is the only one that could be proof but we don't know where that fence is and any wooden fence neglected will develop some sort of blackening from fungus. Where are the pictures of all the houses and cars covered in it? These pictures should be easily available if things are as bad as they make them out to be but are lacking. Has anyone tested this to show it is the whiskey fungus? Another thing lacking, many things can produce this effect.
Ultimately the point of my post was not to say that this is not a problem, just to say not to react without consideration.
When I first came across this story I referenced my collection of books of fungi (which is sizable, I love fungus) and they all lacked any mention of this fungus. Some internet searching showed that this fungus has been known for quite some time and despite that I could not find any evidence of it outside the immediate vicinity of a barrel house, within a few hundred feet, why is this not well known? Why are there not links to such problems in other parts of the world? this fungus is known throughout the temperate world and we don't have the piles of cases it should have, just pictures of barrel houses around the world coated in it.
There could be something about the region which makes it a bigger issue than the rest of the world but no one is providing the proof of it. I live two miles from a distillery and pass it every day, they do have a blackening on the exterior of their building which could be this, but in the decade they have existed it has not even gotten across the street, perhaps someday it will become a problem but the ariticles I have seen on this and my searching have not convinced me of that.