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| Rum Pouring From a Once Used Bourbon Cask |
There's no shortage of bourbon barrel-aged
wines and beers, but recent years have shown a trend of sharing between
bourbons, wines and beers. Today,
tequila is also jumping on the band wagon aging many of their expressions in
the once used bourbon casks.
You won't find bourbon notes in a bottle
of Tabasco, but one of the pioneers for using bourbon barrels in the food
industry, Tabasco's regular pepper sauce is aged for three years in oak, the Reserve
sauce spends eight years in the barrel. Since bourbon is essentially the only
industry still using oak that's deemed Kosher, Tabasco purchases all of its
barrels from whiskey companies. When
the used barrels arrive in the hot Louisiana warehouse, the workers will fill them
with water and sweat them. Tabasco
workers grind out the char, place their own metal hoops around the barrel, and
create a valve on the barrelhead to allow the mash to ferment. They add salt to
the barrelhead, too, to form a hard crust when fermentation is complete. After
Tabasco adds vinegar in the manufacturing process, one barrel of pepper mash
yields 10,000 2-ounce bottles. And much like the bourbon-making process,
there's no speeding up the aging process.
"We've tried bulk aging, aging in fiber glass and different
containers, but that wood barrel is what works best for us. "The mash breathes in the wood." Also like bourbon, the Tabasco barrels absorb
much of the product's essence. Over the Tabasco barrel lifetime of 55 to 80
years, that's a lot of pepper mash.
