I'm not really reading too much into this, but I just had to relay an interesting absinthe related emotional response I just had...

I was watching a program on the History Channel about whiskey and at the end they mention in passing that whiskey is the most complex spirit on the planet. I imminently thought to myself "well I don't know, absinthe is pretty damn complex".

Obviously absinthe's history as caused it to lose 100 years of evolution, and integration into society. It simply never had much of a chance to settle in to our regular subconscious in the way whiskey has. Even though absinthe is essentially coming from a position of second birth, and the fact that, beside reproductions and nearly untasted-by-the-masses pre-ban samples, absinthe as we know it now might as well be a modern invention, not lending itself to much general respect and appreciation among the general spirit-consuming community.

But damn it, absinthe has got to be the most complex spirit I've ever tasted. And I love whiskey, don't get me wrong. I'm having some delicious scotch right now, but for the most part, on a very general scale, scotch tastes like scotch, Irish like Irish, bourbon mostly like other bourbon, etc... But ever absinthe I've tasted since my falling in love with the spirit, is completely different from any other. I've had almost 20 different modern brands of absinthe (and one sample from the 50's-60's) and while they all have similarities, their characters are drastically different.

As much as I enjoy scotch, to me its just a matter of (broadly speaking) the older the better, some more rich and focused than others, and does it taste like burning or actual flavor.

I've ranted far more than I thought I would... sorry... drink up!

Honestly? Not me. Once anything has sat in wood too long, it just tastes like wood to me. I think barrel aging should add flavor and nuance, but after 20 years, it just turns the booze into oak. yechh.

I find an incredible range of flavours in different kinds of whisky. Single malt Scotch has its own character, as does Bourbon, but that's not a lot different from VDT blanches being different from Spanish absentas. And when you get into different regions for Scotch you can find wildly different whiskies between Speyside and Islay drams. In absinthe the different herbs scream for attention so much that it can be difficult to spare attention to pinpoint subtle flavours, whereas in whisky the flavour is so dominated by the grain and oak that it's easier to look for flavours of fruit, candy, wine, and other things.

Anything spirit that is aged in oak is going to develop a bunch of new flavours from the spirit reacting with the oxygen and charred wood. The reactions produce chemicals that are flavour components in many other foods we know. Part of the excitement for me is that, although a single malt Scotch is only made of malted barley, yeast, water, and peat smoke, putting it in charred oak is going to result in mostly unpredictable developments of flavour. Glenfiddich has a banana-like taste to me, while Lagavulin is like drinking bacon. They're both more complex than that but neither of those ingredients are in those whiskies. I don't consider older to mean better, either. Sometimes older means blander and neutered, and sometimes it means more refined and subtle. It depends on what you're looking for at the time, and sometimes a wild, intense 10-year old whisky is just right.

It's something that I'm becoming more interested in looking at in absinthe lately, too. Finding what flavours are made by the combinations of herbs rather than looking at the herbs themselves.

I agree, there are a wealth of subtle flavors in every sip of scotch, whiskey, etc... But compared to the herbal assault of absinthe? I don't think there's much comparison between them.

I think it's just not easy to determine which is more complex, per se. They're so different and the complexity takes such completely different forms that I can't say one is more or less complex than the other. I'll put it this way, when drinking whisky I usually taste a wealth of ingredients that aren't in it, and only a few (malt, peat smoke, cask) that are. Whereas with absinthe I tend to taste a lot of ingredients that are in it, and not nearly as many that aren't. If that makes sense.

Now, in terms of intensity, yeah absinthe is way the hell more intense than all but the most smoky peat monsters.

Edit: I am noticing that I naturally think of single malt Scotch when I think about whisky, and forget about other types. I'm going to have some bourbon right now and remind myself!

Sure it makes sense.
Now, stretch your taste buds and imagination and see what else you can taste in a glass of absinthe. If Absomphe can taste the leather upholstery of a '54 Jag 140 in a glass of wine, imagine the flavors waiting to be discovered in a glass of absinthe.

Well, one could run samples of a wide range of whisk(e)ys and absinthes on LC/MS or GC/MS, and find out which one literally is more complex. Perhaps even weight the final score in relation to how easily sensed a particular flavor compound is.

[/übergeek]

Yeah, I'm working on that lately.

It's like I said, the flavours of absinthe are so intense that it can often be hard to find the softest subtleties.

At the same time, I think people really don't give credit to the enormous number of both changes that take place and flavours produced when a spirit is aged for many years in charred oak. I'm not completely convinced that absinthe, although stronger flavoured, is more complex because of the amount of ingredients put in it to begin with than whisky, which has a lot of flavour and aroma compounds produced while in the cask.

I believe recognizing good, complex taste whether from wine, beer, whiskey, absinthe, etc... is as dependent on taste as it is life experiences. That's why we don't have many 18 year old wine critics.

That's certainly true.

I'm having a Blanton's single barrel bourbon now. I still haven't taken a sip because it smells so awesome. I had it once before and I remember not being terribly impressed by it. I'm surprised by how much of a sherry aroma it has for not being aged in a sherry cask.

I concur, Joe. It takes time, experience, and plenty of thoughtful practice to develop good tasting chops.

On the GC/MS issue, I know that this type of analysis could indicate the number of compounds and what those compounds and elements are, but the issue is whether the presence of compounds and elements corresponds directly in a 1:1 fashion with smells and flavors perceived by the average person. It also may ignore the interaction effect that a human might perceive. For example the analysis may show that there is X amount of compound A and Y amount of element Z, but not be able to account for the fact that X amount of A and Y amount of Z when present together are perceived by a person as coconut flavors and smells. I guess it all just gets down to what definition of "complexity" you are using.

I do that all the time with cognac. I enjoyed the aroma long before I enjoyed the flavor.

There is so much romanticism in tasting which can quickly become ponderous and superfluous but a flavor or aroma that sparks a distant memory is a delight.

It's the only part of our brain that doesn't get hung up on higher-level processing to bog it down. That's why scent-based memory evokes such strong emotion and clear event memories.

No,no, no- that would start entering subjective valuations into the analysis, and that would take it from the realm of science to art. Or, even worse, psychology.

Well I've heard psychology be accused of physics envy, so you're probably right on that. It's funny. Before I became a psychologist, I was pretty far over on the touchey-feeley/artsy-fartsy side of the spectrum. Now that I've gotten a good bit of that science stuff under my belt and into my noggin, I'm now often accused of being too scientific in my approach to things. I like to think that I am a good balance of both sides, but with so many in society not "getting" science and it's awesome utility, I think I appear father over on that side than I actually am.

Man, I'm eating this thread up. Very interesting!

>.>
<.<

Didn't know that was your field; just a shot in the dark. No insult intended.

Personally, I don't think it's possible to lean too far to the science end of things, but, then again, I'm a chem geek (one of the only two actual hard sciences ).

As far as quantifying flavor profiles of liquors, quite a bit of work has actually been done on whisk(e)ys, but aside from Ted Breaux, et al, I'm not aware of much study having been made of absinthe. Not really too surprising, considering their relative market shares...

Sounds to me like a thesis paper waiting for a PhD candidate.

"But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection." Marcel Proust

I usually get to use my lit. degree once a year. I'm saddened that it's barely February, and I've got the rest of the year to go.

It would take more than a little joke about the field of psychology to offend me. I'm on the inside so I'm well aware of my field's foibles and strengths.

The article you cited has me aroused in the most geektastic of ways. As someone with enough graduate level statistics to blow most people's minds and living with a chemist who works with GCMS, I absolutely can't wait to get into this article. I agree that it is hard to go too far with science, but in some instances where human experience is part of the equation, I think that this can get lost in the mix.

As an example, consider the mountains of research on what type of psychotherapy is most effective for treating depression. The treatments are manualized to reduce error variance, but there are times when one must deviate from the protocol when working with a human being. Also, there are very real, large, and currently unquantifiable differences in the therapeutic effectiveness of different therapists. Then there are client differences. When you reduce a person's experience of depression to numerical values you lose much data. This is why psychology has physics envy, but will never be a fully hard science (laughing inside like an 8-year-old that I typed that), and this is why when an aspect of your research involves an entity that isn't entirely quantifiable, it is important to be cautious when interpreting results.

Excellent

Damn. I can't see past the abstract. My question on this article and other studies of this type is while I realize it is possible to use GCMS to identify the congeners in the samples, do these congeners correspond 1:1 with human perception and taste. Also, are there studies to show that samples with more conginers are perceived by people as more complex than samples with fewer congers as determined by GCMS? This is the key element in my mind. If you never get back to the true issue at hand--humans drink and enjoy whiskey/whisky and it is they who appreciate it's complexity; therefore it is their opinion that matters even above what the hard data show--then it doesn't really matter what the GCMS says.

Whenever I see that name I invariably think of Monty Python's Summarizing Proust competition.

I always think of this skit, which is sort of the same thing as summarizing Proust....

Taking the most complex ideas in the history of mankind, and making them silly. Brilliant.

The best line in the piece is where they finish with "and Marx claims he was offsides", implying Marx's lack of intellectual heft.


Philosophy Football

"Marcel Proust was a Neuroscientist." http://www.amazon.com/Proust-Was-Neuroscie.../dp/0547085907/

While I can't buy the book's premise that the historical figures predicted certain scientific discoveries, I'd say they certainly predated them, and those who pay attention could notice experiential threads in the ideas before the science backed them up.

Arrgh. Sorry- I didn't look to see if the whole paper was available (without paying the $31.50).

I'll see if I can get it through my university- I think I can, but I need to jump through some hoops first.

Actually, I mostly made that post to be a smartass- bad habit of mine. I agree that complexity in terms of numbers of chromatographically detectable congeners is probably not an accurate portrayal of perceived complexity- perhaps it might be with some sort of index to perceived taste, but even that would be problematic. Different people taste things differently- probably the most obvious example of this is phenylthiourea (the stuff that everyone tries in BIO101 or high school biology), that is either very bitter or completely tasteless, depending on the taster's genetic makeup.

Still, it would probably be an interesting study for someone, trying to relate objective measures of complexity to organoleptically perceived flavor complexity.

Weather borne out of smartassness or otherwise, it's a cool use of GCMS. Let me know if you do get full access to the article. I'm going straight for the Conclusions section.

Absinthe is to a Jackson Pollock painting as whiskey is to a Rothko.
Absinthe is to a David Lynch film as whiskey is to an Andrei Tarkovsky.
Absinthe is to a David Foster Wallace novel as whiskey is to a Bukowski.

There's complexity in each. And if nothing else, on the surface, absinthe 'wins'. But the complexity of whiskey, is maybe more hidden, under deeper layers.

I wouldn't say one is more or less complex than the other necessarily ... just that the complexities of each come from different places, and turn up in different ways.

whatever you have the most experience tasting will probably seem the most complex to you. I'm sure there are wine fanatics that would laugh at the notion that anything distilled could match the complexity of wine, and beer connoiseurs probably feel similarly.