Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the first edition appeared, there have been several exciting new research discoveries to share, and a few interesting changes to whisky regulation.Another motivation for this second edition is that there are topics of historic and scientific interest that intentionally weren't covered in the first edition.I needed more time to do them justice, and now I've had some.There are also mistakes needing correction, and some places where the exposition was confusing.Some of these were pointed out by attentive readers, notably whisky scholar Tsung-Chi Yu, and I'm grateful for that helpful feedback.In 2018, Professor Michael Toney and I developed a new lab course, Chemical and Engineering Principles in Whisky and Fuel Alcohol Production, for undergraduates in chemistry and chemical engineering.We've drawn on material from this book for lectures, examples, supplemental reading, and answering student queries.Putting the book through its paces in this way also exposed some opportunities for improvement.This edition expands on the first in many substantial ways.The history of whisky now embraces Ireland and Canada.The presentation of Maillard chemistry, which touches on several stages of production, is greatly expanded.The interplay between nitrogen in the mash and sulfur in the spirit, and the remedy of sour mash, is clarified.The role of copper is corrected, and the probable mechanisms of its action are given new emphasis.The quantitative analysis of distillation processes now includes triple distillation and hybrid pot-column distillation.Probable mechanisms of oxidation are also described.There is new material in every chapter, supported by over 350 new citations.My favorite addition, although admittedly rather deep in the weeds, is a new analysis of an accessory to Alexander Hamilton's choice, in 1791, for America's first whisky gauging instrument: Dicas' slide rule.The effort expended in researching a topic often has no relation to the number of words that end up on the page.A great example of this principle is the story of the Honorable Alphonso Taft in relation to a dispute with the Japanese government in 1869, a story which has been repeated many times in the popular whisky literature since it appeared in a 2013 book about bourbon.If the story could be verified with a primary citation, e.g., a court record, or a contemporary newspaper account, it would have been a nice addition to Chap. 1.In the attempt to find corroborating v vi Preface to the Second Edition records, hundreds of hours of effort were expended by dozens of people around the world.I am particularly grateful for the truly heroic sleuthing of Hamilton County Central Services Division Manager Jason Alexander, who led the investigation.The Hamilton County Court records would have been the official repository of Judge Alphonso Taft's story, if the event occurred, and had Cincinnati not burned in 1884.The popular authors were all contacted, but none provided a verifiable reference.Several modern writers have relied on the archives of the Filson Historical Society (Louisville, KY), and Filson researcher Jennie Cole also aided our search and shared numerous scans of historic documents.In the end, we did discover a whisky ruling by Taft, and a whisky dispute with the Japanese government, but neither of these occurred in 1869.They appear together in a newspaper record (Louisville Courier Journal, May 9, 1909, p. 11) unearthed in the Filson's Taylor-Hay archive, but are otherwise distinct.If something of the kind occurred in 1869, we were unable to discover proof of it.Many thanks for the hard work of everyone who contributed to this global effort.I am grateful for the help of many diverse experts.I learned a lot about warehouse operations from Ian Rich of Springbank.His expertise should have been acknowledged in the first edition and I regret the oversight.Carol Forrester
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".