Spirits & Distilling Podcast - Episodes Tagged with “Blending Whiskey”

39: Jarrad Huckshold of The Cask Takes a Winemaker’s Approach to Whiskey Maturation and Blending

Spirits & Distilling — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 16:00:00 -0600

While we often look at spirits aging through the lens of popular climates and standard barrels—used cooperage in the cool climate of Scotland or new charred oak barrels in hot, humid summers and cold winters of Kentucky—many now-enshrined methods were born of efficiency considerations and political realities more than quality concerns. In places not beholden to specific traditions and regulations, different opportunities present themselves, and different takes on efficiency can become the norm.

Take Melbourne, Australia, for example, where this episode’s guest, Jarrad Hucksold, spent almost a decade as head blender for Starward Whisky. The popularity of wine in Australia has created a steady supply of used wooden casks, making them an accessible and flexible vessel for extended maturation. But understanding the way the local environment affects those casks as they mature was key to creating great stock for their blends.

In this episode, Huckshold and host Molly Troupe discuss:

taking a winemaker’s approach to whiskey maturation
how fortified wine barrels interact with aging liquid inside them
re-coopering and re-charring used barrels for better spirits aging
managing sulfur in used wine barrels
reactive maturation environments and avoiding over-extraction because of temperature fluctuations
training one’s palate for the precise sensory work of blending
maintaining consistency in blends through solera aging

And more.

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27: Ashley Barnes of The Blending House Uses Data to Drive Better Blends

Spirits & Distilling — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0700

Ashley Barnes, master blender at the Blending House, joins host Molly Troupe for an in-depth discussion of the scientific and sensorial approaches to building characterful blends. A former pharmaceutical quality chemist, Barnes was recruited by Buffalo Trace, later moved on to Four Roses, and has worked with (and learned from) some of the greats in the bourbon world. Now, at the Blending House, she works with nondistilling producers to carefully age and blend fine spirits using a variety of creative and data-driven techniques, while tracking environmental data such as temperature and evaporation to better understand long-term flavor development.

Over the course of the episode, they discuss:

Learning quality, flavor profiling, and profile maintenance from Four Roses master distiller Brent Elliott
The challenge of creating different flavors from the same barrel stock
Useful analogies for thinking about cohesive blends
Both negative and positive selection for minimizing distractions while maximizing cohesion
Controlling variables in rickhouse aging for more favorable flavor development
Ongoing research on yeast and other topics
The basics of labs for both blending quality and bottling quality
Sensory strategies for maintaining consistency through varying personal circumstances
Building the right lexicon for sensory description

And more.

3: Lisa Wicker, Itinerant Distiller, Considers Lessons From Her Past While Looking to the Future

Spirits & Distilling — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 20:00:00 -0600

Master distiller Lisa Wicker may have taken an unconventional path through her career, shifting from wine to distilled spirits, but that’s hardly the only decision she’s made that some might deem unusual. For Wicker, spreading out and exploring adjacent but interesting fields has improved her approach to distilling and blending much more than intense focus could. Now, she pulls on all that background to hone fermentations with atypical grains, tighten distillations, and blend with identifiable character in mind.

In this episode’s conversation with Sydney Jones, Wicker discusses:

Cold mashing corn for more characterful distillation
Using malted rye and barley
Testing heirloom corn varieties for distilling potential
Lessons learned from winemaking
Building through notes in whiskey brands for flavor identities
Blending with partial barrels to achieve flavor balance
Blending strategies to soften the edges of younger, wilder whiskies

And more.

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