Why is “older” whiskey generally considered better than “newer” whiskey? And does this apply to all alcohol?

1.61K views

Why is “older” whiskey generally considered better than “newer” whiskey? And does this apply to all alcohol?

In: 5690

66 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Lots of great answers here, but there’s an additional factor that I haven’t seen mentioned yet:

Whisky aging in a cask gets better and better as time passes, until it peaks and then no longer gets any better or even deteriorates. The people producing the whisky are well aware of this and will sample the whisky from time to time. If they think it’s ready to be bottled, it’ll obviously not age any further, so that means – in general – that a 40 year old whisky had been repeatedly sampled over 40 years and always found to be still improving. We therefore have a strong selection bias in that the casks that weren’t improving anymore were removed.

You are viewing 1 out of 66 answers, click here to view all answers.