UC Davis tackles whiskey:
"It’s an idea that the aptly-named Tom Collins, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, is actively pursuing. “I worked on my Ph.D., and it was a project looking at aroma and flavor chemistry in wine [fermented] in oak barrels,” Collins explains, crediting the barrels with sparking his initial interest in the chemistry of spirits. “It sort of seemed a natural extension to look from the chemistry of wine to the chemistry of whiskeys, because the chemistry of oak barrels play a huge role in what you see in whiskeys of all sorts.”
Collins and researchers at Davis set out to see if they could determine the chemical differences among 60 different whiskeys: 38 straight bourbon whiskeys, 10 rye whiskeys, five Tennessee whiskeys and seven other American whiskeys, varying in age from two-to-15 years old. What they found was a spectacular testament to the spirit’s complex chemistry–over 4,000 different non-volatile compounds across the different samples, results which he presented today at the 246th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society."