Senior Yancey “Madison” Courtney is a whiskey girl. But, unlike most aficionados, she has had the opportunity to write and research a senior thesis on the subject.
Courtney’s thesis adviser, Professor of Chemistry Lee Baron, said that Hillsdale’s small campus allows students to work closely with faculty while they pursue research on topics they love.
“You can often work together and tailor a unique research problem or a whole project that meets their needs,” Baron said, “in addition to being interesting, creative, and original. It’s so much fun.”
The topic seemed natural to Courtney: A chemistry major uninterested in medicine, her research and practical experience could give her a leg up for future employment in the bourbon industry. In addition, it would allow her to stay close to home. After all, she lives next door to the Woodford Reserve distillery.
“Kentucky and bourbon go hand-in-hand,” Courtney said. “It’s Kentucky’s signature drink.”
Practical considerations aside, Courtney recognized a real need for an industrially feasible method for bourbon distilleries to identify and cull imposter spirits. Counterfeit bourbon is a problem for the whiskey industry, one that Courtney intended to help solve. According to Baron, that was the original question: Could Courtney find a way to identify these bourbons and their forgeries?
So, over the past summer, Courtney spent six weeks in the lab working out and applying a system for the identification of and differentiation between the characteristics of one distillery’s bourbon and another.
“I’d get to Strosacker around 8:30 in the morning and work until I was finished,” Courtney said. “Sometimes I would be there until 10:00 at night. While I was working, the lab smelled a little bit like bourbon.”
Courtney shared the lab with seniors Kelly Tillotson and Joe Banovetz. Banovetz was researching his own thesis, using spectral analysis to differentiate between various types of gunpowder.
“My reaction was, ‘Oh cool, now we’ve got drugs, alcohol, and firearms research all going in the same lab,” Banovetz said in an email.
Courtney’s research method and results developed slowly, a result of long hours and meticulous work.
“We identified a particular component in bourbon — congeners, a certain type of molecule — and determined a way to identify those,” Baron explained. “It’s a process that’s used for identifying aldehydes in humans as an indicator of lung cancer. We took that process and applied it to the bourbons.”
So, using a technique originally used to detect cancer and with little academic precedent or material to work with, Courtney set out to detect counterfeit bourbon.
“In the beginning, we weren’t really sure what we wanted to do with it,” Courtney said of her first thesis proposal. “We just applied it and hoped that it would work. We weren’t sure what to expect.”
Bourbon is a complex spirit, both in its flavor and chemical composition. Each distillery’s product is distinct in both these respects. As a result, each bourbon has a characteristic chemical “fingerprint,” making it discernible from other bourbons — and from counterfeits.
“Bourbon is made up of alcohol, also called ethanol,” Courtney explained. “Everything else that’s in the bourbon is called a ‘congener.’ Those come from the distillation process and the time aging in the bourbon barrels. I was hoping that, by analyzing the congeners in several brands and individual bourbons, I would be able to identify the particular brands of bourbon.”
Using 10 different distilleries’ bourbons — among them Maker’s Mark, Woodford Reserve, Wild Turkey, Knob Creek, Bulleit, and Jim Beam — the chemical properties of each were determined, the data aggregated and analyzed, and the results formed into a usable technique for differentiation between authentic and forged bourbon.
The results look good so far. Courtney, though still cautious, is optimistic.
“This is completely preliminary,” Courtney said, “but for individual distilleries, I have had promising results for being able to differentiate between them using a particular congener.”
