Old Forester Statesman Bourbon 47.5% ABV 70cl - £40 @ Ocado

Which brings us to “how high can the char go???” (shouted in gameshow audience unison). If a distiller wants to, they can char (or have their barrel producer char) as long as they please; they can char until the barrel looks like the smoking remnants of a failed Wile E. Coyote caper. Most don’t wanna do that, of course, since that would basically be turning the complex mosaic of oak compounds into carbon. Levels of char can vary depending on the barrel producer or distillery, but the most commonly used levels are #1 – #4.Most barrels aren’t charred for more than 1 minute (though Buffalo Trace, in its endless experimentations, put out a #7 level char bourbon—or 3 and a ½ minutes of straight fire—that doesn’t actually taste like liquid smoke). A No.1 Char is 15 seconds, No.2 is 30, No.3 (more common) is 35 seconds, and the classic No.4 Char is 55 seconds. The No.4 Char is also known as the “alligator char,” since after that duration of charring, the interior of the oak wood staves has the rough, shiny texture of alligator skin. Pretty bad ass nickname.And that brings us to another wonderful byproduct of charring: filtration. Anyone who’s used a water filter and seen those little black flecks (or tasted Jack Daniel’s and enjoyed the mellowing effects of the charcoal-filtering Lincoln County Process) knows that carbon is commonly used for filtration. When your barrel is essentially lined with carbon, you’re able to filter out unwanted compounds, like sulfur compounds found in a young whiskey. The bonus of the alligator char: those deep fissures also allow the spirit to seep back and forth into the interior of the wood, creating more reaction with the uncharred oak. (Char layers tend to be between 1/8 to 1/4” thick.)