Magic Whiskey Sticks — Tale to Table

This is the story of some magic sticks that can turn ordinary booze into something really special.

You start with the charred oak staves in a glass bottle. The wood is cut and charred by a professional chef, using only mechanical equipment (so there’s no oil or anything like that) in a certified kitchen.

Then you take some inexpensive alcohol, i.e. cheap hooch. You can use whiskey or gin or rum or tequila, anything that might benefit from an aged or smoky flavor. (You could use vodka. We don’t see a lot of added value there, but that’s up to you.)

We started with the least expensive stuff we could find at the grocery store, Bentley’s Canadian Whiskey. This isn’t rotgut, but it’s definitely not anything to write home about.

Seriously, this was only about $6 at the grocery store.

We added it to the Magic Whiskey Sticks and waited.

We tried it after one week and noticed a significant difference. What was before a bit harsh had mellowed and softened. It used to taste like cheap whiskey, but now it was starting to get some toasty caramel notes, more like bourbon. You could even see it was developing more color and character in the glass.

We let it sit for a couple more weeks, and could see a bigger difference, even with from the bit that had soaked just one week. And now we started to get a smoky, almost Scotch-like flavor from it.

On the left is the starting whiskey, middle is aged one week, on the right is two weeks old.

What started out as cheap booze probably only suitable for mixing, was now a delicious sipping refreshment.

But we’re not done yet. We drained the booze from the jar — we didn’t filter it, but we could have used a coffee filter to remove the particles that settled on the bottom — and then refilled the jar with maple syrup. In a week we hope to have boozy, smoky, maple syrup. We’ll let you know.