27: Ashley Barnes of The Blending House Uses Data to Drive Better Blends

Ashley Barnes, master blender at the Blending House, joins host Molly Troupe for an in-depth discussion of the scientific and sensorial approaches to building characterful blends. A former pharmaceutical quality chemist, Barnes was recruited by Buffalo Trace, later moved on to Four Roses, and has worked with (and learned from) some of the greats in the bourbon world. Now, at the Blending House, she works with nondistilling producers to carefully age and blend fine spirits using a variety of creative and data-driven techniques, while tracking environmental data such as temperature and evaporation to better understand long-term flavor development.

Over the course of the episode, they discuss:

• Learning quality, flavor profiling, and profile maintenance from Four Roses master distiller Brent Elliott
• The challenge of creating different flavors from the same barrel stock
• Useful analogies for thinking about cohesive blends
• Both negative and positive selection for minimizing distractions while maximizing cohesion
• Controlling variables in rickhouse aging for more favorable flavor development
• Ongoing research on yeast and other topics
• The basics of labs for both blending quality and bottling quality
  
• Sensory strategies for maintaining consistency through varying personal circumstances
• Building the right lexicon for sensory description
  

And more.

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