It's Now Possible to Detect Counterfeit Whisky Without Opening the Bottle
Freeman writes:
There's nothing quite like the pleasure of sipping a fine Scotch whisky, for those whose tastes run to such indulgences. But how can you be sure that you're paying for the real deal and not some cheap counterfeit? Good news: physicists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have figured out how to test the authenticity of bottles of fine Scotch whisky using laser light, without ever having to open the bottles. They described their work in a recent paper published in the journal Analytical Methods.
[...] A 2018 study subjected 55 randomly selected bottles from auctions, private collectors, and retailers to radiocarbon dating and found that 21 of them were either outright fakes or not distilled in the year claimed on the label.
[...] Food scientists and chemists are also interested in using spectroscopy to identify the chemical compounds inside a whisky bottle. This involves shining a laser light into a substance, which scatters the light and breaks it into a spectrum of wavelengths.
[...] The challenge in applying such techniques to whisky is that the glass bottles themselves produce a large spectral signal, making it difficult to discern the chemical fingerprint of interest (that of the spirit inside). So spectroscopy is usually performed after whiskies have been removed from the bottle.
[The researchers] figured out how to shape the laser light into a ring instead of a focused beam, thereby suppressing the noisy signal from the glass.
Journal Reference:
Holly Fleming, Mingzhou Chen, Graham D. Bruce, et al. Through-bottle whisky sensing and classification using Raman spectroscopy in an axicon-based backscattering configuration [open], Analytical Methods (DOI: 10.1039/D0AY01101K)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.