[HN Gopher] Tennessee town completely smothered by black whiskey...
___________________________________________________________________
Tennessee town completely smothered by black whiskey fungus
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-03-04 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dailymail.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dailymail.co.uk)
| birdman3131 wrote:
| I find the picture of the sign to be odd with the perfectly clean
| signs in the background.
| okasaki wrote:
| The article does say they replace the signs once they become
| illegible.
| melling wrote:
| This must be the original story picked up by others?
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/us/whiskey-fungus-jack-da...
| wilkystyle wrote:
| Here's the non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/g6NHM
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Ms. Willis also said that air filters could hurt the flavor
| that Jack Daniel's whiskey acquires during the aging process.
| Distillers refer poetically to the liquor that evaporates
| during that process as "the angel's share."
|
| This seems like an odd claim by the company.
| kodt wrote:
| I know some people believe the fungus growing in the barrels
| lends some flavor to the whiskey and therefore killing it
| would have a potentially negative effect on the product.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Done at a small scale nature can handle some excess fungus
| overgrowth. Done at a large scale and it becomes too toxic
| and destroys life.
|
| It reminds me of the fisheries. Catch too many and the fish
| never return
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No one's asking them to eradicate the fungus. They're being
| asked to filter the outgoing air ventilation on the
| barrelhouses so it doesn't spray fungus (and fungus food,
| in the form of ethanol fumes) over the nearby community.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| This past summer I visited a cognac distillery, and when in
| an aging room the same thing was mentioned (also called the
| angel's share). You can actually tell which buildings hold
| aging barrels, because you can see this black fungus growing
| on the outside of those buildings.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Strikes me as an industry run mostly be ad hoc rules and
| this-is-how-it-has-always-been-done. Which, for a historical
| product that people enjoy is a fair enough stance. Especially
| if it takes four years (!!!) before you see the outcome of an
| experiment.
|
| I have no doubt they employ plenty of food scientists and
| specialized analytical techniques to monitor the product, but
| at the end of the day, making a change has got to be scary.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Odd, and downright disingenuous. Scrubbing the air won't stop
| evaporation from the barrels. I guess you could make an
| argument about how changing partial pressure causes a change
| in equilibrium vapor pressure. But if such a subtle effect is
| so important, there would already be much more tight controls
| on the warehouse environment.
|
| Just another penny pinching company with externalized
| consequences...
| fwlr wrote:
| "If stuff can get out, stuff can get in". A filter setup that
| stops ethanol vapors from escaping is more precisely "a setup
| that applies the installed filters to all incoming and
| outgoing air", if those filters block more than just ethanol
| vapor, you're losing out on whatever those filters do block.
| Maybe it turns out some important bacteria can't get in and
| so the whiskey doesn't develop right. That spoils roughly
| four years of the warehouse's capacity which is a lot.
| kerpotgh wrote:
| There no reason incoming and outgoing air have to have the
| same pathways. Fans that suck out inside air will not bring
| in outside air. This is pretty basic stuff. Your inlets can
| have absolutely no filters on them and the fans sucking out
| the air will maintain a pressure differential that makes
| sure the inlets will mostly only let air in.
| fwlr wrote:
| To clarify, I don't think much of their excuse, this is
| obviously a situation the distilleries should be trying to
| fix, and so on. Mostly just a caution not to assume the
| solution is simple, obvious, and risk-free. Making spirits
| is not a science, nor even an art - it's luck, and mass-
| producing spirits is like trying to crystallize that luck
| and replicate it. It's like being told to fix a legacy
| codebase to stop throwing errors, except nobody understands
| the codebase, not even the people who wrote it. Oh and any
| subtle change you make can destroy the current production
| database as well as four years of backups.
| jemmyw wrote:
| Making spirits is a science. Chemistry and biology.
| fwlr wrote:
| Jack Daniels isn't meth. It is a complex and specific
| flavor profile that is enormously successful
| commercially. This profile was not arrived at via
| chemistry and biology, and it's currently infeasible to
| apply chemistry and biology in a lab to replicate this
| flavor profile. The same is true of the overwhelming
| majority of other spirits, too. The only method we have
| to find your way to these extremely precise locations in
| high-dimensional flavorspace is to religiously follow the
| ritual that gets us there. On the road to mass
| production, spirit distillers have run across many
| pitfalls that look innocuous, minor changes that seem
| like they couldn't possibly affect the outcome but
| nevertheless do. That's what I mean by trying to
| crystallize luck. (Yes, chemistry and biology are the
| fields of science that _would_ describe this process...)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Looking at the NYT vs Daily Mail reminds me of why I shell out
| a coffee a month to avoid ads.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| It's not nearly as bad as the daily mail, and the writing is
| higher quality. But I still get 7 ads in that NYT article and
| I'm a paying subscriber. I just grab their $5/mo deal and
| when it expires and wants to charge me $20/mo I unsubscribe
| with the reason being I'm not paying $20 for a service that
| still has ads. About 2 weeks later I end up getting an email
| for another year at $5/mo.
| psychphysic wrote:
| It's hard to explain to a non Brit just how lowly most of
| society thinks of the Daily mail.
|
| While simultaneously being the most circuited paper heavily
| driven by women readers.
|
| The ads are likely the good bit of the website.
| Ntrails wrote:
| > just how lowly most of society thinks of the Daily mail.
|
| This is really just a perfect example of how society
| splinters on certain lines.
|
| I give my mother endless shit for reading the daily mail,
| it is a pre-clickbait indignation generation machine and
| the website is probably worse.
|
| However, "most of society" does not ring true to me. I am
| the outlier not the default.
| psychphysic wrote:
| As a percentage of the population daily mail readers are
| miniscule.
|
| And aging.
|
| If you asked a hypothetical 100 people their thoughts on
| the Daily Mail the number who report reading it would be
| dwarfed by the number calling it trash.
| petre wrote:
| They claim to reach 65% of UK audience, I wouldn't call
| that minuscule.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Hahaha you really think the daily mail sells 40million
| newspapers a day!
| ipaddr wrote:
| Both are true statements.
|
| 65% read it. 90% say they don't
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I used to work for a newspaper; reach claims are
| basically bullshit, as they can include things like "saw
| an article online in the last 30 days" or household
| multipliers where they assume everyone in a subscribing
| household reads it. Circulation is much more informative.
| psychphysic wrote:
| If they actually sold 40 million papers a day as this guy
| believes I wonder how much wood they'd consume in a year.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Mailonline website is editorially separate from the print
| newspaper last I heard. Not saying it's better or worse.
|
| All the press is a click bait indignation generator, just
| different ones cater to different tastes in indignation.
| petre wrote:
| Heh I've looked them up to check if they were owned by
| Rupert Murdoch. They're not, but it looks like they've been
| sued by various celebrities, including Hugh Grant, Prince
| Harry and Elton John for libel. Grant won the trial, as
| expected.
| alfor wrote:
| I am surprised they let ethanol escape and don't capture it to
| recycle it.
|
| They could put condensers on the ventilation and sell the product
| for gas or industrial process.
| akiselev wrote:
| It would be prohibitively expensive to recapture it because the
| buildings meant to store whiskey for as cheap as possible while
| it ages. They're little more than sheds made of corrugated
| sheet metal.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| For anyone wondering what this article doesn't really tell:
|
| Baudoinia compniacensis is a sac fungus which has been observed
| on a variety of substrates in the vicinity of distilleries,
| spirits maturation facilities, bonded warehouses, and bakeries.
| The fungus is a habitat colonist with a preference for airborne
| alcohol, earning it the nickname whiskey fungus.[1]
|
| There's photos on that wiki article of other distilleries in
| Kentucky and Scotland with the same issue, interestingly.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudoinia_compniacensis
| isoprophlex wrote:
| The title of this submission was altered from the original, and
| should be:
|
| "EXCLUSIVE: Shocking new DailyMail.com images show Tennessee town
| completely SMOTHERED by black fungus caused by local Jack
| Daniel's plant"
|
| I'm joking, but there are less irritating sources of news than
| the daily mail.
| [deleted]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Lynchburg is a population of about 6500. Jack Daniel's HQs there
| and has about 500 employees.
|
| Does this town exist because of the distillery? Might be a very
| hard thing to deal with if the adversarial party is also the core
| of their economy.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| > Does this town exist because of the distillery?
|
| More or less. Most of the economy there is related to the
| distillery and tourists visiting the distillery.
| joenathanone wrote:
| It's not an either or senerio, Jack Daniel's could take some of
| their profits and spend them on remediation.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Certainly there are many solutions. That's not in doubt.
| Companies often don't like spending money if they don't have
| to. Given they haven't tried to address this for so long
| suggests as much.
| windthrown wrote:
| Agreed. To your initial point Jack Daniel's marketing
| relies so heavily on being "Tennessee Whiskey" I think it
| would be harder for them than other companies to threaten
| to move to a state with looser rules (e.g. Boeing in SC).
|
| I don't think anyone believes that the company will do this
| out of the kindness of their hearts but rather are hoping
| that this attention spurs new regulations. The company
| basically admits that's what it would take in the article:
|
| "Melvin Keebler, general manager of the Jack Daniel
| Distillery, said in a statement that the company 'complies
| with all local, state, and federal regulations regarding
| the design, construction, and permitting of our
| barrelhouses.'"
| ipaddr wrote:
| Which means they have enough political support to stop it
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| In this case, JD will likely withhold changes to their
| process at least until they can be held non-liable for the
| costs incurred by the community due to the fungus.
|
| It's a shame and defect of our legal system that complying
| with an accusation arguably constitutes agreement, because
| it creates the perverse incentive to delay or avoid
| potentially time-sensitive remediation, with the much
| broader implication that human caused climate change very
| much has a bill that responsible parties must foot.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Agreed. It's a tricky part of law.
|
| In Ontario we have the apology act, which makes it
| possible to apologize for something without implying
| fault or guilt. I think that demonstrates how tricky and
| unfortunate it can be that there's legal disincentives to
| do the right thing.
| causality0 wrote:
| The properties adjacent to the barrelhouses I understand, but how
| could they possibly be emitting enough alcohol to drive fungal
| growth in the next county?
|
| _For months, some residents have complained that a sooty, dark
| crust has blanketed homes, cars,_
|
| Why has it only become a problem in the last year?
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I have not been to the Jack Daniels distillery, but a different
| vendor, and it is truly unbelievable how much alcohol is in the
| air surrounding the buildings. While it is unlikely you could
| become intoxicated just breathing in the air, it certainly
| feels possible.
|
| I could believe that the vapors from the aging barrels could
| spread to cover a significant area if the winds were right.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Why has it only become a problem in the last year?
|
| From the NYT article:
|
| > Ms. Ferry said that _since Jack Daniel's built a barrelhouse
| next to her house in December_ , whiskey fungus had been
| accumulating on the roof of her home and car and on trees on
| her property. She said she had scrubbed the paint off wooden
| patio furniture while trying to remove the dark growth.
|
| New construction, and more on the way.
| [deleted]
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| You see that a lot around distilleries everywhere. Any vehicle
| you work on that's kept at a distillery, whisky bond, or blend
| house, will be absolutely covered in grotty black shit.
|
| It rots bricks like crazy, and in Dumbarton a little to the west
| of Glasgow in Scotland people have semi-successfully attempted to
| sue some large drinks companies because of the damage it has done
| to houses.
|
| Now, the distillers reckon it doesn't rot bricks, but I've put
| communications aerials up on their buildings. They build things
| like the security gatehouse out of "engineering bricks", very
| hard and strong bricks used for things like manholes. These
| bricks are normally very hard to drill, especially with something
| like a 16mm SDS for fitting M10 rawlbolts to support an aerial
| pole.
|
| I could practically poke the holes in the bricks with my finger.
| It was like drilling stale chocolate cake.
| [deleted]
| h2odragon wrote:
| I dunno how they got the pic of the dead pig. If I went to stage
| such a picture I'd need to let the thing bloat inside for a day
| or two and then have someone standing over it with firearms to
| keep the vultures off while getting the picture. Also have to
| note its not visibly leaking anything; suggests that it was
| washed.
| projektfu wrote:
| I've come across carcasses like that that haven't been spoiled
| before, in Georgia, New York, Puebla Mexico. Distension is a
| pretty early part of the process before putrefaction.
| [deleted]
| bartislartfast wrote:
| Please don't link to the Daily Mail. It's the british tabloid
| equivalent of Fox News.
| kittenkidd wrote:
| Closer to Fox+TMZ
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-04 23:01 UTC)