A neophyte need not worry now for their lack of differentiation between Scottish malt whiskey and an Irish blend. Scientists have developed an artificial "tongue" that can tell if you are drinking fake whiskies. The artificial "tongue," or sensor arrays, can not only distinguish between two nearly identical whisky samples, but also identify some initial qualities of whiskies, such as malt status, age, and country of origin, according to the study published by the US journal. Whisky was first produced in Scotland, where the oldest distillery was licensed in 1775. Since then, Scotch and other whiskies have been popular, and today, countless whiskies of different origin are available now. They are also quite popular now in Chinese modern, cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai and Beijing with a huge market potential, said by a Shanghai-based marketing agency.
“Our human tongue consists of six or seven different receptors – sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami, and hotness – and they're able to identify food by differential reactions of those elements," he said. "The combination of differential receptors gives you an overall taste impression of what you eat.”
How These “Synthetic Tongue” Works:
These synthetic "tongues" can be used to spot counterfeits of expensive luxury whiskies, but they can't identify an unknown whisky from scratch, he said. “You start with a sample that you know is the real McCoy. Then you look at another sample, and you can say whether it's the same sample or it's not. The researchers said their method could in principle work well for other beverages and even for biological materials, which are also complex mixtures.
Testing the dyes on 33 different whiskies, researchers found that their approach could accurately tell them apart, ‘New Scientist’ reported. Distillations from Scotland looked different to those from Ireland or the US, and blended whiskies had a different fingerprint to single malts. Current techniques. Nowadays, use mass spectroscopy to identify the chemical composition of a whisky. By building up an overall flavor profile in much the same way as our tongues do, the approach is good at telling if two bottles of whisky are the same.
