Review: Modern Barrel Co. Moba Smart Barrel

In case you missed it, there’s a cottage business on the market of devices and doohickeys that allow you to age your individual whiskey, rum, or whatnot, all with out the effort of getting to construct a warehouse and fill it stuffed with hooch. These units tackle many types: tiny barrels that look cool in your bar prime, items of wooden you drop into your bottle, and different forms of gizmos that each one revolve round quickly exposing a spirit to oak.

Now you’ll be able to add one other, higher-tech choice to the combination. Modern Barrel Company’s Moba Smart Barrel is a plug-in, Wi-Fi-enabled urn that ingests a bottle of booze and spits out a barrel-aged model after every week.

How does it work? If you’re accustomed to the sorcery of commercial-scale accelerated getting older operations like Lost Spirits, you’re heading in the right direction. Moba retains a few of its tech near its vest, however one among its founders—it is a facet hustle for him and one other skilled chemist—says it includes warmth, oxygen, and wooden, “just like in a real barrel.”

I’ll attempt to describe it as a cross between a strain cooker and a pint-size water heater. A small block of wooden referred to as an M-Stack (extra on this in a second) attaches to the tip of a slim steel pole, which dangles into the middle of a steel flask that you just fill along with your chosen spirit. You seal it up and hit the ability button, then the unit gently heats the wooden and, apparently, agitates the spirit with vibration or another sort of motion.

Modern Barrel provides 5 forms of M-Stacks ($13 every, single-use), all constituted of American white oak however handled in a different way earlier than they’re prepared to be used. Sweet, Smooth, Baking Spice, Oak, and Smoke aren’t probably the most intuitive names, however Modern Barrel gives some concepts on how every is finest used and a really helpful sort of spirit for every. The firm despatched me two wooden tiles to make use of for testing together with the Moba itself.

Curiously, the Moba was initially designed for getting older blanco tequila, although the founders say they’ve tried it on the whole lot from baijiu to Southern Comfort and have had good outcomes getting older mezcal, Everclear, and “barreled” cocktails just like the Manhattan.

For my testing, I began with the OG: a cheap however one hundred pc agave blanco tequila, paired with the Baking Spices tile. After one week within the Moba, what emerged from the canister was certainly a major shade of brown, in line color-wise with a reposado or añejo tequila. I tasted the earlier than and after spirits facet by facet. The unique, unaged tequila was clear and flippantly lemony, with touches of white pepper and a recent end that helped it punch nicely above its price ticket. After the Moba getting older, I discovered your complete character had modified, and never for the higher. The nostril had turn out to be decidedly smoky, nearly like a forest hearth was burning within the distance. The similar went for the palate: Tannic wooden and burning underbrush dominated, and the sweetness one expects to search out in a reposado tequila was wholly absent. I had a robust choice for the blanco right here, and I didn’t discover the aged model gratifying by itself or as a mixer.

For spherical two, I reached for a traditional: a bottle of Old Crow bourbon, as an experiment in “extra aging” one thing that’s already frolicked within the barrel. Out of the bottle, Old Crow is pushed by its cereal origins, with dominant notes of peanuts and popcorn. It’s a innocent sufficient whiskey, however may or not it’s improved by every week within the Moba with the Sweet M-Stack? This time I skilled totally different outcomes: The aged Old Crow—I wish to name it Older Crow—was decidedly darker in shade and featured a way more aggressive wooden affect on each nostril and palate. This was a great factor and a foul factor. While the whiskey wasn’t smoky the way in which the tequila was, the wooden components have been fairly heavy: drying and tannic, stripping away a few of the pure sweetness of the bourbon. On the opposite hand, the aged whiskey discovered its nuttiness amped up, and even generated some thrilling notes of cinnamon and clove—traditional components you’d discover in an actual whiskey barrel. The catch was that I didn’t actually benefit from the aged model extra, discovering it a bit unbalanced and too targeted on considerably harsh, uncooked wooden components. While I appreciated the added complexity, I’d say quality-wise the 2 whiskeys resulted in a tie.