From 40% to cask strength: understanding whisky ABV

There are many individual pieces of information on a whisky label that can help you glean what a whisky might be like before you’ve opened the bottle. Many of them - the distillery, the region, the cask type - may give a hint as to its flavour or style. But there’s one that sometimes goes understated: ABV. Discover the story behind whisky ABV, how it has evolved and what it means for the whisky in your glass with drinks writer Mike Gibson. Alcohol by volume is essentially the percentage of ethanol in a particular volume of liquid. In wine, the figure can be a good gauge of things like style and body, because it’s often the ripeness and sugar content of the grapes that dictates ABV in the finished wine, and in that sense, to an extent, it’s out of the winemaker’s hands. In spirits, though, it’s different. From cask strength down to the ubiquitous 40% seen in the majority of supermarket staples, the ABV of the spirit you buy is invariably a deliberate and precise choice on the part of th

by WSETglobal · source ↗