‘Whisky Wizard’ Graham in the Observer
In this week’s Observer Magazine, Graham was highlighted for our work in detecting counterfeit whisky. The feature article details 5 experts in spotting fradulent products.
The section of the article detailing our work states:
The whisky wizard
Dr Graham Bruce, physicist at the University of St Andrews
Very old bottles of whisky have sold for more than £2m. But bottles which are that expensive are devalued when you open them to test a sample and check they are authentic. So for the last 15 years, my colleagues and I have been developing new techniques to identify counterfeit alcohol without unsealing the bottle.
We shine a ring of laser light into the drink that we want to characterise and the molecules in the liquid will scatter the light and produce lots of different colours. These exact colours, which are not perceptible to the human eye, can be mapped using our cutting-edge techniques and used to generate a unique fingerprint for the chemical composition of the drink.
This chemical fingerprint can be used to authenticate a bottle of whisky, by drawing similarities with the chemical fingerprints of other bottles from the same producer at similar time periods and stating our confidence level that it would be genuine.
We can detect the oakiness, and how peaty and smoky the whisky is, because these flavours are embedded in the chemical profile of the liquid. Using lots of data and machine-learning approaches, we can even distinguish between whisky bottles where the chemical differences are very subtle – for example, an 18-year-old versus a 12-year-old of the same brand, or a mixture of two slightly different blends from the same manufacturer. We can also use the fingerprints to do quality control by identifying potentially poisonous chemicals, such as methanol, or proving to a manufacturer that a sealed bottle has been tampered with at an early stage in the supply chain.
At the moment, our systems are lab-based so we’re bidding for the funding to develop a prototype we can use in a real environment. It’s been estimated that UK businesses lose £200m a year due to counterfeit alcohol and about 25% of the world’s alcoholic drinks are believed to be illicit and potentially dangerous.
Ultimately, we envisage the technology could be miniaturised enough to go under every bar and used to test the chemical composition of your drink, so you could potentially check it for the presence of methanol or date-rape drugs. We also hope that the technology will lead to consumer confidence that the expensive bottle of whisky you are buying is worth every penny – and you don’t have to waste a drop to prove it.
The work on this project was also recently featured in the student newspaper The Saint.