This Might Be Why Whisky Tastes Better When You Add Water

Get the Full StoryIt’s not just a made-up thing after all.

Have you ever seen someone add water to whisky and wonder why on earth they were doing that?

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It turns out there might be a scientific reason why adding water to whisky makes it taste different or, some would say, better .

And no, it's not just because it waters it down.

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"If you look on a microscopic level, there are clusters of ethanol in water," Bj rn Karlsson, an associate professor of physical chemistry at Linn us University in Sweden and author of the paper, told BuzzFeed News. So he and his coauthor Ran Friedman decided to try to figure out what happens with those clusters when you add in something else.

Their findings are published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

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They isolated Guaiacol, one of the molecules that gives some whisky its distinctive smoky taste, and ran a simulation to see what happened to this molecule with different amounts of water and ethanol.

Guaiacol is a type of chemical called a phenol, and it's phenols that give whisky – especially very peaty whisky like that distilled on the Scottish island of Isley – its smoky flavour.

Karlsson and Friedman Via Nature

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