She'd coopered forty years. Her best barrels made forgettable whiskey. Her worst — the early ones, loose staves, overcooked char, three previous tenants in the wood — those made what the critics called complex.
The difference wasn't the wood or the technique. It was that the wood had been somewhere before.
She couldn't go back to making bad barrels. But she'd started leaving the new ones outside for a year before the first fill. Rain, heat, frost, forgetting. The apprentice asked what it did to the grain.
She said she didn't know. She just knew the whiskey tasted different when the barrel already had a history.