191 Sustainability White oak staves interact with the liquid, helping to age it properly while imparting sugars and flavors that create highly desired bourbons. Each company has its individual recipes, processes, and traditions for making bourbon that vary the way they char the inside of barrels to unleash flavors of caramelized sugars and vanillas from the wood. The ongoing exchange imparts tastes, smoothness, and color that make up the distinct signature of bourbon. Brown-Forman and others use nearly 100 percent of the white oak they purchase. They collect the bark to be used for fuel while the sawdust and wood chips are pressed into pellets to be used for cooking fires. The Future of Bourbon Barrel Apps The US Forest Service handles data requests from many sectors—academia, the pulp and paper industries, and lumber companies. For distillers, they have been revamping the bourbon barrel app to reflect the multiple layers of data and type of analysis crucial to white oak logging and barrel-making purposes. The app gives an at-a-glance view of the available resource, and users can adjust criteria to determine the most suitable locations that fit their needs. “You could look for areas where white oak resources existed, where growth was positive in that white oak resource, and then also look where the density of mills was lowest,” Oswalt said. “And you could toy around with the different weights and so forth. Doing that highlights areas on the map that you might be interested in, and then you could click on the map and get a quick snapshot of what the resources within a 50- or 100-mile radius of wherever you clicked.” With properly organized data and the ability to display the analyses spatially, the whole FIA database will open up to many related industries, Oswalt said. “One of the things that we’re really interested in is bringing our national woodland owners’ survey information to bear to these questions,” he said. “We hope to bring that data together much more comprehensively, and do so spatially, so all of that information is available for each place at the same time.” Changing Methods for Changing Times With airborne drone surveys also a possibility in some areas of forestry, the older types of intense boots-on-the-ground investigations may become a fading memory. Russell has seen a wide arc of change in the industry, and he hopes to see white oak continue to thrive and supply bourbon makers. “Well, right now, white oak is pretty rare and valuable,” Russell said. “The demand is far outrunning supply right now. And so that’s forced the price of logs up. It’s forced the price of lumber up … . So right now, it’s very precious. I’m expecting to see that crest and go back the other way. It always has over my last 43 years in the industry.” The Bourbon Barrel Oak Availability Tool allows users to explore many variables and to craft their own model to virtually visit places that may be suitable for harvest and milling of white oak.
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