THE SMELL TEST

This ‘E-Nose’ Can Sniff Out Fine Whiskies From Fraudulent Ones

You don’t have to be an e-girl to use this e-nose.

So you’re at a bar with friends and order a whiskey neat. To impress them, you bring the glass up to your nose for a sniff, and make some vague comments about the woody aromas before taking a sip. While your attempts to pretend you know anything about whiskey are pretty weak (you can’t tell a bourbon from a White Claw), there is hope: Researchers have recently created an “e-nose” that can tell different types of whiskey apart.

A team of scientists from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) recently published a paper in the journal IEEE Sensors about the device, dubbed “NOS.E”, that they claim can distinguish between different origins, brands, and styles of a whiskey simply by “sniffing” it. The e-nose was created in order to help sniff out fraudulent junk whiskies billed as high-end liquor.

“Up until now, detecting the differences between whiskies has required either a trained whiskey connoisseur, who might still get it wrong, or complex and time-consuming chemical analysis by scientists in a lab,” Steven Su, an associate professor at UTS and lead author of the study, said in a press release. “So to have a rapid, easy to use, real-time assessment of whiskey to identify the quality, and uncover any adulteration or fraud, could be very beneficial for both high-end wholesalers and purchasers.”

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Unfortunately, NOS.E doesn’t look like a disembodied human nose that you hold up to a glass of whiskey. Instead, the liquor is poured into a small vial on the device. The liquid’s vapors are then injected into a gas sensor connected to a computer that uses a machine-learning algorithm trained to identify different whiskies.

The team was able to use the device to identify three blended malts and three single malt Scotch whiskies. According to the study, the e-nose produced 100 percent accuracy for detecting the region of a whiskey, 96.15 percent for its brand name, and 92.41 percent for its style—a heckuva lot more accurate than most people’s noses.

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It might seem a little silly, but the device can be incredibly valuable to high-end liquor manufacturers, dealers, and collectors. Scammers frequently create fakes of highly sought after bottles of whiskeys. In fact, a 2018 study found that up to one-third of all rare bottles of single malt Scotch whisky were fake—which can be a sobering realization after you spend $1,000-$5,000 for a bottle. As such, a device that can suss out fakes from the genuine article could save collectors and manufacturers a lot of money.

For now, though, NOS.E is still a prototype. However, the researchers believe that the e-nose has a whole range of potential applications outside of the alcohol industry including detecting illegal animal parts on the black market, identifying counterfeit perfumes, and even detecting diseases in humans.

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