A stick and time makes fine whiskey

And very little time--24 hours--at that, for whiskey not aged in oak for years;

“Customize your whiskey in 24 hours,” the product page reads. “It’s your whiskey, drink it the way you want.”

The product is the brainchild of a Portland-based company called Time & Oak. They argue that the best and most expensive whiskeys are made after they are aged in quality oak barrels. But if you can’t afford to buy the finest whiskeys, you can probably settle for their Whiskey Elements, which are nothing more than specially designed oak sticks.

By simply adding the stick to a bottle of cheap whiskey, they claim that you can replicate the taste of high quality liquor in no time at all. That’s because their ‘accelerated transpiration through capillary action’ can properly age cheap whiskey into a quality one by filtering impurities and infusing additional wood flavor in the spirit.

It's this simple;

“Wood barrels are really only good at containing the whiskey, because the wood is cut vertically so that the capillaries aren’t exposed to the liquid; otherwise the whiskey would slowly seep out the sides of the wood like a wet paper bag.” So they designed a product that takes advantage of ‘transpiration through capillary action’ by cutting the wood horizontally. The horizontally cut ‘element’ of wood provides a shorter distance for whiskey to travel through its repetitive exposure to the capillaries, so it matures much faster and becomes of a much higher quality. They call this ‘accelerated transpiration through capillary action’.

And, through another modern invention--crowd funding--it's reality.