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RUM as good as the best premium aged spirit can now be made cheaply, without having to leave it to mature for years. The rich flavours produced during ageing in wooden casks can be generated artificially in as little as 10 days say José Quesada Granados and his team at the University of Granada in Spain. They tested the quality of cheap brands that had been aged artificially by adding toasted oak chips to the liquid for 10 to 330 days. After measuring the concentrations of 13 key flavour compounds, Quesada Granados concludes in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that the genuine rums were virtually indistinguishable from the synthetic substitutes (DOI 10.1021/jf010889i). By shortening the ageing process, distillers would slash storage costs and evaporation losses, say the researchers.