The infinity bottle is a trend that has taken hold among spirits nerds as a way of creating a unique blend at home. The idea is pretty simple: You take an empty bottle and start creating your own personal blend of a chosen spirit, typically a whiskey. Then you keep adding to it over time. If you have an infinity bottle of bourbons, for example, you might drink some of it one night and then top it off with something new, creating a blend that continually evolves in the bottle.
The concept has been traced back to a 2012 YouTube video by Ralphy Mitchell, who compared it to the solera system of ageing sherry. The key to a solera is that it never runs empty: When a sherrymaker withdraws some wine for bottling, he tops the barrel off with sherry from a younger barrel. Individual solera systems can go back decades, growing more complex with time. You probably don’t have room for a chain of barrels in your own home, but you can have fun creating a similar effect within a single bottle.
Infinity bottles have become a niche hobby among whiskey enthusiasts, although there’s no reason to limit the practice to brown spirits. That said, it makes sense to decide on some constraints rather than just throwing any and all liquors indiscriminately into the same vessel. If you choose to make a whiskey infinity bottle, you’ll need to decide whether to focus on a single style — rye, Irish, Scotch? — or to combine them all into one weird blend.
Thoughts? I mean, it sounds like it could be kind of good…it’s how you make a really good sourdough starter. At the same time, one wrong addition and bleh.