Devil's Cut
Modern equivalent
Roughly 2–3 gallons per barrel, varying with wood and age
The spirit absorbed into the oak staves and left behind when a cask is emptied, amounting to several litres a barrel.
Where the angels’ share escapes into the air, this is what stays in the wood.Oak is porous, and over years of maturation the staves drink a quantity of spirit that is never recovered by ordinary emptying — commonly put at two or three gallons a barrel, deeply coloured and heavy with tannin.Coopers and distillers have known this for as long as there have been casks.The name, however, is neither old nor British.Devil’s Cut is a Jim Beam product launched in 2011 and a registered trademark of its owners, who developed a process of agitating emptied barrels with water under pressure to draw the absorbed spirit back out and blend it into a bourbon sold under that name.The phenomenon is genuine and the extraction works; the term is twenty- first - century Kentucky marketing, coined as a mirror to a much older Scottish phrase.It is in this archive as a companion to the angels’ share rather than as a measure anyone ever traded in, and because the contrast is worth knowing: one name is a distiller’s joke about tax, the other is a brand.