Comment by shiroiushi

I was going to make a comment along these lines. I don't know much about bourbon, but as an alcoholic drink, basically it's relying on chemical reactions to create the final product. The current way of making it, which takes a lot of time, has been designed by trial-and-error over many, many generations, as with most alcoholic drinks, and this was mostly done in times before we understood the science of chemistry.

It should be certainly possible (I'm not sure how) to replicate this process in a speedier way.

However, I think the thing being missed by the start-up guy is that, like Louis Vitton crap and genuine De Beers diamonds, most people aren't looking for something that replicates the "genuine" product, they want "the real thing" because there's some kind of emotional factor in owning some massively overpriced shirt made by sweatshop workers and sold in a fancy store by appointment, or a rock that was really dug out of the ground by an enslaved child in Africa. I suspect barrel-aged bourbon is similar.