In the world of professional spirits reviews, “smooth” is something of a dirty word. Consumers, on the other hand, absolutely love to use it.
The implication of “smooth” is simple; it suggests a product doesn’t hurt when you drink it. It’s such a sought-after quality that the distilling industry will do just about anything to achieve it. Some methods are respectable, like aging a whiskey for 15 years to file down its rough edges. Some are less so, like dumping in loads of chemical additives. Some are more successful than others, but none can completely eliminate that burning sensation in your mouth.
But it wasn’t until Joana Montenegro and Martin Enriquez, the spousal founders of Voodoo Scientific, that anyone really asked: Why does alcohol burn, anyway? And, most importantly, is there a way to get rid of that gasp-inducing burn altogether?
Conventional wisdom and common sense would suggest that ethanol is what makes that ill-advised shot of firewater sear your mouth and throat so badly, but it turns out that’s not the case. During the months of Covid-19 lockdown, Enriquez, a former telecom executive, says he and Montenegro, essentially on a lark, had the idea to dig deep into this question. They started by scouring the scientific journals to see if anyone had pinpointed the reason why whiskey and its ilk can cause an unpleasant burn. No one had. “Nobody could describe the compounds that make that harsh, painful bite,” he says. “No one could really identify what it is that attacks you and creates pain.”
Montenegro, a veteran food scientist from General Mills and Land O’Lakes, said they decided to go deeper. “We said, ‘Let’s go back and find the specific receptor in the mouth that’s being triggered by the spirit,’” she says.
To do that, the duo started by contacting David Julius, the head of physiology at UCSF, to discuss the line of inquiry. Masked and 6 feet apart in a Starbucks, Montenegro says, Julius didn’t comprehend why someone who was part of the team that patented Go-Gurt had an interest in pain receptors. Nevertheless, the duo persisted, and Julius eventually guided them on how to research the concept and determine which receptor was being activated to cause a pain response. Eventually Montenegro and Enriquez found it, a receptor called TRPA1.
Once a negative receptor like this is identified, traditional food science has a solution for dealing with it: You block the receptor with a chemical. It’s the typical way that sweetness and bitterness can be masked in foodstuffs, by just covering it up with something stronger. Alas, that didn’t work for hiding the burn of alcohol. “This receptor has a very unique property called reversible bonding,” says Montenegro. “It’ll bond to a thing, it’ll give you a jolt, and it’ll let it go—and then it’ll bond to another one.” This is why alcohol continues to burn sip after sip.
“In other words, you can’t block it,” she says. “It’s designed to continuously alert you that you’re consuming something that is an irritant.”
So, the couple turned to plan B: Remove the triggering compounds from the distillate. The only problem was they didn’t know what those compounds were. To find them, GC mass spectrometry was used to identify hundreds of molecules that are common across all spirits categories, and then whittle them down to find the few that had the characteristics that would trigger TRPA1. Eventually the team identified nine compounds of interest.
The most surprising thing about these compounds is that none of them are ethanol itself but rather various by-product compounds of the fermentation process that are expelled by yeast and survive distillation. Specifically, says Montenegro, “As yeast ages, fat around the cell starts to oxidize. It’s this oxidation that leads to these kinds of compounds being created.” Since it’s related to yeast, it doesn’t matter if you’re making tequila, rum, or moonshine—it’s all going to burn. They’re present in every fermented product at a scale of parts per million or billion.
“There’s nothing you can do to stop this. It’s just a natural adjacent bioprocess to fermentation, making alcohol,” says Enriquez.
In Search of Smoothness
But if these compounds are a natural part of fermentation, how do you get rid of them? That answer came in the form of a class of enzymes in the dehydrogenase family, which are some of the catalysts that convert acetaldehyde to ethanol. Turns out some can also convert those offensive compounds into something neutral during fermentation.
“The beauty of nature is, when you have an irritant, nature tends to have a way of detoxifying it,” says Montenegro. “Detoxifying enzymes takes these precise compounds and converts them into a neutral and safe organic acid. So it’s the perfect thing to put in the fermentation tank, because as the yeast starts to get aged, old, and stressed, the enzyme is only scavenging for these types of compounds and completely converting them into this organic acid that is neutral and safe. It’s actually a precursor to an ester. So it’s never a bad thing in a spirit.” However, the enzyme does not survive distillation, so it’s not present in a finished spirit.
Voodoo Scientific didn’t create the enzyme it uses in its process, but rather worked with a biotech company to pore through thousands of commercially available enzymes to find a handful that could impact the nine suspicious compounds it had targeted. The company’s patent isn’t actually for the enzyme itself, says Montenegro, because a broad family of enzymes can do the job, and it would be trivial to create a slightly different one that worked the same way. Rather, Voodoo’s US patent (#12359150) covers a method of using any of a broad class of enzymes during the fermentation process “to reduce or remove an oral pain response.” Its patent for “Enzymatic smoothing of beverages” was granted in July 2025.
Making Enzymagic
Voodoo Scientific’s product is called Viriato, named after a legendary warrior in Portugal—where Montenegro is from and where the couple now lives—who held off Roman soldiers from invading his village. While Montenegro and Enriquez estimate they’re a year or two away from being able to provide the enzyme at the scale needed for full-tilt production, the product is now being tested by R&D groups in distilleries all over the world.
One of those testers is Pete Barger, CEO of Southern Distilling in North Carolina, who first met the team five years ago, during their early Covid-era development. “I liked the concept and the technical approach,” he says, saying that Voodoo’s idea was a breath of fresh air in a stodgy industry built on tradition. “So much of the American whiskey space is ‘We do it that way because that’s how we’ve always done it.’ But we know we can use new technology to get better results.”
Encouraged by his tastings of Voodoo’s production samples, Barger says Viriato isn’t about “fixing a bad product” but rather about opening the door to creativity that might otherwise not be possible. “If you can have a better, cleaner distillate going into a barrel,” he says, “we don’t have to ask that barrel to atone for the sins of production. It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s another tool in the box that allows us to do some really interesting things.”
Southern is now waiting on a product to test Viriato at scale. If it works out the way he hopes, Barger says it could become part of its entire production process. “I think it’s all or nothing,” he says.
Enriquez echoes Barger’s hopes that Voodoo will spur more creative distillations. “Distillers are artists,” says Enriquez. “They like making things that have nuance to them, and Viriato allows them to explore places they couldn’t previously.”
When independently tested by experts at the Beverage Testing Institute in January 2025, tasters noted that the treated samples not only were much less harsh but also that one processed sample surprised them because “it tasted more like rum than moonshine,” BTI president Jerald O’Kennard said in an interview for this story. “It has this transformational aspect. It’s almost like it could create a new product category.”
No Pain, No Gain
But is there a dark side to Viriato? After all, that pain response is there for a reason, ostensibly working to keep drinkers’ consumption in check. If there’s no burn, won’t people just guzzle down these super-smooth spirits without a care?
As I expected, medical professionals weren’t exactly thrilled with the concept of booze without the burn.
“This is basically removing the biological barrier to overconsuming alcohol,” says Nicole Avena, a neuroscience researcher at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “A burning sensation or adverse taste is beneficial. It is the sense that it helps us to limit our intake. People could definitely run a risk of becoming highly intoxicated rather quickly.”
Jared L. Ross, an emergency medicine doctor in Charleston, also says that he has some worries. “I’m not sure this will be a driver for overconsumption,” he says, “though it may get you to consume the drink in front of you faster,” which in turn would cause you to drink more than you might ordinarily consume.
That said, notes Ross, “There are certainly other ways to mask alcohol.”
Montenegro and Enriquez at least concur with that last statement, saying that distilleries already add loads of sugar and glycerin to hide the bite of booze. “And you’re going to have to get rid of cocktails if you go down that road,” says Enriquez.
Rather than encouraging distillers to mask the harsh bite of alcohol with adulterants, they reiterate that they feel it’s better for both producers and drinkers to eliminate it.
The Pepsi Challenge
Naturally, I had to see for myself if the product lived up to its promises, and the company sent me a tasting kit of two vodkas and two unaged whiskeys (they call it moonshine), one of each made traditionally, the other processed using Viriato’s enzymes.
After hours of talking about the product, I thought I had a good handle on how Viriato would impact a spirit. But I was wrong. To my palate, it wasn’t so much a matter of removing burn—probably because after 18 years of tasting spirits professionally, I’m immune to burn at standard proof levels. I really didn’t detect much burn in any of the samples.
Rather, what the Viriato samples did reduce was a sense of roughness and immaturity. The hard edges and pungency of a relatively cheap, unaged spirit were far less visible in the Viriato samples. More importantly, I could now readily taste how the spirits had been doctored during their production. The hefty amount of sugar used to create the vodka was easily detectable without the burn of alcohol to counterbalance it. And it was also trivially easy to detect that the vodka had been made from a base of grain, rather than, say, potatoes.
Montenegro says that this amplification of other flavors in a product is one of the added benefits of the solution—and that distillers shouldn’t really need additives if they use Viriato. Additives are under increased scrutiny in the beverage alcohol space, she says, noting, “Consumers are becoming increasingly concerned with the fact that there are all these secret things that are getting added to their liquid that aren’t on a label, and which don’t have to be on a label,” she says. “So if you no longer have to add these ingredients to mask things, it’s better for everyone.”
If Viriato catches on, will we soon have access to cleaner, less adulterated spirits, all without harshness and burn?
Sounds like a pretty smooth idea.
