Useful as a warning against forcing legal, material, geographic, and process dimensions into a single genealogy.
The exercise demonstrates that spirit categories span multiple axes, but its phylogenetic framing, selected characters, and several underlying whiskey classifications are not authoritative.
The authors construct a spirit tree from nearly thirty selected characteristics, including plant material, country, proof, infusion, sweetness, aging, and barrel type, and then interpret the output as if cultural product categories formed biological ancestry groups.
Printed p. 108 / PDF sheet 118
Printed p. 107 / PDF sheet 117
Chapter 7 — Spirits Trees
Text and figures checked. Treat as an exploratory classification artifact, not a valid whiskey taxonomy.
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