COLLABORATION
Scotch & Science:
Ghosts in a Glass Lead to Potential Industrial Breakthrough
By Michelle Z. Donahue
Guest Contributor
Scotch wasn’t in
Button’s early repertoire; he marPassing by a glass left out on a side table,
ried into it when
Ernie Button picked it up to carry it to the
his wife, Melissa,
dishwasher. But, chancing to look down at it
and her family
before he put it away to be cleaned, he noticed
introduced him
something peculiar: a phantasmic imprint at the to it. He’s gradubottom of the glass. As he held it up to the light ally come to enjoy
to get a better look, the smudge resolved itself
a little tipple here
into something more sublime: a series of smoke and there, but as
rings, patterns of chalk, embossed on the glass. one photo led to
On the previous evening, Button had been sipping on a Scottish whisky, and he was mystified
by what now remained in the glass.
A photographer by personal passion, Button is drawn toward the mostly unobserved
influences of human presence; the disregarded effects and artifacts left behind by
the passage of people. To notice this shadow at the bottom of his glass was in keeping with his aesthetic interests, though on
a decidedly more microcosmic scale—other
subjects of his camera work have included
portraits of rock formations in his home state
of Arizona and from travels in Peru.
“It’s hard to get away from the influence
of man,” Button said. “If there’s a trail to the
middle of nowhere, someone blazed that trail.
A lot of my photography for the past fifteen to
twenty years is really about the things that are
often overlooked, the things that are ignored in
the process of our daily lives.”
But as a practicing speech pathologist, Button’s analytical mind kicked in. The deposits
were smooth, rhythmic, and organized. He
started wondering: is there some way to replicate this? Some way to test if this was a one-off
occurrence?
another, the
questions
began piling
up. Do the
rings change
depending on
the Scotch’s
geographic origin? Or the type of
cask it’s aged in? He
knew, for instance, that
labels like Laphroaig and Lagavulin are created
with liberal portions of peat, while others, like
Speyside and Macallan, don’t use as much peat.
“I got the idea, is there a difference between a
12-year whiskey, to 15-year, to an 18-year?” Button said. “I thought it would be really fantastic
if there was. I was precise in what I was doing.
I put them on a slide, one drop of each, and let
them dry.”
Only whiskey produced and aged in Scotland can be called Scotch. The process involves
sprouting barley, sometimes along with other
Answers would come. He flipped the cup over, cereals, drying the germinated grains—someshined a light through it, and snapped a photo.
times with peat smoke in the kiln—grinding
them up, then mixing the grist with yeast and
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SciArt in America April 2015