Overview
Gajek and colleagues digested 170 whiskies from 11 countries and measured 30 elements by ICP-MS and ICP-OES plus mercury by cold-vapor AAS. Table 2 gives the mean, median, minimum and maximum of each element across all samples, and Table 4 gives manganese and copper by age group for single malt Scotch. Mercury was below the limit of quantification in every sample.
Key numbers
- Lead: mean 15.82 µg/L, median 10.61 µg/L, maximum 450.9 µg/L (Table 2); one Irish blended whisky exceeded the Polish limit of 0.3 mg/L (Section 3.1).
- Cadmium: mean 1.260 µg/L, median 0.720 µg/L, maximum 16.00 µg/L, below the 0.03 mg/L limit in all samples (Table 2).
- Chromium: 53.83 to 666.1 µg/L in blended Scotch versus 10.70 to 108 µg/L in single malt (Section 3.3).
Methods (brief)
Four milliliters of whisky were digested with nitric acid in a microwave system and diluted to 25 mL; indium served as internal standard. Detection and quantification limits were derived from blanks (LOQ = 3 LOD), but the values sit in a supplementary table that was not in the filed PDF. No certified reference material is described in the main text.
Evidence Fitness
A large, direct whiskey dataset with a sensitive method. Table 2 has internal errors: for boron, calcium, phosphorus and sulfur the printed maximum is below the mean or median, and nickel appears to be printed as “N”; those values are flagged. Limits, validation and per-country statistics are only in supplements. Results are per litre and are not comparable with mg/kg food values. The same group’s 2022 authenticity paper (gajek2022-whisky-authenticity-multielemental) analysed a different whisky set.
Related evidence
Update history
No substantive edit history is available in this build. The full commit record is available in git.