Yet aging can take, well, ages: four years is a widely accepted minimum for bourbon, eons to a cash-hungry start-up that has spent a small fortune on equipment, barrels and warehousing.

In response, many new distillers are turning to smaller barrels, as little as 5 gallons, instead of the standard 53-gallon model. The smaller size allows more of the whiskey to come into contact with the wood surface. As a result, it picks up the oaky flavors and dark colors of the wood faster, and within a year a distiller will usually have something with the vanilla and caramel notes associated with whiskey.

The problem is that those notes are about all they will get. Missing will be the complex floral and fruit notes that come from esterification, the years of interaction of acids in the wood with alcohols, oxygen and other chemicals in the barrel. Such one-dimensionality characterizes several new regional whiskeys, including Kings County bourbon of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is aged in five-gallon casks for about a year, or Hudson Baby Bourbon, produced by Tuthilltown Spirits in Gardiner, N.Y.

“You get something that’s interesting, and some people like it, and there might even be a market for it, but it’s not something that people who are looking for a complicated spirit are going to particularly enjoy,” said Kris Berglund, a chemical engineer and the head of the artisan distilling program at Michigan State.

It’s not that very young whiskeys are bad; they are just different. Koval, a new distillery in Chicago that makes whiskey with nontraditional grains like millet and spelt, gives its products just a few months in the barrel, enough to smooth a few edges but not so much that the grains’ unusual flavors disappear.