Jeff Stringer, PhD, chair of the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Kentucky, makes it an annual priority to track wood commodities prices. Around 2012, he started noticing a spike in demand for a very particular product: white oak staves, the thin strips of wood that

BackgroundWhiskey (usually spelled whisky in Canada and Scotland) is a spirit produced from fermented grain and aged in wood. A spirit is any alcoholic beverage in which the alcohol content has been increased by distillation. Other spirits include brandy (distilled from wine), rum (distilled from su