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Karlsson's Vodka: It's In The Blend

Months ago I started to talk about my trip to Sweden with Karlsson's vodka. I only covered how to pick potatoes so far.

The potatoes for this vodka all come from Cape Bjare in Sweden.To get there, we drove from Copenhagen, over the relatively new bridge that connects Denmark to Sweden with Malmo on the other side, then turned North to the Cape. The town we stayed in is called Torekov.

The nearby potato farms grow little heirloom potatoes called virgin potatoes whose skin has not yet developed. For these potatoes, smaller is better, and they're served seasonally as virgin/new/fresh potatoes, which they pronounce like "freshpotatoes" so it's easy to know what they are. They are in season from May through August. I ate approximately 700 pounds of them while on the trip.

Karlsson's doesn't necessarily distill the smallest ones, but instead the larger ones that are less desirable for eating. They're still relatively tiny compared to the giant American Russets. Virgin potatoes don't have a ton of starch in them (which will be converted to sugar, which can then be distilled into vodka) but they have a lot of flavor. It takes several times more of these potatoes to make vodka it does the American kind.

In a truly unusual move for vodka, the potato farmers who contribute to the blend are all minor shareholders in Karlsson's vodka.

The Blend

In the development of the blend that would become Karlsson's Gold, they initially distilled 20 different types of potatoes. The current blend of Karlsson's Gold uses seven. At the moment Karlsson's doesn't have their own distillery but uses a few others. All of them are single column stills.

They specify the distillation parameters (there is a minimum distillation proof to be considered vodka) and then get the liquid at the end.

While most brands of vodka emphasize their distillation and filtration technology, Karlsson's focuses on the blend. They recognize that ever year's distillation is different so they worry about it afterward.

We tasted several distillations of individual varietals including Solist and Old Swedish Red (Gammel Svensk Röd). We even tried several different years of Solist potatoes (the main component in the blend) from 2004, 2005, and 2006.

These vintages tasted very different from one another, from bitter and tangy to sweet and honeyed. It's hard to say if the potatoes vary that much year-to-year, or if they were just getting better at distilling them with passing years. The Old Swedish Red potato distillate is insane- it smells like the sea and reminded me of washed potato skins.

Karlsson's is a blend of 7 potato varietals and to me tastes of chocolate, caramel, and dusty chocolate-pecan, with a scent texture (my made-up term) is the dustiness of Red Vines when you first open the package.

Making Vodka

To get from potatoes to vodka, they first mush up the potatoes. They don't even need to add water. They bring them up to 95 degrees Celsius, then add enzymes to break the starch into dextrins. It is then cooled to 65 degrees then another enzyme is added. Then they're ready for fermentation.

The yeast used to convert the fermentable sugars into alcohol is the same strain as an old yeast used for potato vodka production years ago. They maintain cool temperatures during the fermentation process, as this produces less methanol than it would otherwise.

They use the sour mash method of yeast propagation/fermentation. This is when you add a splash of yeast from the previous batch of fermentation to the next one. This ensures consistency between batches and probably saves raw materials as well. After fermentation, the mash is only about six percent alcohol.

A couple days later on a boat on a cruise around the Stockholm, we met Karlsson's Master Blender Börje Karlsson, who also developed Absolut vodka. He's kind of a big deal.

When blender Karlsson created Absolut, it was developed as an export product only, to get around Sweden's ban against producing vodka from anything but potatoes. It's funny that he's now bucking the trend; making potato vodka despite the trend in the other direction.

(Karlsson's served with crushed black pepper)

For a technically flavorless vodka, Karlsson's has a ton of flavor. I had some last night in a 2:1 Martini with Imbue vermouth and a dash of Angostura Orange bitters- my first vodka martini in eons.

Many vodka companies today are putting out very refined, smooth, subtle and supple products for vodka drinkers. Karlsson's is almost the opposite of that, an in-your-face, meaty vodka for people who normally dismiss the category as catering to people who don't like the taste of alcohol. There's no missing the flavor in Karlsson's. 

 

Come to my Sherry Class in San Francisco!

On October 24th, I'll be teaching a class at Bourbon & Branch's Beverage Academy! This class was scheduled previously, but foolishly on a holiday weekend so we moved the date. Not only that, we lowered the price to sixty bucks. There is going to be some excellent sherry for sipping at this seminar. I hope you'll join me. 

I'm really excited about it. Sherry is a big category of rather complex fortified wine, so I'll be busting out my PowerPoint ninja skills and a whole lot of tasting glasses. Here's the class description.

Oh Sherry!

Sherry is wide category of fortified wine that’s due for a big comeback. Already bartenders have adopted itas favorite mixing ingredient in cocktails, and wine connoisseurs are giving it renewed attention.

Delicious as it is, sherry is no simple sipper: There are two sweet (Pedro Ximenez, muscatel) and five dry styles of sherry (fino, manzanilla, palo cortado, amontillado, oloroso); plus the dry sherries can be sweetened to create pale cream, medium, and cream styles. All are aged and blended in the famous solera system (in two very different ways) that gives sherry its unique flavor characteristics. Don’t worry, you’ll understand it all by the end of the class.

We’ll taste these styles of sherry and learn the amazing processes by which they’re made, learn how to drink it and where to buy it, and enjoy a sherry cocktail or two.

Instructor: Camper English

Camper English is a cocktail and spirits writer and educator who contributes to the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Fine Cooking Magazine, and many other publications. He travels the world visiting distilleries, blending houses, and bodegas and shares it on his website Alcademics.com. He has visited bodegas in each of the three major sherry producing cities in Spain and written numerous articles on the topic.
    

And we won't be drinking swill, either. I've scored some top-notch sherries, along with some very nice sherry-finished scotch whisky and some sherry-finished rum as well! 

The class starts at 7PM, lasts about two hours and costs $60. It is limited to 14 students. 

Buy tickets here, or learn more about the Beverage Academy here.

Solid Liquids: Campari Fruit Roll-Ups

In the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) we are experimenting with the best methods to dehydrate liqueurs, and then putting the dehydrated liqueur to good use.

This is one of those uses.

I've been using a food dehydrator as one method of dehydrating liqueurs. It works well enough, though other methods are faster. In order to use it, I insert plastic trays into the dehydrator shelves so that the liquid won't pour through the holes.

These trays are actually designed to make fruit leathers. The instructions on how to do so come with the tray, so I knew as soon as I got enough liqueur sugar I'd be using it for this.

First Try

On my first attempt, I followed the instructions a little too closely. Basically you use apple sauce to form the base layer of the fruit leather, then add other fruit to it to flavor it. The example recipe given is to use:

2 cups unsweetened apple sauce
2 pints strawberries, de-stemmed and with bruises cut off

To this I added 1/3 cup dehydrated Campari sugar and mixed it up in the blender.

I spread this out over two of the circular trays and let it dry for 14 hours, which was a little bit too long as the fruit leather was cracky in some parts and they didn't roll up.

They were delicious, but unfortunately you could barely taste the Campari; only a little bitterness.

Second Try

On my second attempt I left out the strawberries as a flavoring agent, and I did much better. My recipe was simply:

Campari Fruit Roll-Ups

2 cups unsweetened apple sauce
1/2 cup Campari sugar (in the future I'd use 3/4 cup)

Add ingredients to a blender and blend until blended. Spread out over one tray in fruit dehydrator and dehydrate for about 12 hours, until there are no sticky spots. For thinner roll-ups, spread out over two trays.

These were done to the perfect amount, and rolled up quite easily.

 

They were also delicious. The Campari flavor kicked in as you chewed the roll-up and in the after-taste. They were amazing but as I say in the recipe, could use more Campari!

Campari Straw Attempt

For both recipes, I attempted to roll up the roll-ups into a straw, because a Campari straw would be fabulous.

On one attempt I rolled a roll-up around a chopstick then waited to see if it would stick. It did not so I then weighed it down and put it in the oven to see if the ends would melt together. They did not, so I put it in the microwave to see if I would accomplish it that way, but it just came apart.

 

 

Alas. I'll keep working on this.

 

The Solid Liquids Project is sponsored by Skyy Spirits. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

The Bombay Sapphire/GQ Most Inspired Bartender Competition

Last week I helped judge the Bombay Sapphire/GQ Magazine Most Inspired Bartender Competition in Las Vegas.

My fellow judges were Tony Abou-Ganim, Francesco LaFranconi, and our host Tyler Florence. This makes me look awfully good in comparison!  

In the first round (that I did not judge), 46 bartenders from the US and Canada were judged on a single drink in shifts. From these, the top ten were chosen to compete onstage at the XS nightclub at the Wynn Las Vegas. 

The challenge for the top ten bartenders was a mystery ingredient contest- bartenders had 12 minutes to come up with a cocktail using the mystery ingredient before presenting it on stage. The ingredient in this case was Bombay Sapphire East, the newly-launched brand extension with lemongrass and black pepper added to the botanical mix.  Furthermore, the resulting cocktail was supposed to represent their home city in some way. 

The top ten bartenders were: 

• David Delaney - Boston 
• David Wolowidnyk - Vancouver
• Luke Edson - Omaha
• Matt Young -  Milwaukee
• Mia Sarazen - Los Angeles
• Chris Simmons - San Diego
• Adam Rose - Austin

The top three were: 

Second Runner-Up: Brandon Clements of Spruce in San Francisco. 

Naturally, Brandon used Fernet-Branca in his San Francisco-inspired cocktail. He also used Bombay Sapphire East, maraschino liqueur, Benedictine, Regan's Orange Bitters, and sage leaves. It was garnished with orange and grapefruit twists with a sage leaf. It was a nice classic-style cocktail freshened up with sage. 

First Runner-Up: Scott Mayer of Sra. Martinez in Miami.

Scott made a variation of a Negroni using Bombay Sapphire East, Cocchi Americano, Aperol, and a tincture of black pepper, grapefruit, tarragon, blueberry bitters, and lemongrass. It was served up with a grapefruit peel. It was pleasantly syrupy and bitter, just like the drink it is based on. The tincture (made within the twelve minutes) was a nice touch.

Winner of the 2011 Bombay Sapphire and GQ Magazine Most Inspired Bartender Contest: Bryan Dayton of Boulder's Oak at Fourteenth. 

Bryan's cocktail was fresh and delicious, used the orchard fruit and berries of Colorado, had a freshly-made sage simple syrup, and added Chartreuse that brought all of the elements together and gave it extra depth. Bryan did everything right and his drink was the clear winner. 

Here is the recipe - probably not the official version that will be announced later, but should be pretty close:

East Collegiate Peaks 
by Bryan Dayton

2 ounces Bombay Sapphire East
.25 ounces Yellow Chartreuse
.5 ounces Fresh Lime Juice
.25 ounces Sage Simple Syrup
1 ounce Pear Juice 
2 Blackberries

Shake and serve up.  

Congratulations to Bryan, the runners-up, the top ten, and everyone who made it into the competition!

Book Review: Gaz Regan's Annual Manual for Bartenders 2011

Gaz Regan's Annual Manual for Bartenders 2011 has a ton of amazing recipes from bartenders around the world, but unlike most cocktail books I think the additional content is where the book really stands out. 

The "101 best new cocktails" section contains some great recipes, most of which were tested and possibly adapted by Gaz Regan. In skimming the book, I earmarked a dozen or so of them that I feel the need to make eventually. But there is a lot more to the book than recipes. 

The first part of the book is the first part of Gaz' autobiography. The second part is a discussion on "mindful bartending," a sort of zen philosophy on how not to get stressed out and punch a customer in the face. 

Next is the methodology section. He goes over some tips and techniques on basics like pouring, muddling, building drinks, and using citrus. There is a whole section on using eggs in cocktails. The section contains the basic information you can get elsewhere, mixed with modern thoughts on matters like the proper age of citrus juice and the hard shake. 

Another section is the "fabulous bartender awards," recognizing bartenders for their creativity, attitude, philanthropy, etc. 

The "fabulous innovators" section is my favorite, though. It not only recognizes who invented what, but importantly when. With all the writing about cocktails these days, it is getting more difficult to keep a coherent timeline. I imagine someone looking back on this new cocktail renaissance in 50 years and trying to sort it out - it would be a lot of work. 

Gaz recognizes the creators/promoters of fat washing, Martini stones, mist-flaming, herb-spanking, carbonated cocktails, smoked whisky, and aged cocktails in bottles and barrels. 

For this reason, the annual manual is not just a recipe and instruction book, it's almost like a bartending yearbook.

Sugarcane and the Environment

For the most part rum is made from molasses, the byproduct of sugar production. So when we study the issue of the environmental impact of sugarcane production we need to keep in mind that molasses is the waste product of sugar production. Rum is recycling!

That said, we're studying not just sugar but sugarcane production so let's look at its impact. Most of this information comes from Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott (2008). See the references page for more information.

In Cuba where they couldn’t purchase pesticides and fertilizers due to economic issues, they made their own version of organic sugar farming. 

Sugar beets are a rotational crop so they don’t need much fertilizer or pesticide. It doesn’t cause much erosion or contamination. 

The sugar industry ruined the Everglades. It was protected by President Harry Truman, but sugar planters drained it and plantations' phosphorous runoff hurt much of the topsoil. 

Abbott writes about sugar's impact: “The World Wildlife Fun reports, cane has likely ‘caused a greater loss of biodiversity on the planet than any other single crop, due to its destruction of habitat to make way for plantations, its intensive use of water for irrigation, its heavy use of agricultural chemicals, and the polluted waste-water than is routinely discharged in the sugar production process.’”

 On the other hand, “Although Brazilian cane production is notoriously destructive to the environment, cane-derived fuel is precisely the opposite. It is much cleaner than fossil fuels and contains no contaminants such as sulfur dioxide. It emits much less carbon dioxide and protects the climate by vastly reducing carbon emissions, hence reducing pollution. It is sustainable. It yield 8.3 ties as much energy as as that expended to make it and, as new cane varieties are developed, will yield even more. Even its by-products are valuable, and Brazilian mills process them into electricity for their own use and to sell to the national grid.... Cane-based ethanol is the Twenty-First Century’s miracle-in-waiting.”

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

Dehydrating Liqueurs: Stovetop Crystallization Method

So far in the Solid Liquids project, I experimented with using the food dehydrator, oven, and microwave to dehydrate liqueurs into flavored sugars. The project index is here.  

Well, thanks to a Facebook friend, I now have a much more efficient way than all the others I've tried. Lauren Mote, co-owner of Kale & Nori Culinary Arts, wrote me to tell me the way she's made liqueur sugars. She wrote:

So I have found the easiest way to do this is actually culinary and through "almost" candy making.

If you cook down the spirit, and remove the water molecules, the liquids eventually crystallize.... the trick is "agitation". When you're trying NOT to crystallize, which is making candy, brushing the edges of a pot with water constantly prevents crystals from forming in the sugar. However, when you agitate the liquid and sugar, the crystals form. Continue to agitate, on low heat past the candy making stage, do not burn it. You will concentrate all of the flavour, without a microwave. Once the crystallization starts, it's really really really fast! Remove from the heat, keep mixing until the mixture turns light and powdery. Let cool on a SilPat non-stick baking sheet. Once cool, blitz in a food processor and sift through a tea strainer. What you're left with is completely concentrated, amazing powdered spirit. I did this with Cointreau and it was really amazing.

I wasn't sure I was doing it right but I tried it out with Campari, and it works! In short, add the liqueur to a metal pot,

Heat it so that the alcohol burns off, then it starts going into the candy phases as the water burns off. 

First it boils, then it gets thicker, then it starts to froth. Eventually the frothiness gets really big, like it's going to overboil.

Stir it with a metal spoon (perhaps you have a barspoon around). Not long after this point the frothiness dies down a little. You'll notice sugar crystals on the bottom of the pan as you stir it and the volume of the liquid seems to shrink a lot. Though it still looks quite liquid, it's ready.

Pull it out and as fast as you can, scrape it onto a silicone Silpat or other non-stick pan. You'll see that it is sugary and full of crystals. This dries really quickly.

Then you can stick it into a spice grinder and get your powdered liqueur.

The process takes less than two hours, and it seems to work with larger quantities of liqueur just as fast. Sweet.

In future posts, we'll finally start dehydrating liqueurs other than Campari.

The Solid Liquids Project is sponsored by Skyy Spirits. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

 

 

Solid Liquids: Bulk Liqueur Dehydration in the Oven

This is just a quick post in the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) to note that you can dehydrate liqueurs in the oven in containers other than the silicone cupcake holders that I've been using.

Many people have SilPat non-stick baking mats. These are great but have the problem of being flat so liquids run off them.

However you can also get other silicone containers. I bought a breadpan-sized silicone pan from Amazon. It works just fine for dehydrating larger quantities of liqueurs.

As you dehydrate a liqueur in the oven, a surface crust will form trapping some still-liquid liqueur beneath it, so it's important to break it up as it gets near the end of baking. I just squeeze the silicone pan to crunch the innards.

 

The Solid Liquids Project is sponsored by Skyy Spirits. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.