My latest story is up on Details.com. I took a look at Michael Veach's amazing book Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage and wrote about a few of the many bourbon myths he busted.
These include who invented bourbon, why it's called that, what they used to put into it to make it taste older, and more.
Go read the story on Details.com.
In my search for information about water sources used for various spirits as part of the Water Project, I came across Uisge Source, a company that bottles waters from different regions in Scotland.
The waters from Speyside, Islay, and the Highlands are meant to be representative of the waters used by distillers in those regions to make scotch; for dilution of drinks in the bourbon-and-branch style.
As I learned in the book Whisky on the Rocks, even distilleries next to each other may have different water sources, so it shouldn't be assumed that all the distilleries in an area use waters just like these in their whisky, but it seems like a good place to start.
The really cool thing about Uisge Source that it's not just water they sourced from these regions; they actually tell you about the chemistry of the water.
Islay’s Ardilistry Spring produces water with higher natural acidity which is created by filtration through peat.
St Colman’s Well in the Highland region produces a hard water, high in minerals due to filtration through porous and brittle red sandstone and limestone.
The Cairngorms Well in the Speyside region produces a soft water, low in minerals as a result of being filtered through hard rock such as granite.
And they give a chart of each water's properties. I love charts! (Click to make it bigger.)
As you can see from the chart, the Highland water is full of minerals including calcium and magnesium. Islay water is high in potassium, chloride, and sodium, and has a lower (more acidic) pH. Speyside water is low in nearly all minerals and has a slightly higher (more basic) pH than the other waters.
So: How do they taste? Happily, they sent me some to experiment with.
Uisge Source Taste Test
Speyside: Tastes quite dry. I notice this in distilled waters without mineral content, though at 125 ppm dissolved solids this still has a lot more minerals in it than my tap water. There is a granite taste to the water as well – not a creamy soft minerality but a hard one.
Highland: I measured the total dissolved solids (TDS) in this one at 225 ppm. It tastes softer in body and sweeter than Speyside. It's also more earthy.
Islay: At 183 ppm TDS it is halfway in mineral content between the other two, but this water has the most flavor- it's got a pronounced dirt/earthiness to it but I also taste grainy minerality.
Then the natural test would be to try different whiskies with the different waters, so that's what I did. The results were surprising!
Tasting Uisge Source with Scotch
I tried a 25-year-old Highland single-malt with each water, and a 10 year-old cask-strength Islay with each. I was surprised to find that each whisky tasted best with its regional water! Maybe I just got lucky – I didn't measure quantities down to drops and such, but I really didn't expect these to align.
The Speyside water made both the Islay and Highland whisky taste sweet. The Highland water brought out honey notes from whiskies, but it was totally in synch with the flavor profile of the Highland scotch where it wasn't a perfect fit for the Islay. The Islay water brought out the creme brulee and smoke of the Highland scotch which was good but not the typical flavor profile I associate with it, while it did the same for the Islay scotch to great effect.
This could all be in my head (and down my throat at this point) but I was surprised at how much these waters with subtle differences brought out pronounced differences in the whisky. Awesome.
Looking to buy Uisge Source? Unfortunately it's not in the US yet, though they tell me they're in talks with an importer and I'll share the news when it's available. They have a list of retailers on the site for UK customers and you may find it in duty-free shops in some airports.
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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.
In my latest post for Details.com, I talk about the interesting trend of leafy green salad vegetables making their way into cocktails.
Shut Up and Drink Your Salad: Cocktails Embrace Spinach, Kale, and Arugula
By Camper English
The West Coast style of cocktail in which bartenders muddle a cornucopia of fruits and herbs in their drinks has long been known as a "salad in a glass," but that term is taking on a whole new meaning as mixologists move to mashing leafy greens like spinach, kale, and arugula into drinks this spring.
In the Water Project I'm studying water in spirits in cocktails, from the source water for fermentation through to the sparkling water we use to dilute drinks. As part of the latter research, I'm looking into deconstructing and reconstructing mineral water.
Much of the work on this has been done by other people and I'll just be reproducing it here. In short, the mineral content of mineral waters is publicly available, so you can add minerals to your own water to recreate your favorite brand.
You can either start with your tap water, taking into account its mineral content, and add more minerals to it (as done on the Khymos blog), or you can start with completely mineral-free water and add to that (as done in the Craft Cocktails at Home book).
What's in My Water?
I decided to look at San Francisco tap water to see what it contains. From the annual Water Quality Report we can see the standard minerals that we look at in bottled water including calcium, magnesium, and sodium. My local water also contains metals like copper, lead, and aluminum. Then it has added chloramine and fluoride for disinfectant and dental health.
I know my water tastes good even without filtering it, but is it appropriate for use to make mineral water? Most of the numbers in the water report are given in ranges, and some of those ranges are pretty wide. They also give average levels of minerals and contaminants. Some averages from the report are:
Calcium 49 ppm (parts per million)
Magnesium 4.9 ppm
Sodium 13.5 ppm
The average amount of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) in my water 132 ppm. The TDS is an important number as we use it to measure mineral waters. Water sold as mineral water in the US has to have TDS of 250 at minimum.
Intrigued by the fact that my water seems to be halfway to mineral water, I decided to test the TDS of my tap water.
Testing Total Dissolved Solids (TDS)
TDS is super easy and cheap to test – a TDS meter costs about $15 on Amazon.com, or you can get one for free when you buy a Zero Water pitcher for $33. The pitcher is designed to get reduce the TDS in tap water to zero, so I bought one.
Using the enclosed TDS meter, I found that my tap water has super low TDS in the first place – only 32 ppm, compared with the San Francisco average of 132! I then compared it with filtered water:
San Francisco Tap Water, Average = 132 ppm
Camper's Tap Water = 32 ppm
Camper's Tap Water, after filtering with Mavea water pitcher = 28 ppm
Camper's Tap Water, after filtering with Zero Water pitcher = 0 ppm
Distilled Water (purchased), no minerals added = 0 ppm
I also tested Carbonated water, just to see how it reads, as most mineral waters that I'll be looking at later will be sparkling. It turns out that this is harder to read – the meter jumps around quite a bit and then settles around a number range. When I carbonated TDS 0 water it settled to 17 – 22 ppm. Interesting.
But what about the rest of the stuff in the water?
So even if I get the solids down to zero, what about the chloramine and fluoride? Are they still there and can you taste them? It turns out that the Zero Water pitcher gets rid of fluoride and some chloramine. From the FAQ:
Q. Does the ZeroWater filter remove Fluoride?
A. ZeroWater filters are not certified for the reduction of fluoride however fluoride is an inorganic compound. The TDS meter is designed to detect inorganic compounds. Fluoride levels in water are usually around 2 to 4 ppm, which will show up on the meter as 002 to 004. So when filtered water reads 000 it is not likely that fluoride is present in water.
Q. Does the filter remove Chloramine?
A. We have done internal lab testing that shows our filters can reduce chloramine. However, the presence of chloramine can reduce the expected life of the filter, so if you have chloramine in your water, you may need to change your filter more often than normal.
I then looked about getting rid of chloramine on the SF Water website:
Chloramine is not a persistent disinfectant and decomposes easily from a chemistry point of view but for water supply purposes chloramine is stable and it takes days to dissipate in the absence of substances exerting chloramine demand. Therefore, it is not practical to remove chloramine by letting an open container of water stand because it may take days for chloramine to dissipate.
However, chloramine is very easily and almost instantaneously removed by preparing a cup of tea or coffee, preparing food (e.g., making a soup with a chicken stock). Adding fruit to a water pitcher (e.g., slicing peeled orange into a 1-gal water pitcher) will neutralize chloramine within 30 minutes. If desired, chloramine and ammonia can be completely removed from the water by boiling; however, it will take 20 minutes of gentle boil to do that. Just a short boil of water to prepare tea or coffee removed about 30% of chloramine.
If desired, both chlorine and chloramine can be removed for drinking water purposes by an activated carbon filter point of use device that can be installed on a kitchen faucet.
Can you taste chloramine in drinking water? Several sites say that chloramine tastes better than chlorine in drinking water, but can you taste it at all?
"Chloramines do not give off any taste or smell and are relatively safe." [link]
The Water Quality Association, says [pdf]: "While chloramines are not a drinking water health concern to humans generally, their removal improves the taste and odor of drinking water. " They do not mention boiling but activated carbon filtration.
(Extra: A note about chlorine and chloramine removal in home brewing.)
So maybe you can taste chloramine, and better safe than sorry.
My guess is that if I boil water for 20 minutes to remove chloramine, then cool and filter it in the Zero Water filter, I could get pretty good quality water, with which to begin mineral water experiments.
Or, you know, just buy distilled water by the gallon at the store.
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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.
In my studies of water in spirits and cocktails, I picked up the book Whisky on the Rocks: Origins of the 'Water of Life' by Stephen and Julie Cribb. The book is about the geography of Scotland and how that influences the water sources for scotch whisky.
It turns out Scotland's geology is pretty varied between very old (2900 million years) and new (60 million years), with large faults that divide the country into different areas, rift valleys, metamorphosed Dalradian rocks, schists, volcanic islands, and more. I don't know what most of those words mean either.
Distilleries in Scotland draw their water from streams, rivers, springs, reservoirs, wells, and other sources. Even within a single distilling city like Dufftown, water comes from several different sources. The water used for scotch whisky seems to be just as varied as the whisky produced there.
One of the most interesting and useful passages in the book (to me), comes from an early page.
The primary source of water is rain, but what happens to rainwater before its arrival at the distillery affects its chemistry and thus the uniqueness of the resulting malt whisky. The rain may end up as a stream or river, in a loch or a reservoir, coming from the rock as deep or shallow boreholes, or as a spring high on a hillside.
If it falls on bare mountains made of crystalline rocks it will flow rapidly downhill as streams. This water has little chance to interact with the underlying rocks and often has a low mineral content. It will be acid and soft.
On the other hand if the strata are more permeable, or have many joints and fractures, the rain will percolate into and through the rock, dissolving it and increasing the water's mineral content. Limestones and sandstones, for example, yield water rich in carbonates or sulphates; such waters will be neutral or slightly alkaline and hard.
'Soft water, through peat, over granite' was the traditional and still oft-quoted view of the best water for distilling. Remarkably, out of the 100 or so single malt whiskies, less than 20 use water that fits this description.
Though the book covers how geography influences the water sources for scotch and the paths it takes to get to the distilleries, it doesn't really get to deep into how that water then influences the distillation and importantly the taste of scotch, noting that it is just one factor along with peat smoke, still shape, and aging that may influence the final product. But of course, that's a big question that I'm researching in my Water Project.
Some facts about water sources for whiskies from the book (keeping in mind it was published in 1998 so it may be out of date):
Those are just a few tidbits from the book, which is only 70 pages but rich with diagrams of the geography of the regions being discussed. It is definitely a geography book rather than a whisky book, and can be a little hard for the novice (me) to parse. That said, I have a feeling that the more I learn about water and its effects on fermentation and distillation, the more I'll refer back to this book.
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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.