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The Mysteries Wood Maturation at Tales of the Cocktail

Here are notes from the Mysteries of Wood Maturation seminar at Tales of the Cocktail convention in New Orleans.

• "We want to keep the character of the base spirit, but we don't want to have vinegar. Wood helps us do that. It takes some of those acids out that we don't want." Dale DeGroff
• "We don't really know how far back barrel usage goes." Doug Frost. Theoretically you could throw it off a boat and it would float for a while. One person can roll it up a hill. "The very idea of bending staves is not way out - we're talking about ship-building." Doug Frost
• "It was in idea vessel and it just happened to provide flavor." Doug Frost
• "The very idea of whisky and brandy as aged products is a relatively new - 150 years or so- concept." Doug Frost
• Barrels we use for aging have about 5 percent tanin, 23 percent lignin, 70 percent cellulose. Resinous/turpentine elements in oak for barrels is tiny and that's what we want. - Doug Frost
• Prescription Julep - made with both bonded rye and cognac
• In barrels alcohol solubilizes extractable substances from the wood and acquires color. The color acquisition is gradual 
• Troncais oak was planted methodically in rows. The circles/grains have tighter grains. Limousin oak is fatter, grows among bushes. 
• Oxidation: taste mellows down, stewed oak aromas (from toasting) disappear, replaced by floral aromas specific to the type of oak used and the toasting. Color intensifies. 
• In France, 24 to 36 months natural drying in open air. Humidity in wood is  brought down from 17 percent to 10-14 percent. This tightens the fibers and locks in aromatic wood compounds. Harsh tannins undergo polymerization and eliminates the hard ones that taste like turpentine. Rain water washes the wood. 
• Rain, Dampness, sun, winds, temperature variations, and micro-organisms all act on wood as it's aging outdoors. 
• Wood from US - aromatic, sweet, low tannins. French: complex and aromatic, don't aromatically overwhelm the eau de vie.
•  Fine grain wood better for long aging. 
• The main aromas in wood: Eugenol - spices, cloves. Vanillin - vanilla, sweetness, sugars, Christmas cake finish. Whisky Lactone - grated coconut, mushroom, mulch, celery. (If too strong, lactone gives bitterness.) Mixed together over the years the levels of these three things give rancio; flavors that don't really go togher. "A mix of youth age spiciness, flower, tobacco, cigar box"
• At Vicard cooperage in France (read about my visit to Vicard here on Alcademics) they use corrugated staves. These allow more exchange between the spirit in the wood. 
• If you have too much moisture inside the stave, you'll get blisters when you toast the staves. These cause leaks. 
• "Consumers are being more and more difficult today, and they know what they're drinking."
• Can we separate what the wood does from what time in wood does? Yes, says, Doug Frost. As something ages in barrels it tastes on the spices from the barrel, caramel vanilla butterscotch. But then we take a step back - evaporation/oxidation from time in oak - you begin to make the fruit character we start with get riper and riper - raisin and dates and figs. If I'm smelling cinnamon and coconut and black pepper that's just the oak talking; the other notes are from time.
• "Some 50 year old cognacs taste dried out to me - the fruit gets more and more ripe until it gets dried out." Doug Frost 
• You always want to start aging in a humid cellar because these are when the biggest extractions take place 18 months - 2 years in a humid cellar, then move to a dry cellar. (In cognac.) You might bring a barrel back to the humid cellar to give it a little push. 
• We a next tried Parker's Heritage Collection - 10 year old bourbon finished in cognac casks, 100 proof. I'm no bourbon expert but I am pretty sure people are going to like this stuff a lot when it comes out later this year.    

New Products from Beam: Devil's Cut, Rose Cognac, and a Twelve Dollar 100% Agave Tequila

I wish all the major spirit companies would do this: Instead of being contacted by a million different PR agencies, I sat down with a Beam Global employee and she took me through some of the new product launches for Beam's brands over the next half a year. 

Beam has partnered with Thatcher's Organic Liqueurs so we may be seeing those around more. They're pretty low in alcohol level so I think they'll be more for home consumers than for bartenders. Of the ones I tried I think the apple-ginger one has the most potential.

Jim Beam is releasing the "Devil's Cut" in July/August. A play on the angel's share (the alcohol that evaporates through the barrel), the devil's cut is the bourbon that is trapped absorbed in the wood when the barrel is emptied. Apparently they've developed a way to get some of this whisky out. (Chuck Cowdery gets the info here.) They add a touch of this devil's cut to six-year-old Beam (with the same mash bill as their four-year-old) and release this product at 45% ABV.

I sampled the Devil's Cut and found it to be light bodied like regular Beam, but definitely a lot more woody. Not so much caramelized vanilla, but raw wood.

Knob Creek Single Barrel is just regular old Knob Creek but unblended and sold at 60% ABV instead of the usual 50%. The one I tried tasted like Knob Creek, at higher proof.

Courvoisier Cognac is coming out with a Rose' - a blend of cognac and wine. Sounds to me like it's a Pineau des Charentes but I don't know enough about it yet. Courvoisier continues to release new products - last year saw the launch of a 12-year and a 21-year bottlings. Finally cognacs are getting creative.

Sauza is launching a 100% agave tequila called Sauza Blue for  $11.99 and $13.99  $18.99 (the product was just released at this price- must have changed since speaking with me), in time for Cinco de Mayo. Sauza is usually a mixto, whereas their other lines - Tres Generaciones and Hornitos are 100% agave.

I think this is a pretty significant event, because:

• While 100% agave tequilas are growing even in the bad economy, the cheaper mixto tequilas are actually selling less. It seems Sauza is acting on this.
• We're currently in an agave glut, but the price of agave must be super low to offer this for twelve bucks. Will it be sustainable?
• 100% agave tequila must be bottled in Mexico, whereas mixto tequilas are usually trucked to the US and bottled there. Because Sauza is the #2 selling tequila their production is so big that they added an additional bottling line in Mexico to handle the bottling volume of this product.

So between Cuervo launching the 100% agave Tradicional Silver in the US ($24) and this 100% agave Sauza, things are moving in the right direction.

Contest: Blog About Cognac to Win a Trip to Cognac (Sponsored)

Over at the Palate Press Ad Network they're hosting a contest in conjunction with the BNIC (Cognac Bureau), called the 2011 Cognac Writing Contest.

The winner gets a trip to the Cognac Blues Passions Festival, which this year is hosting acts including ZZ Top, Moby, and Aloe Blacc. Second prize is five hundred bucks, which isn't too bad either.

So: you write a post about cognac, submit it for approval, and they give you a stat counter on your post. The first round of the contest is based on number of hits for your post (so the sooner you get started the better), and then a panel of judges chooses the winners in the second round (so don't just make it a bunch of search engine keywords).

I've been to the Cognac region with the BNIC and they do a lovely job as hosts. So if you were thinking about blogging about cognac, now might be a good time to do so.

And should you need inspiration or information, the cognac posts on Alcademics are here.

Read the rules before you get started, and good luck!

Cognac Cocktails in the Los Angeles Times Magazine

My first story for the LA Times Magazine is now online. It is in the Sunday, December 7, 2010 print edition. 

(Photo by Bartholomew Cooke)

The story is a brief airing of a pet peeve: Why are there so few cognac cocktails being served when we're supposedly in the midst of a classic cocktail renaissance? 

The article also includes four recipes from Damian Windsor of the Roger Room. 

Read and enjoy!

Good Info on Pineau des Charentes

Importer Nicolas Palazzi brought in a delicious barrel of cognac that I sampled earlier this year. Soon to arrive on US shores is another import project, a long-aged Pineau des Charentes. 

In announcing the new bottling, Nicolas sent a great and very practical description of pineau, how it is made, and why we don't see too much of it outside of France and Belgium. I have pasted it below.

After the general description I've pasted specifics as to the bottling that he is importing. 

If you are not familiar with what Pineau des Charentes is, no worries, no-one is; only two areas in the Galaxy consume Pineau in quantities: the Cognac region itself and....Belgium (I have always found mind-bending how such a small country could absorb that much alcohol...). Anyway, Pineau des Charentes - we will call it simply "Pineau",  "des Charentes" simply pointing to its provenance, from the Charentes Departments of France - is a sweet wine that can be white, red or rose and made in the Cognac region, using cognac as one of its components.

Indeed when making cognac, once the grapes are harvested in late September, they are destemmed then pressed to extract the juice. This juice will ferment (the sugar of the grapes being converted into alcohol thanks to the presence of yeasts) into a dry wine which is distilled twice in copper pot stills. The unaged eau-de-vie (water of life) is put in oak casks made of french wood; only after having spent at least two years in barrels can this spirit legally be called cognac.

Now what about Pineau? A few artisan distillers take some of this fermenting grape must and, before fermentation is over and all the sugar has been converted into alcohol, simply add cognac to it. The addition of eau-de-vie stops the fermentation immediately, the alcohol killing the yeasts.Part of the sugar is still present making for a sweet dessert wine, technically belonging to the Fortified Wine category like Port, Sherry, Madeira etc... The alcohol content of the resulting wine is usually between 17% Alc./Vol (34 % ABV) and 20% Alc./Vol (40 % ABV). Pineau is then aged in casks, usually on its lies to give it more complexity.

So why do only very few people know about Pineau? Well, in France most Pineaux available in the marketplace are young (have not been aged for a long time) therefore lacking complexity; as a result they do not attract the attention of wine or liquor enthusiasts. Because it is unrecognized, most connoisseurs never had the opportunity to taste how complex and refined a very old Pineau can be.Of course the absence of marketing make the export market completely inexistent. Thank God for Belgium and it's consumption of more than 2/3 of the Pineau output...

The provenance of the cognac used is another factor that plays an important role in the very average quality of the Pineau out there:Pineau from the Grande and Petite Champagnes can age longer and get more complexity over time than the ones made in the Bois areas of the Cognac region.Now because the demand for Pineau is small, Cognac's first and second growth - respectively the Grande and Petite Champagnes areas - rather than using part of their cognacs to make Pineau, prefer selling all of their eaux-de-vie as straight cognac which will command a higher price tag. As a consequence, makers from the Fin Bois, Bon Bois and Bois Ordinaires are the source of the majority of the Pineau production, their cognacs being less susceptible to age, therefore more affordable an ingredient to use.

Of course, a few passionate artisan cognac distillers do not follow the rule.

And now, information about the bottle Nicolas is bringing in to the US:

Case in point, my friend Dominique in the Grande Champagne; as a total Pineau geek, he has been putting as much care in his sweet wines as he does in his cognacs, aging both for decades the way his family has been doing for generations.

After tasting through Dominique's oldest barrels, I have decided to bottle one fabulous cask that has been seating in his cellar for longer than my adult life. This white Pineau took on an almost pinkish hue due to both the slow maturation in barrels (oxydation) as well as the prolonged contact with its lies; at 17.5 % Alc./Vol (35% ABV), it's residual sweetness is perfectly balanced by a high acidity that makes it one of the best sweet wines I have had the chance to taste in a long time. I have bottled a bit over 600 bottles - 679 to be precise.Let's see how it goes, those bottles are somewhere on the Atlantic ocean as I write and should arrive in NY by mid October...

Check the website for further details on this bottling. 

The New Remy V: Unaged Cognac or French Pisco?

I finally got the press release for Remy V, the new product debuting in September in two trial markets- the San Francisco Bay Area and Atlanta. I'd heard the word on the street about this and posted a couple hints to my Twitter feed and Facebook page last and this week, but this was the first I got an actual press release on it. 

 

Remy V is not a cognac because it is unaged- just double-distilled on the lees like cognac, chill-filtered, and rested before bottling. They're releasing the product with cocktail recipes from mixologist Charles Hardwick. 

I guess the proper name for this product would be a grape eau de vie or grape brandy. It's not a cognac since it's not aged long enough. It's not a marc (which is French grappa) because that is made from the leftovers of wine production rather than with the whole grape. 

It might be close to Peruvian pisco in that it is distilled from grapes in pot stills. Pisco comes from Peru or Chile, though (in Chile pisco can be column-distilled and slightly aged), so obviously this product won't be billing itself as a pisco. Furthermore, pisco is distilled only one time in a pot still and it is distilled to proof, meaning no water is added before bottling. Cognac is distilled twice and usually watered to bottling proof. One would expect Remy V to be more neutral and less grapey than pisco, but it's impossible to say at this point. 

So the big question is how the product tastes. I don't know yet, but I can't wait to find out. 

 

Sleeves are IN this Season with Moet-Hennessy

Sleeves! Sleeves! Sleeves! Everything in sleeves! 

Moet-Hennessy found the hot new look of the season by putting sleeves on all their products.

Perhaps they were inspired by the champagnes they put in sleeves a few seasons ago, like this attractive ice jacket for Veuve-Clicquot.  Sassy!

 

Then they did the same thing with flasks of Hennessy V.S. just this year.

So fresh!  SO funky!

Thinking ahead for fall, they knew it would get chilly, and said,  "SLEEVES FOR EVERYONE. EVERYONE GETS A SLEEVE!"

So they did one for Chopin vodka. It's the puffy jacket for potato vodka. FABULOUS.

More Fun With Distillery Waste

I am a big fan of distillery waste. Not bathing in it, but learning about it. 

In most cases where a grain is distilled into whiskey or vodka, the spent grain (after all the sugar has been removed to be fermented) is sold off as animal feed. In Cognac (at Hennessy anyway) the spent lees (grape parts) are taken to an industrial distiller to get more alcohol out of them, and the "heavy sediments" of the grape juice go for cattle feed and for use in pharmaceutical products. In tequila production, the spent fibers from the agave pinas are sometimes put back on the fields as fertilizer, sometimes mixed with the heads and tails of distillation. 

 (There is a lot of leftover vegetation in tequila production.)

Many sugar cane distillers (either at the sugar factory for rum or at the distillery for rhum agricole) burn the spent sugar cane stalks to heat the steam engine that powers the distillery. 

(Spent sugar cane to be burned at Rhum Clement distillery on Martinique.) 

(Huge steam-powered gears at Rhum Clement distillery on Martinique.)  

The heads and tails are the waste products of distillation, made up of alcohol, water, and undesirable flavor compounds that distillers don't want in their final products. These are also recycled. In scotch whisky, these are put back into the still for the next batch of distillation. (Somehow they never build up and overwhelm the spirit- weird.) Many companies sell the heads and tails to industrial distillers who make pure spirit, cosmetics, and other products. Some use this alcohol as fuel to heat their distilleries in winter. 

(The condenser at Fettercairn.) 

Speaking of heat, many (if not most) distilleries are mainly powered by hot water; heated either by an oil burner or by burning waste materials like the sugar cane stalks mentioned above. The hot water heats the stills to convert the liquids into steam. Cold water is also needed in the condensers of the still to convert the alcohol in steam form back into liquid form. Typically this cool water comes from a nearby stream or river. After it is used in the condenser it is now hot water, which isn't usually suitable for dumping back into the water stream from whence it came until it is cool. In some distilleries such as the one for Blue Ice Vodka, this hot water is used to lightly heat a warehouse in the winters. 

What About the Water in the Still? 

On my recent trip to the Isle of Jura, The Dalmore, and Fettercairn distilleries I learned about more industrial waste. This made me very happy. 

For some reason nobody talks about the leftover water from distillation. Distillation is really just separating alcohol from water in order to concentrate the alcohol. Concentrate alcohol in beer and you get (unaged) whisky or vodka. Concentrate it in wine and you get brandy. The heads and tails contain alcohol and this is valuable so it gets recycled, but there is still the water left in the still. 

(Stills at Fettercairn.) 

At Fettercairn, Jura's master distiller Willie Tait explained it: After the first distillation, the leftover water also contains yeast bodies from fermentation. This water/yeast mix is called "pot ale," and it can be boiled down into a high-protein syrup used as cattle feed or as fertilizer. 

After the second distillation the leftovers are mostly water with a high copper content with some congeners. Tait said this mixture is called the "spent lees," which is confusing because in cognac this means something different. I also failed to write down how this water is recycled if it is at all, so I have more fun facts about distillery waste to learn!