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A Visit to the Hakushu Distillery in Japan

I visited the Hakushu distillery owned by Suntory, located in the Yamanashi prefecture, about two hours by train from Tokyo in Japan. There is a new Hakushu single malt whisky on the US market. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, Hakushu was built in 1973 and is located at a high elevation - 700 meters above sea level. (Scotland's highest distilleries are Dalwhinnie and Braeval, both about 355 meters.) On the train ride there, your ears are continually clogging as you change elevation. The distillery is on a large site to protect its water source, and doubles as a bird sanctuary. 

The Yamazaki  distillery used to grow at least some of its own grain up until around 1970, but now they import all their barley. It is grown and malted in Scotland and shipped to Japan. Suntory buys malted barley at two different peating levels; basically unpeated and at highly peated at at 25 ppm phenol content. 

They grind the malted barley on site, then put it in the mash tun with hot water to expose the fermentable sugars and transfer it to the wooden washbacks for fermentation.  They ferment it using both brewers' and distillers' yeast.

They have six pairs of stills at Hakushu;  two of them the same shape and one not currently used. Thus they have four active still shapes producing different whiskies. As there is another whisky boom, they're currently distilling 24/7. 

As Hakushu is at a very high elevation, the whisky ages more slowly with less wood influence on the spirit. Though they use five types of barrels at the other single malt distillery Yamakazi, at Hakushu they focus on two: ex-bourbon and hogshead. (Hogshead barrels are reconstructed bourbon barrels made a little larger, holding 230 liters rather than 180.) They do, however, age ex-sherry butts (Spanish oak, 480 liters), and puncheons (new American white oak, 480 liter). 

They rechar some barrels after using them to age whisky about four times, but after they rechar they only use them one more time. Distillery General Manager Mike Miyamoto says that the whisky aged in rechar barrels is more astringent than with regular ex-bourbon barrels. 

The smell of a recharred barrel is amazing! It's like campfire wood and sugars, even marshmallowish. 

At Hakushu they use only racked warehouses, in earthquake-safe metal racks that go about 13 levels high. 

Here they use peated and unpeated barley, four still shapes, and five types of casks (though they focus on two.) They say that between them (2x4x5) they make 40 different types of whisky at Hakushu. 

Regardless, to make up the Hakushu single malt they primarily include three whiskies distilled on-site:  unpeated malt distillate aged in hogshead barrels, unpeated malt distillate aged in  sherry butts, and peated malt distillate aged in  ex-bourbon barrels. 

We sampled each component separately and then the Hakushu 12 and 18 year old blends. With three widely different distillates, Hakushu is almost more of a blended malt (vatted malt) than a single malt.  

DonQ Rum Visit to Puerto Rico

This summer I visited the Destileria Serralles Puerto Rico, the home of DonQ Rum.

DonQ is distilled in the southern part of Puerto Rico, in Ponce. The distillery has been on the same site since 1865. As with most rum distilleries, it was once the site of a sugar refinery and the distillery was a small part of the overall operation. Puerto Rico stopped producing sugar in the 1980s and the distillery became the important business.

As with distilleries in the United States, during Prohibition Destileria Serralles was closed. After Prohibition ended, they rebuilt the distillery, this time with column stills to replace the previous pot stills. One of those distillation columns from 1934 is still in use today.

Making Rum

The molasses for DonQ is purchased on the open market; the low-sugar stuff from the Dominican Republic or thereabouts, and the high-test sugar-rich stuff from Gautemala. (I learned only recently that with improving technology and higher prices for sugar, they are stripping more sugar out of molasses so they need to suplement lower-quality molasses with special high-sugar stuff so that there is enough sugar in the liquid to ferment.)

The molasses is shipped into the port of Ponce and then transported to the distillery, where it is pasteurized to prevent any spontaneous fermentation.

It is then fermented in stainless steel fermenters with their own strain of yeast until it reaches 8-10 percent alcohol by volume. They distill two rums that are later blended; a "light" and "heavy" version. The lighter version ferments for a lesser time than the heavy.

The heavy rum is distilled in the original beer column (the first column of a multi-column still) from 1934. It looks just as old as it is. 

The light rum is distilled in the newer, multi-column stills.

After distillation, the rum is aged. The barrels used at DonQ are used twice before they buy them: the first time by the bourbon industry (as with most rums, tequilas, and scotch because barrels can only be used ounce for bourbon by law), but also another time for "light whiskey" which I take to mean blended whiskey like Seagram's.

Thus there should be less wood influence from these barrels than on other products. Furthermore, they reuse them about 20 times and never rechar them.

The rums are aged at a few different proofs, aged separately as light or heavy-style rums, and some is aged as a "medium" rum; a blend of the two. There are also some solera-aged rums in ex-sherry barrels, which are added to some of the blends.

Sustainability Practices

Roberto Serralles is a sixth-gernation Serralles family member who holds a PhD in environmental sciences. He is responsible for making this distillery more eco-friendly with the goal of making it waste-free. If given the chance to see him speak, I highly recommend it because he is engaging, authentic, enthusiastic, and making a real difference. Some of the innovations he has helped develop are already being copied by other distilleries. 

The DonQ website has a great overview of the sustainability practices in place, though from what we learned on-site many of these are evolving from how they are described there.

The carbon dioxide released during the fermentation process used to be captured and sold to use to carbonate sodas, but a change in legal regulations has made this undoable in the short term.

The distilled molasses "beer" is only 8-10 percent alcohol, then is distilled up to 75 - 90 percent. That leaves a lot of excess water with organic material leftover - during the height of their production 350,000 gallons of wastewater per day. 

The goal is to separate out the organic matter from the water so that you can reuse the water. First they use anaerobic digesters, in which bacteria eat the organic matter and release biogass. (I want to write a book about distillery waste and call it "Everybody Farts".) This biogass is burned to produce heat at the distillery and reduces the distillery's oil consumption by about 50 percent.

The next stage is aerobic decomposition, which further reduces the organic matter and produces brownish water. They used water this for irrigation, but as I understand it the water isn't ideal, so they are replacing this system with a new membrane filtration system that Roberto Serralles was pretty proud of.

That and other systems are in development, but some of the development has been delayed due to a significant business change. You'll learn why in tomorrow's post.

Underwater Wood Reclaimed for Boozy Use

I've noticed two different situations where trees submerged in water for a long period of time have been pulled out and put to good use in drinking situations.

The first time was at the Four Roses distillery in Kentucky. The wooden fermentation vats are made from cyprus logs that were submerged in the Suwannee River (I always that it was spelled "swanee"). Apparently the logs were cut in the 1800s, so they've been under water a very long time.

(Um, this is the inside of the fermentation vat anyway.)

The wood lasts a long time in this wet environment because the cyprus trees grew in swamps and are used to being waterlogged.

The second time waterlogged wood came to my attention was as part of a bar at a new hotel. The new hotel is the Trump Ocean Club, opening July 6th in Panama.

Tejas Restaurant’s bar is made of “cedro espino” wood, cultivated from trees preserved underwater for more than 95 years.  Since the construction of the Panama Canal – finished in 1914 – the cedar trees have been submerged in nearby Lake Gatun, a manmade reservoir used to support the Canal’s locks during dry season.

I didn't know that reclaimed underwater wood was a thing, but it turns out it may be a thing.

Zen and the Art of Bartending

This week I flew down to LA to attend the Pioneers of Mixology, a day-long seminar put on by Pernod-Ricard. We were given talks by Dushan Zaric (Employees Only, NY), Aisha Sharpe (Contemporary Cocktails), Gaz Regan (writer), Tony Conigliaro (69 Colebrooke Row, London), and Nick Strangeway (Hix, London).

Below are some of the take-home messages that I took home.

Gaz, Aisha, and Dushan kicked off the day speaking about Mindful Bartending. I'd describe the concept as happiness in your job as a bartender, reaching "the zone" feeling when you're in the weeds yet the drinks seem to mix themselves and you're smiling your way through it all- even when you're not slammed. 

Beyond feeling better about your work, you're a nicer person to your customers. So rather than specific mixological skills or particular elements of service, mindful bartending is about a positive attitude. Aisha said, "If the spiritual aspect of this is not important to you, think numbers." Basically, you'll make more money when you're nice to your customers.

Some of the ways to achieve this include:

• Doing a bit of meditation or breathing or some getting-psyched/calm ritual before the start of a shift.
• Healthy living- exercise and proper sleep.
• Thinking about someone you love or other positive thoughts when working. Infusing your drinks with good thoughts.
• Breaking patterns that build bad moods throughout the day.

I couldn't help but think about how I can use some of this philosophy in my own work, trying to find "the zone" when sending 6 hours worth of email and not writing anything. I think it's doable. 

The second talk was by Tony Conigliaro about scientific mixology. Some of the things he's been concentrating on lately include:

• In order to get the albumin egg smell out of egg whites, he rests eggs in a sealed container with some essential oils. As the egg shell is a permeable membrane, they end up taking on these scents.
• He has been studying the way scents work, with the lightest molecules reaching your nose first and heaviest later, clinging to the carrier. This is why in perfume you smell things like lemon and Bergamont, followed by rose, jasmin, and iris, with lingering notes of sandalwood or oakwood.
• He continues to experiment with his Buchi  roto-vap, low-temperature still. In England apparently it is legal to redistill something (he starts with neutral spirit and a flavor) but in the US it is not. Lately he has distilled flint stone and a barrel, and will soon write a food and drink manual to accompany the machine.
• He also distilled wood notes out of a Manhattan cocktail and then barrel aged it. His aged cocktail program is mostly bottle, rather than barrel, aging. He had his bottle-aged cocktails analyzed by gas chromatograph and you could see chemical differences between the aged and unaged Manhattan.
• He has been using the website www.FoodPairing.be, which lists which foods and drinks fit together chemically. The claim is that foods that have similar chemical structures work well together. So you might use this website to see some unusual pairings. Apparently fino sherry and peas go well together...

Last but not least was Nick Strangeway, who had the arduous task of trying to educate Californians about using local ingredients.

He made the excellent point that not only is going local ecologically good, it helps a bar center more on its local area, and hopefully restore some of the sense of the village pub as a local meeting house; the center of the community.

He talked a bit about foraging, "guerilla gardening" (spreading seeds in free space that's not your own), "yard sharing," community gardening, and made several suggestions for plants that grow well in California weather- many of them I've never heard of or seen used in a bar program.

But he also talked about preserving seasonal produce through several methods:

• Infusions and Liqueurs
• Jams and marmalade
• Shrub syrups
• Aged milk punch
• Sherbet aka oleo saccharum
• Freezing

There are tons of great books on preserving. Now I just need to plant some things that I can preserve after they grow.

All told, this was a great day of education.

Jameson Irish Whiskey Distillery Visit

In early February I visited the Jameson Irish Whiskey distillery - actually two of them.

The original Jameson distillery is in Dublin, but it is no longer made there. In 1971 it moved to the Middleton distillery in Cork. The reason is because in the late 1960's Irish Distillers was formed, a merger of Jameson, Powers, and Cork distilleries.

In Dublin there is a visitors' center and restaurant. We went there first. I've got to admit, they did a really good job making a non-working distillery look working, using dioramas and original distillery parts but with fake ingredients pumping through them.

The next day we went to the new distillery in Cork. But actually it's the new-new distillery, located next to the old one.

Here we skipped the typical tour in favor of an in-depth one. 

Jameson Fun Facts

• Triple-distilled, as opposed to most scotch's twice-distilled
• The old pot still here is gargantuan, probably one of the largest in the world. That is no longer used in favor of two wash stills half the size- that are still pretty huge.
• All of the pot-still whisky made here is made on the same four stills: two wash stills, 1 feints still, and one spirit still
• There are also several column stills as Jameson is blended whiskey.
• Redbreast (available in US) and Green Spot (not) are all pot-still whiskeys.
• They also make Middleton, Powers, and Paddy here, plus a couple other brands
• They distill Tullamore Dew here under contract
• Most Jameson uses ex-bourbon and ex-sherry casks. Some (Rarest Reserve) uses ex-port barrels
• Sherry butts are prepared by putting oloroso sherry (that has already aged the minimum of three years to be called sherry) into new casks for two years to prepare them.
• Their pot-still spirit is a combination of malted and unmalted barley. If it's all pot-still whiskey, it is called "Irish pot still." Bushmills is "Irish malt" as it uses all malted barley.
• They don't make a big deal about yeast strains here - use a "standard distilling yeast"
• We nosed 100% malted distillate vs. malt/unmalt blend. The malted smelled more fruity and esthery than the blend
• Due to the weather, there isn't a great temperature variation in the barrel warehouses, and only 2% angel's share per year
• Jameson and Jameson 12 have opposite ratios of pot to column distilled spirit in them, though they don't say the ratios.
• Jameson 18 tastes like green caramel apples
• Jameson Rarest Vintage Reserve tastes like the inside of banana peels, coconut flakes, pineapple gum arabic. It is the yumz.
• Only before 1800 was Irish whisky peated, and much of that would have been poteen rather than whisky. Around 1800 large-scale production became legal in Ireland and everyone moved to using coal rather than peat. So really in modern Irish whisky making there is no tradition of peating.

 

Four Roses Bourbon Distillery Visit

This week I was in Kentucky for a quick visit to the Four Roses distillery. For some history on this brand, see this post a I wrote a few years ago. In short, Four Roses was only a bourbon in Japan for many years, and has recently come back to the US market. They use two mashbills (grain makeup) and five strains of yeast to make ten recipes of bourbon. 

The ten recipes blended together ensure a consistent bourbon from batch to batch. Another way they help do this is by having single-story rickhouses. While other brands have several floors in their rickhouses with quite extreme temperature variations in them, at Four Roses they're only one floor high, six barrels tall, with a much less variation in temperature from top to bottom.

 We did two tastings at the distillery. One was tasting all ten recipes of the white dog. They have quite the wide range of flavor, from fruity to spicy. The second was tasting several barrels all with the same recipe from different barrels. This was fascinating as there was a surprisingly large difference: one tasted like oloroso sherry, one like apricot socks, one like creamed corn.

Largely because they've been selling mostly in Japan, they use all non-GMO corn. Distillery Jim Rutledge says they don't really advertise that because he doesn't expect they'll be able to get enough non-GMO corn to continue doing so: everything is being replaced by the modified stuff. 

Well I have to run to another event- more on this interesting brand another time. 

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!   

Fettercairn Distillery Visit- Single Malt Scotch Whisky Distillery Tour

Last week I visited the Isle of Jura, The Dalmore, and Fettercairn distilleries in Scotland. These brands are all owned by White & Mackay. This post is about visiting the Fettercairn distillery. 

(Fettercairn marked with red pin. Map made with Google Maps)

From The Dalmore distillery we went on yet another gorgeous drive over two mountain ranges to reach Fettercairn, a distillery named after the town where it is located. As you can see on the map below, after you come down from the mountains where much of the vegetation is heather (brown at this time of year) like low scrub bushes, you hit the eastern farmlands with rich soils and plenty of water coming off the hills.  

The Fettercairn distillery is about a five-minute walk from the center of Fettercairn with its one pub and stone arch commemorating a pit stop from Queen Victoria. It is surrounded by fields and there are cattle grazing across from the distillery. 

The distillery is full of much original equipment from 1824 with a few technological improvements. They no longer do floor maltings (I think only five or six distilleries still do) but otherwise things look pretty old-fashioned here. 

(Fettercairn Distillery. Cows in foreground.)

The mash tun is an old copper-topped one with mechanically-driven (see below) stirrers inside. The drainage at the bottom of these older mash tuns is different from newer models, so to compensate the barley must be ground to a courser level. 

(Above: Copper-topped mash tun. Below: Inside the mash tun.)

The distillery also has wooden washbacks where fermentation happens. Most wooden washbacks I've seen are made from Doug Fir pine from Oregon. 

(Wooden washback)

Unlike at The Dalmore distillery that uses the brown-colored peat-rich river water, Fettercairn uses water from an underground spring for mashing, fermentation, and reducing to barrel proof. It is crystal clear and rich with minerals- you can taste a sort of metallic-granite flavor and it is very drying in the mouth, almost a tannic feeling. 

(Stills at Fettercairn)

Fettercairn has two pairs of stills and the still for the second distillation (the "spirit still") has a pretty unique feature. 

On yesterday's post about The Dalmore I noted that the still has a reflux box (don't know the technical name for it) in which cold water runs around the top of the neck of the still to encourage only the heavy flavor molecules to cross over. 

At Fettercairn they do this  in a different way: during the part of the distillation when they're getting the heart of the spirit (the part that will actually be put in barrels rather than recycled), cold water runs down the outside of the neck of the still.  I've never seen anything like this on a still before. 

It's hard to capture in pictures, so I took this short video. I think this is supercool, but I'm a nerd. 

After the whisky is distilled and put into barrels it is stored in traditional dunnage warehouses- old, earthen floor warehouses in which barrels are stacked no more than three-high. There are thick walls and in this case a slate roof. The walls are super moldy and reminded me a lot of the aging warehouses in Cognac. 

In these dunnage warehouses (about 12 of them for Fettercairn, all local), there is not a great deal of temperature difference between the top and bottom row. This is quite different from a racked warehouse (think of the tall bourbon warehouses), in which casks are stacked several stories high and temperature, evaporation, and rate of aging vary greatly in different parts of the warehouse. 

Now for the bad news: Fettercairn is not available in the US. Even in Scotland its pretty rare to find it as a single-malt. They released a new bottling called Fior that's really tasty and they can't keep it on the shelves. They also sell some 30-year-old and 40-year-old expressions but who can afford such things? 

 

We tasted several barrel samples and they were really wild- a 2004 ex-bourbon had a salty finish and a bourbon grain taste. A 1997 sherry refill cask sample tasted fruity-savory with flavors of sundried tomato and cranberry. The 1974 and 1973 ex-American oak hogsheads were insane floral explosions of lilac, jasmine, rose, and other candied flower flavors. 

I assume that most all Fettercairn goes into blends, as most whisky goes toward blends even if it is from a notable single-malt. I do wish they sold this single-malt in the states because:

1. It tastes good.

2. Unicorns!