Alcademics.com

Major Map of Micro-Distillers

The American Distilling Institute put together this great map of craft distillers in America. I'm not sure if it's limited to members or what the criteria is to be included, but regardless this is a very cool (and for me, very useful) way to find small distillers in different locations. On the website, clicking on the map will take you to a PDF file that links to each of the distilleries numbered.

Eau Duh

This post is a couple months late, but no matter. A while back I visited the St. George Spirits (and Hangar One Vodka) distillery in Alameda, California, while they were finishing distilling raspberry eau de vie and about to distill pear. I've known Hangar's distiller Lance Winters for a while, but this time I was hearing from Jorg Rupf, the distillery's founder. He too, is awesome.

German lawyer Jorg Rupf started making eau de vie in California in the late 1970's (while on a sabbatical at UC Berkeley that doesn't appear to have ended) because he says he thought the Europeans living here would like it. He was the first licensed distiller of eau de vie in the US- but that didn't come until 1984. He's been making the stuff ever since.

Interestingly, his philsophy of making eau de vie extends to the full range of products made at the distillery. But first, some definitions.

Eau de vie is colorless fruit brandy. "Brandy" comes from "brandywine" which means "burnt wine." Wine comes from fruit (as opposed to beer, which comes from grains and is distilled into vodka, whiskey, gin, etc.) I think of most brandy as divided into a few categories- the aged brandies including cognac and armagnac (grapes) and calvados (apples), the usually-unaged and often leftover grape brandies (grappa, marc, pisco), and eau de vie. In my mind, what distinguishes eau de vie is that you're trying to get the whole unadulterated fruit into the bottle. The other categories are focusing on the juice or the solids, and aging adds another category of flavors.

The ancient word for most spirits (whiskey, vodka, eau de vie, etc.) means "water of life," which I'd always taken to mean life-stimulating liquid. Early booze was usually given as medicine, and could also be used to purify (kill the germs in) unsafe drinking water.

But on this visit it finally occurred to me the other side of the term: that distillation acts as a preservative to retain/extend the life of the fruit or grains. It's not just human life, it's the life of the base ingredient. (In many subjects, the obvious answer occurs to me last.)

At St. George Spirits, they generally try to capture the full flavor of whatever they're distilling. For the eau de vie and liqueurs, they distill whole (fermented) fruit- including the skins. For the Hangar One vodkas, they're not distilling vodka, they're distilling natural fruit flavorings to add to vodka. For the absinthe and the basil eau de vie, they add fresh herbs to the still to try to get the full flavor into the bottle, not pre-distilled essences.

And for the agave spirit (tequila, but can't legally be called tequila) launching next weekend, they distill the whole agave fibers- not just the sugary juice squeezed from the agave heart.

As this post is getting way too long, I'll keep the rest of it to bullet points.

• They're distilling 250,000 pounds of pears this year.
• You don't get a high alcohol percentage after fermenting many of these fruits. This means you have to distill a lot of it to get the final product, which means you have to start with so much. 
• 400 pounds of fruit (I think we're talking pears) produces a whopping 2 gallons of raw spirit.
• They wait until the pears turn ripe, which happens fast, causing a rush to ferment/distill immediately before they spoil. Rupf says, "We think it won't happen on the weekend, but it always happens on the weekend." 
• The philosophy: "Our job is not to make anything better than the fruit but to not screw it up so the fruit shines through at its best."

But my takeaway from the day was really about what eau de vie means- and how it tastes. When you're talking cognac and calvados and grappa and other brandies, you ask yourself "Does this taste good?" whereas for eau de vies you ask, "Does this taste like the real thing?"

A day with Charbay

The other week I sat down on the patio behind Swirl on Castro with Marko Karakasevic and Jenni soon-to-be Karakasevic of Charbay and tasted through their line of products.

Charbay is a family-run winery and distillery in Napa Valley. And boy do these people like to play with the still- in addition to wine, they make flavored vodka, rum, whiskey, walnut liqueur, grappa, pastis, port, and now some aperitifs. It's hard to keep up with them.

The aperitifs are neither eau de vie nor typical liqueurs, but flavored fortified wines. Currently they produce a pomegranate and a green tea flavor, which they like to think of as cocktails-in-a-glass. Importantly for retailers, these can be served at beer and wine-only venues.

We then tasted through the vodka line. When they make vodka at Charbay, really they're making extractions that are added to plain vodka to flavor it. (Most flavored vodkas are vodka plus flavors purchased from flavor companies.) Not only is this unique, they make their extractions using whole fruit- not just the peel or juice. They throw the entire fruit (okay, not the pomegranate, but the citrus) into a leaf shredder and into the tanks, then distill the mixture to extract the flavor components they're looking for. Marko told me he was able to get the Meyer lemon flavor less bitter than before (emphasizing the pith less and peel more). The grapefruit flavor is as bitter as it should be.

The Tahitian vanilla rum is triple pot distilled and made from concentrated sugar cane juice (not molasses) from Hawaii. All rums are made from sugar cane products. Rhum agricole and cachaca are made from sugar cane juice. Most rums are made from molasses (the leftovers after sugar is extracted from sugar cane juice). Ron Zacapa is made from a form of concentrated sugar cane juice without the sugar taken out. The sugar cane juice used by Charbay is flash dehydrated under a vaccuum to remove the water and concentrate the liquid. I want to research how this is different from what Zacapa uses. Project!

I think they should just call their whiskey "weed-lovers-whiskey", because it really tastes like marijuana. This is the second release of the product that was pot distilled from pilsner beer with three kinds of hops (this is probably where the weed aromas come in) and aged six years in new barrels. The first release was after three years in barrels.

Finally, they're going to release a pomegranate dessert wine (they really like the pomegranate over there) that smells like it's going to be ultra-syrupy, but is just pleasantly sweet. A nice way to end a meal, or a tasting session.

To sample the products in person, check out the early happy hour at Tra Vigna in Napa Valley, during the weekly Charbay tasting. Hopefully Jenni and Marko will be there, because they're really fun people with whom to share a drink. Or ten.

Maker's Mark Distillery Visit

As part of a visit to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, I visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries in September. Today I'll talk about visiting Maker's Mark.

The distillery has been around since 1805, but was purchased by Mr. Samuels, founder of Maker's Mark, in the early 1950's. This distillery will receive 70,000 visitors this year, and not just because they're fans of the product- this is one of the most beautiful distilleries I've ever seen. With its little bridges, common color theme, trees, and lawns it's more like a college campus. In fact when I was there in September the tours going through almost looked like summer tours for prospective students.

Maker's is different than other bourbons as it is 70% corn (all non-GMO) plus malted barley and "soft red winter wheat" instead of the rye in most other brands. Also pretty unique is that at this distillery they make only one bourbon- only one product at all.

Also at the distillery, they use an "anaerobic processor" to capture methane biogass from their waste, which allows them to reduce their natural gas use by 15-30 percent. They also sell off their spent grains for animal feed, but I'm not sure at what point that happens.

One thing I learned about Kentucky bourbon is that the products produced here are tied to the distiller who produced them (or popularized them), rather than the company. When people talk about a bourbon, they're talking about a distiller, and not usually the current one. When you talk about Jim Beam and the Small Batch Bourbon collection, people think about Booker Noe, who recently died, not so much Fred Noe who is the current voice of the company. When Fred Noe talks about the line, he talks about his father, not himself.
 
That was also the case at Maker's Mark- Master Distiller Kevin Smith said that his job is to keep Maker's Mark the same as Bill Samuels Sr. created it, and if they created a new product then it wouldn't be a brand extension, it would probably be something new. When they do special editions of Maker's with a different color of wax on the bottle, it's still the same whisky inside.

Anyway, I think it's interesting how different companies with a history are loyal to the company philosophy or the founder or the product itself.

Maker's rotates their barrels in the warehouse, and is the only bourbon distillery to still rotate all of the inventory. The barrels are first put at the top of the warehouse for three years, then spend another three at the bottom.

Beyond its flavor, Maker's is known for its branding- the iconic bottle with the red dripping wax unique to each bottle. The bottle design, wax seal, and the "maker's mark" itself were created by Mrs. Samuels, Bill Samuels' wife. The dripping wax is actually trademarked, which is why you don't see other brands doing it.

Those are all of my fun facts for now. More pictures from my Maker's Mark distillery visit are here.

On the bottling line

As part of a visit to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, I visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries in September. Today I'll talk about the bottling line at Jim Beam.

I've seen a lot of bottling lines in my day, and not one of them has been interesting until this one. At Jim Beam, the huge operation and tons of machines were really cool. And loud.

They bottle something like 300 bottles of Jim Beam per minute on this line, plus other products like Canadian Club and Mount Gay Rum that may be blended and bottled on site. We walked through several rooms of machines bottling regular Jim Beam, minis, and other products. There were machines for wax dipping, ones that build boxes around the bottles, ones that fill the bottles, and labeling machines at the end. Here are a couple of videos I took.

The first video is of the line where boxes are built around the bottles of Jim Beam.

And the second one is just some fast bottling in action.

Bonus videos of a rapidly fermenting vat of what will become Jim Beam is here, and a giant box-wrapping machine here.

A visit to the Jim Beam distillery

In September I visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries as part of the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. For all the distilleries I've been to in 10 different countries, I'd never seen a bourbon distillery.

The Claremont Jim Beam distillery is a huge facility, and one of two where the product is distilled. They receive tons of grain daily, and distill whiskey 24 hours a day, 6 days each week. The annual output is around 6 million cases of bourbon each year. (I believe they also distill the small batch bourbon collection here- Booker's, Baker's, Knob Creek, and Basil Hayden.) Beam uses 70 warehouses to store their 1.7-1.8 million barrels of bourbon that are aging.

Beam is made from corn, rye, and barley. Interestingly, we get GMO corn in the US bourbon, but they distill, age, and bottle non-GMO spirit separately for export to Europe where they have restrictions against GMO products. (I definitely want to learn more about this so if anyone has a non-hysterical GMO book/video they can recommend let me know.)

The bourbon is first column distilled in the "beer still" that's about six stories high. It is then distilled a second time in the "doubler" which they say looks like a pot still but is continuous. (We didn't see it.)

The barrel warehouses are not only enormous, they're very tall- nine stories, with each story holding three tiers of barrels. At the top of the warehouse where it's hot, the barrels gain proof over time  as more water evaporates out of the barrel (through the wood) than spirit. At the bottom of the warehouse, the whiskey loses proof as more alcohol evaporates than water. 

When selecting barrels to use for Beam, they take barrels from each level of the warehouse to make up the final blend. For the Booker's bottling, which is cask-strength and unfiltered, they only take barrels from one middle floor.

After aging, the barrels are emptied, diluted, and bottled. You can find more pictures on my Flickr page here. In tomorrow's post, I'll talk about the bottling facility- with videos!

Homework for the weekend

More reading material from the internet:

A travel story on seeking the best vodka in Warsaw.

Ayyyy.com has a quiz on the lady lushes of television. (Answer is here.)

Lauren Clark writes about breaking up with your favorite beer. I've had that happen with booze. I love St. Germain but I'm no longer in love with it.

Le Mixeur lists a whole bunch of recipes with my favorite ingredient: Vinegar! VinegarWatch continues...

The Underhill Lounge geeks out on why Savoy Cocktail Book drinks aren't very bitter.

Chuck Cowdery gets all up in your grill about micro-distillers who are not craft distillers.

Matt Rowley lists about a zillion synonyms for "drunk." I like "tangle-footed," because it would be impossible to enunciate while still in that condition.