Glossy Booze: Mostly June edition

Everywhere Magazine (Issue 3) has a story about the The Hedgehog Distillery located in Auvergne, France.

San Francisco Magazine has a story on the death of happy hour discounts in the city, written by the one and only Camper English.

Elite Traveler magazine (March/April) has a story by Nick Passmore on getting the most out of wine auctions.

Playboy lists some vodka picks for brands to drink on the rocks, in mixed drinks, in martinis, and a new product, with a few recipes.

Lawrence Osbourne has a story in Men's Vogue about the return of Riunite.

Gourmet has a short piece on a Berlin beer brand Berliner Weisse bottling 1809.

7X7 Magazine (May) has a story on sipping blanco tequilas. Another original topic by Jordan Mackay. In the June issue, he talks about ice and the infamous Kold-Draft machine.

Delta's Sky Magazine (May) lists a signature cocktail called Le Starcky from Le Meurice in Paris, some wine pics from Paul Pacult, and an interview with a beer sommelier in Santa Monica.

It's Esquire's annual Best Bars in America round-up, though I think this year it may have jumped the shark. New York Magazine agrees. Some of the choices seem more like writers' personal favorites more than David Wondrich's curated selection. Oh well, at least San Francisco's Cantina, Elixir, Rye, Toronado, and Tosca got mentions. There are also a few good sidebars on drinking alone, having a "safety drink," and bad hotel bar names.

Boozy movies: Sugar

While trying to find the History Channel's Modern Marvels episode on whiskey on Netflix and iTunes (no luck), I stumbled across their sugar episode. I figured it would include some information on rum, which it did. Molasses is a byproduct of sugar production that can be fermented and distilled into rum. The show did not touch on rhum agricole.

I realize that I never posted about my trip to Martinique over a month ago. On Martinique, like many Caribbean islands, European settlers first planted tobacco, then switched to sugarcane when the market collapsed. On Martinique the sugar market also collapsed, so Homere Clement and other sugar producers turned their giant sugar factories into giant rum distilleries. They just skipped the middle step of making granular sugar.

Rum distilled from sugar cane juice instead of molasses on Martinique is called rhum agricole (they refer to other rums as "industrial"). The agricole distilleries take in sugarcane, smash it and shred it to get all the juice out, then ferment the juice and distill it into rhum. The leftover cane fibers are burned to generate steam, which in turn powers the distilleries. The steam engines are enormous machines at the front and center of each agricole distillery, which makes them some of the coolest to visit- they're loud with big spinning parts. Here's a video I took in Martinique:



The Modern Marvels video didn't touch on rhum agricole, but did mention sugar production in other areas. Hawaii produces a large amount of sugar from cane, but as far as I know no brands of American cane sugar rum are on the market. In Brazil, not only do they make cachaca from sugar cane, they fuel their cars with the distillate.

Something like 40% (I could be wrong on the number) of sugar now comes from sugar beets from colder climates instead of sugar cane from the tropics. But according to this discussion on the Ministry of Rum website, sugar beet molasses is high in salt and doesn't produce good spirit.

A lot of the sweetener used in the US since the 1980's is from corn, in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). I think that with the corn ethanol poor government planning and HFCS/obesity epidemic bad press, the (mostly corn-based) bourbon industry had better start using organic corn if they're going to come out of this retaining their "traditional American heritage" image.

But corn is a different story. For that, you can watch the documentary King Corn, or the History Channel also has a Modern Marvels on that crop.

Island Life

On Friday I visited the exotic island of Alameda, CA. I met up with my pal Vanessa and Cameron Bogue, who was in town on his way to who-knows-where, and three of Cameron's friends. We first hit up the Hangar One/St. George Spirits distillery where we did the tasting and hung out with Distiller Dave and the tasting room crew. It was a hoot. I bought a shirt with the original St. George Absinthe Verte monkey on it- the one playing human skull instead of the one playing the cowbell that now dons the bottle label.

Then we all squeezed into a car and drove to Forbidden Island, the tiki bar. Co-owner Martin Cate and his wife met us there and entertained us as we got a little silly rather fast. I had a Nui Nui, followed by a category four Painkiller, and we washed everything down with a giant flaming bowl drink that Martin brought out. Was there another drink in the middle somewhere? Who can say?

I can say this: Forbidden Island is close to a couple AC Transit bus lines that connect to the BART station, so you people coming from anywhere along the BART lines can get safely home afterwards. If my experience is any indication, you may find that the whole trip back to civilization is a pleasant blur.

The lines, ever-blurring

Yesterday I went to the Hangar One Vodka/ St. George Spirits distillery in Alameda for a party. I've been to their tasting room before but never back to where the stills are. (The area is only open to the public for the Saturday tour.)

They have what looks to be three itty bitty little stills back there. That seemed a bit small to me for all the vodka they produce, and it turns out not everything that gets bottled there runs through them.

Most smaller gin and vodka distilleries operate like this one: They buy column distilled vodka from a larger manufacturer, work some magic on it in a pot still, and bottle it as their product. In the case of gin, they soak herbs and citrus in purchased vodka and redistill it into gin.

At Hangar One, they take grape wine and distill it into vodka- that's the magic. Then they blend this grape vodka with wheat-based vodka made elsewhere to create their final straight vodka product. The wheat vodka part of the finished goods doesn't go through their still.

For their infused vodkas, they let the fruit (or other flavor) soak in purchased wheat vodka and distill it into really flavorful vodka product, then blend this with more of the plain wheat vodka to bring it down to the desired flavor level of the final product.

So without knowing the specific quantities of each of the liquids involved (and assuming this is a trade secret) the line seems a little blurred as to whether this company and others are making flavored vodka or instead making then blending vodka flavorings. On the other hand, if my definition of making flavored vodka meant that all the vodka has to have flavor in it before being (re)distilled, there probably isn't a single product on the market that would qualify.

I suppose I should state that this is not a comment on the quality of the final products, just me nerding out on the definitions.

So perhaps that's a less romantic picture of how craft distilled products are made, but all the craft is still there, just on a different scale than most of us conjure up naturally. But this may help explain why these tiny distilleries are able to sell products at prices not that much higher than those of all column-distilled brands. And in the case of the ultra-expensive designer vodkas where the price reflects more the millions spent in marketing them than the care in making them, these small batch spirits seem like a real bargain.

Blue Ice and Distilled Resources Trip

Two days after I returned from Finland, I was off again visiting the Distilled Resources distillery in Rigby and Sun Valley, Idaho courtesy of Blue Ice Vodka.

At DRinc (Distilled Resources, Inc.- pretty clever) they produce about 17 different potato and grain vodkas and liqueurs, and also organic alcohol for use in food goods and processing. But we focused on potato vodka and Blue Ice, since they were footing the bill.


There was a great, small group of writers on the trip, including New York wine and spirits educator Harriet Lembeck , Chicagoan Sean Ludord of BevX.com, Louise Owens, booze writer from Dallas, and LA-based Meridith May, publisher/writer/co-owner of The Tasting Panel Magazine and former monster truck driver. (When we learned this, we all pretty much bowed to her awesomeness forever more.) These were really smart people who know their booze. But my relative ignorance meant I was learning the most. Here are some fun facts I picked up.

Distilling:

• The DRinc distillery was a biofuel plant leftover from the Carter administration that they bought and turned in to the distillery.
  
• They use a four-column distillation process. Column distillation does not scale down so that you can have a small column still. Also, pot stills only scale up so far, so that if someone needs to produce mass-quantities of a pot-distilled product they need to buy a whole bunch of pot stills.
  
• After the raw material (potatoes in this case) is fermented into beer, they heat it up and distillation starts. The first distillation column just strips out all the solids from the beer. The rest break down the vapors into the desired components.
  
• You could have just one giant column instead of four or five or whatever, but this way is more compact. So booze that's x-times distilled should refer to pot distillation instead of number of columns, but you never know with the vodka marketing craziness what's really up. Blue Ice compromises and labels their bottles as "four column distillation."
  

Bottling

• The bottling process isn't just taking finished booze and sticking it in bottles. Bottling is often diluting, blending, filtering, flavoring, and bottling at a "bottling facility." Thus, one could order up alcohol from a distillery and flavor it at a separate bottling facility where it becomes distinct products/flavors. (At DRinc they bottle on site.)
  
• Thus the water that brings the product to proof and the flavorings are added at the bottling facility. It is the bottling facility city that is legally required to be put on labels, not necessarily the distillery where the alcohol was first created.
  
• The filtering and treatment of water is a big factor in the finished product- vodka is 60% water, after all. The line between "treating the water" and "flavoring the vodka" isn't terribly clear to me.
  
• There are a lot of ways to filter the water and the final product. Many places run the vodka through a charcoal/carbon filter, but here they add carbon granules to the tanks then filter them out. They say their carbon filtering is actually a clarifying agent for the vodka rather than an important part of the flavoring (they use a "five stage filtration").
  

Waste Products (You know I love distillery waste products):

• The name for the grains or potatoes leftover after fermentation is stillage DDG, or distillers dried grains. Except at Blue Ice they're still wet and they're potatoes, so I guess they should be called DWP. Anyway, this gets sold off as animal feed.
  
• The heads and tails from the distilling process combined are called fusel oils, and are often sold off to be used in chemical processing and cosmetics. However, at DRinc they have to prove to the ATB (via purchase of testing equipment) that there is no more recoverable alcohol in the fusel oils before they do, and by "recoverable" they mean "taxable."
  
• I had the opportunity to smell a jar of fusel oils!
  
• Waste heat from the distillery (steam) is pumped under the floors of the storage warehouse in the winters to heat it.
  

Blue Ice

• They have to get certified to say that they make the product from Idaho russet potatoes, as that term is trademarked, by proving that all their potatoes come from Idaho.
  
• They don't make a lot of organic potatoes in Idaho, which is why DRinc makes organic grain-based vodkas for other brands but not an organic potato vodka. It would be just too expensive on the shelf.
  

Call me a sucker, but I love distillery tours. At every one I learn more, and also how much more I need to learn. It's an ongoing study of booze, and these are the field trips that keep it exciting.

Land of the Hangover

Hey y'all- I'm in Finland right now courtesy of the people at Finlandia vodka and Brown-Forman, whose products I drank way too much of last night. I'll post a more complete entry later, but here are my thoughts so far:

• If the luggage loader breaks and they can't load half the luggage on the plane, why not wait until it's fixed before sending the plane off? My comfy airplane t-shirt did not make a great urban exploration t-shirt for the additional 24 hours I was forced to wear it (so far).
  
• Finn Air's wine and spirits selection in business class was delightful. The veggie meals? Not so much.
  
• Monday night and we went bar-hopping to four venues. I think we got back sometime after 3:30AM. I like this place.
  

Thursday update-I'm back from a night of partying in Lapland, where the sun is shining 24 hours a day now. I am absolutely polluted with vodka that at some point of the night we stopped drinking in cocktails and began chugging out of the bottle. Boy do I ever need a shower.

Sunday update- I'm back in SF now. Pictures are here. More details after I'm back from my next trip.

The Mists of Canada

Last week I went on a trip to visit the Canadian Mist distillery in Collingwood, Ontario.

The first day we sampled cocktails made with the product. As Canadian Whisky generally doesn't have a walloping strong flavor profile and it's sold at a "popular price point" (read: it's cheap), it's good mixing whisky for cocktails.

The focus of their cocktail recipe program is on simple drinks with a small number of ingredients. This makes sense from a marketing standpoint, as Canadian Mist is a product most often purchased at stores to take home, rather than being served in bars. People don't make extravagant cocktails at home all that often, so why populate the website with recipes nobody is going to make. (I hate it when products' websites list 200 drinks and you can never find the basic one you want.)

I was surprised to find that the whisky sour (a.k.a. the "misty sour") to be my favorite of all drinks we sampled. Here's a tip we learned- to get a sour drink really foamy, shake it extra hard in the shaker and the thick foam should stick to the glass and remain there the whole time. And of course, make your own sour mix if you don't want it to taste like powder and corn syrup.

The next day we headed to the distillery in Collingwood, about an hour and a half drive from Toronto. The distillery is not open to the public, resembling more a shoe factory than an old-timey barn.
They produce 2 million cases of the stuff each year, with only 35 people working at the mostly-automated distillery. Unlike the small-batch bourbon and scotch companies who tout how hand-crafty and slow their products are, here it is all about efficiency. The control room computers show the entire distillation process on computer monitors, and you can see exactly how much grain or liquid is in every tank. The distillation process in good detail is here.


After the resultant whisky is poured into casks, it's aged on a rotating system so that they go through more temperature cycles than they would just sitting in one place waiting for the seasons to naturally heat and cool the barrels. More cycles is supposed to impart more flavor into the whisky. (The marketing line is "it's not about age, it's about cycles.")


But to me, the most interesting part of the process is how it's flavored. I was under the impression that all whisky sits in barrels as finished product, ages the legally required amount of time, then is blended together for consistency. Not so here. What they do is create a simple, mostly corn "base whisky" in large quantities then flavor it with both other whiskies produced in-house that are heavier on rye or wheat, and also other flavor components from other types of booze up to the legal limit of 10% of the total volume.

As a demo, we did a little experiment where we were given bottles of base whisky, wheat whisky, rye whiskey, port, sherry, and brandy, and our goal was to try to blend something that tastes like good whisky. Mine came out not good, but less than disgusting, so I felt pretty proud.

See my full photoset on Flickr here.