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A Few Whiskey Discoveries

I attended Whiskies of the World in San Francisco this April and made a few discoveries. Here are some notes.

Tasting Highlights:

• Exclusive Malts (and independent bottler new to the US) Littlemill 1988 24 year old was terrific. 
• Mezcalero mezcal batch #7, which will be out soon, uses three different agaves. It is delicious. 
• Gordon and MacPhail Old Puteney 21 Year Old was terrific, and  Old Pulteney's own 21 and 30 year old expressions were a treat as always.
• Samaroli is an Italian independent bottler of both rare rums and scotch whiskies. I tied a Bunnahabhain and a Caol Ila that were both excellent. They brought some rums to sample but someone stole the box! 
• Willett Rye - I've had this before and like it a lot but didn't realize that it's the only rye on the market that is charcoal-filtered in the Tennessee whiskey style. 

Other notes:

Kavalan Single Malt is made in Taiwan and aged in various full-sized casks. They have one aged in an ex-fino sherry cask that I didn't get to try, unfortunately, but I did try another aged in a wine barrel that was really juicy. I also tried a bourbon cask-aged whisky. While it's not the greatest whisky I've tried by a long shot, it is really impressive as t is only four years old but it tastes far superior to most products of its age. Dr. Jim Swan, who helped develop the product, said that they get all the barrel interaction they need after about three years, but then keep it in wood (somehow sealed to have no more angel's share and no more wood interaction) for another year for labeling reasons. I think he said the angel's share was above 10% and despite the hot weather they don't temperature control their warehouses; they just distill it differently to accommodate its fast aging. Fascinating. 

Lost Spirits Distillery is doing some crazy shiz. They are making American single malts in Monterey and peating it up to 110 ppm phenol with Canadian forest peat, and then aging in various wine casks. They taste pretty young but the peat is wild- I'd call it swampy, even. The distiller said, "We get as much hate mail as fan mail." 

Tomatin is a Highland single-malt that made a big impression and ended up being a topic of discussion for a bunch of us. It's tasty scotch on its own, but what impressed us more is that it is very reasonably priced - the 30 year old can be found for $250. This is definitely a brand to watch. 

 

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A Mezcal Drink for the Flu-Ridden Masses

Let's say you're a drink nerd who has the flu. You want to work mezcal into your schedule but how can you justify it when you're sweating through your sheets and spending all day watching soap operas?

Houston Eaves, of Esquire Tavern in San Antonio, has the answer. In my lastest FineCooking.com recipe post I list his recipe for the Espadin Tea. It's a lot like a Hot Toddy using tea and Licor 43 as a sweetener.

 

The drink calls for mezcal (I'm sure whisky would also work), lemon, Licor 43, and hot tea.

 

Go get the recipe at FineCooking and make yourelf feel better.

 

 

Liquid Smoke in the LA Times Magazine

I have a story about smoke cocktails in this Sunday's LA Times Magazine. Go read it!

PHOTO: BARTHOLOMEW COOKE

Now, you're saying, "Didn't I already read that?" Nope, that would be Robert Simonson's excellent story in the New York Times, which I learned about after mine had already been submitted. We cover pretty much the same material, referencing many of the same people and even including one of the same recipes! Compare and contrast. 

My story includes recipes by Tim Zohn and Ethan Terry of AQ, San Francisco, Giovanni Martinez of Sadie, Los Angeles, Michael Callahan of 28 HongKong Street, Singapore, Daniel Zacharczuk of Bar/Kitchen Los Angeles, Jacob Grier of Metrovino, Portland, and Sam Ross of Milk and Honey, New York. 

Liquid Smoke
By Camper English 

Between molecular mixology, mezcal, and scotch, the vapor somehow seeped into cocktail glasses. 

Back at the turn of this century, when we were all obsessed with the Cosmopolitan, smoke was barely a wisp on the cocktail scene. The genre’s only notable drink was the Smoky Martini, which called for gin and the tiniest splash of blended—not actually smoky—scotch. Then menus started to feature a few vintage scotch drinks, like Blood and Sand and Mamie Taylor, with the faintest tendrils of smoke. But as dark spirits became more popular, the time was right for new flavors to accompany them.

Read the story here.

New Bar: Tacolicious II and Mosto in San Francisco

The second outlet of restaurant Tacolicious has moved in to The Mission district in San Francisco, with tequila bar Mosto attached. 

It's a very strange set-up: Both Tacolicious and Mosto serve both food and drinks, yet they opperate independently with different menus. Yet you have to walk through Tacolicious to get to Mosto. The restaurant serves cocktails, while the bar serves mostly shots/sippers. 

(Photo of Tacolicious II by Tyler Gourley, courtesy of Tacolicious)

Tacolicious is food-focussed: it's a high-volume restaurant with a large private dining/party room and an outdoor patio. They offer about 20 cocktails, most available by the glass or pitcher. (The menu is below the jump.) They are mostly juice cocktails with a couple Micheladas. They also offer a huge selection of tequila. 

(Photo by Ed Anderson, courtesy of Tacolicious)

The bar Mosto on the other side of the wall is a much smaller and tighter space than the restaurant it abuts, and doesn't feel like a waiting room for Tacolicious either as it is so different.  Mosto only offers five snacks, served from a station at the end of the bar, and only a few cocktails: 2 versions of a Margarita, an El Diablo, a Tequila Sunrise, and a Paloma. 

(Photo of Mosto by Tyler Gourley, courtesy of Tacolicious)

The tequila list at Mosto is also huge, and it includes a large selection of mezcal too with the full range of Del Maguey and Pierde Almas lines among other mezcales. They even have a few sotols. Tequilas start at $8 (though most are $11+) and are served with both sangrita and jugo de escabeche, the latter sort of a spicy pickleback that is delicious. 

(Photo by Ed Anderson, courtesy of Tacolicious)

As far as other drinks, they have a small menu section awesomely called "Haters" that offers a single choice of vodka, gin, rum, and bourbon. 

 

The menus are below. 

Latin, Packing, Pisco: A Few Articles I've Written Lately

I've had several stories come out recently, so I thought I'd share them here. This blog is also my resume, after all. 

Friday I wrote about my recent piece in the daily email Tasting Table San Francisco. This one is about Encanto Pisco, brought to us by a bartender, a sommelier, and a distiller. 

Attention people attending Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans this July: My story about what to pack for the week (for media, speakers, bartenders, PR, and brand reps) in the June issue of Tasting Panel Magazine is now online. 

 In the July issue of Executive Travel Magazine I have a story on the Latin libations that are hot and the ones that soon will be. 

I have recently become a regular contributor to SilverKris, the in-flight magazine for Singapore Airlines. Unfortunately the magazine is not online. Recent stories have focused on new classic cocktails, the return of absinthe, and where to drink in Wellington, New Zealand. 

New Booze: Ilegal Mezcal

This is a review of Ilegal Mezcal. The product is 100% agave, made in Oaxaca at Destileria Tlacolula. The drink is more widely distributed in New York but should be coming to California this spring.

They make a joven/blanco, a reposado, and an anejo. They sent me the reposado to taste. The nose on this stuff is all sweet olive-lemon brine with the smoky tire fire back typical to mezcal. It smells of the anticipation of biting into a juicy barbecue coal-smoked olive. In the mouth it's not as sweet or as salty as expected, though it is juicy, with a ton of wood char notes coming though. That char remains and on further sips I experience low char mouthfeel and high sweet notes with little middle ground. 

Overall, I like it and look forward to having it mixed into cocktails. Some of the mixing mezcals are too mild, while the great ones are so good I feel guilty covering them up. I don't know the price point on Ilegal Mezcal, but I hope it's somewhere between the two, as there is a lot of middle ground where this would be a good fit.  I look forward to seeing it more on bar shelves in California.

Up in your Internet

Oh hai. I've been writing a lot of stuff lately on this new fangled thing called the internet.

I did a few things for Tasting Table, like this piece on bartenders swapping out whisky in drinks for mezcal and this other one on where to get a good cocktail during the day in San Francisco. 

For the national edition of Tasting Table I wrote about where you can buy a whole barrel of booze. There are a whole lot more places to buy a whole barrel listed at this Liquor.com article that came out a few days earlier. I didn't write that one (great minds drink alike), but I did write this other one on bitters for the same site a while back.  

For CitySearch I wrote about single-spirit specialty bars, which is supposed to also include this review of Smuggler's Cove but doesn't, because the internet is full of bugs.

Smoke Gets in your Ice

Over the history of cocktails, certain flavors have become trendy during particular years. First the cocktail was invented, then the "fancy" cocktail, then the "improved" cocktail. These variations added liqueurs like curacao, maraschino, and absinthe to the regular formula. In the early 1900's, grenadine was all the rage and suddenly you'd find a splash of it in all the drinks.

A hundred years later, the same thing happens and I run around and try to document it. In 2007 and 2008, what cocktail menu didn't suddenly have three drinks with St. Germain on it?  We're currently seeing a revival in ginger flavored cocktails. And I believe that 2008 and 2009 will be known as the years of smoke.

Bartenders have taken different approaches to putting smoke into drinks. Sometimes, they light stuff on fire to make smoked Coke (Eben Freeman of Tailor), smoked ice (Daniel Shoemaker of Teardrop in Portland), and smoked syrup (Cody Robertson of San Francisco), and in a drink I just learned about, smoked strawberry shrub(!!!) with scotch and bitters at Absinthe. 

Other bartenders add liquid smoke to drinks. An early version of this was in the (awful) Smoky Martini, a Martini with a rinse of scotch, and a (less awful) Martini with a smoke-brined olive inside. In the past couple of years though, it's been all about the rinse. Folks use a rinse of Islay scotch like Laphroaig or Ardbeg, and within the last year they've gone nuts for rinses of mezcal- especially in San Francisco. At Clock Bar they have a drink with Qi black tea liqueur for similar effect. 

As bartenders and consumers get more fetishistic about smoke, it seems they're putting more of it into cocktails. It used to be bartenders would mix half mezcal or Islay scotch in a drink with half tequila or blended scotch so as not to overwhelm the drinker, as in the Carter Beats the Devil cocktail. Now you're more likely to get a full dose of smoke but tempered with robust mixers like pineapple gum syrup in the Single Village Fix. 

Luckily I have a very trendy palate, and have been sucking down smoky cocktails like they're going out of style. And they will, of course, but hopefully not until sometime in mid-2010.