Alcademics.com

Changes at St. George Spirits/Hangar One Vodka

*Update* In the original post I mistakenly wrote that distribution/marketing for all St. George Spirits products was moving to Proximo Spirits. That was incorrect. This is only the case for Hangar One Vodka. I deeply regret the error and any resulting confusion.

News from St. George Spirits, the makers of Hangar One Vodka, St. George Absinthe, the forthcoming Agua Libre rum, and other products: They've changed their distribution and marketing from Craft Distillers to Proximo Spirits. The company has not been sold and Lance Winters, Jorg Rupf, and Dave Smith will still be making the booze.

I'm sure there will be much more news in the future from this new collaboration. 

 

California Rum

Last week I visited the St. George Spirits distillery to sample their new rum, Agua Libre, and watch them distill more of it.

The new release was distilled from fresh California-grown sugar cane juice (not molasses) and aged for two and a half years in French oak barrels.

From the media contact:

After pressing 25 tons of sugar cane from Kalin Farms of Southern California's Imperial Valley, with a press imported from India, they distilled 750 individually numbered bottles. We still need to slap some labels on the bottles and will probably start selling them late May/early June for $60 a bottle at the store in distillery tasting room.  Bar Agricole will be the first account to carry the rum when they open in May.

This isn't the first rum released from St. George Spirits though. They also made Eurydice, a rum exclusive to Smuggler's Cove in San Francisco. Distiller Lance Winters said that one was made from different varieties of sugar cane, and if I remember correctly it was aged in an ex-bourbon barrel as well as French oak. I've just had each of the rums once but if I remember correctly both are grassy and vegetal, but Eurydice is a lot more funky/gamey than Agua Libre.

I really like the Agua Libre and I think fans of agricole rums and Smith & Cross will really like this one as it's sort of a combo of the two styles.

As for the new rum being distilled on the day of my visit, it is made from sugar cane grown in Brawley, California. The grower, Carson T. Kalin, was at the distillery to speak to us and I sort of nerded out on sugar cane. The farm is apparently located at California's last sugar beet processing facility, (I didn't know sugar beets even grew in CA) and so far the sugar cane is purely experimental. Kalin said he is trying to find varieties suited to the hot and dry weather that would be watered by irrigation as there isn't the rainfall of the tropics there. And as sugar can has the opposite growing season of sugar beets, they could always be harvesting.

In the short term, the only thing the cane is being used for is making rum. They harvest the sugar cane by hand rather than by machine, because the sugar cane crushing machine in the distillery needs to use tall stalks of cane rather than the small segments the machine produces. After crushing the cane in the distillery, they ferment the cane juice for 15 days before distilling. I tried the fermented sugar can juice and it was crazy sour and I am glad nobody took a picture of the face I made. Luckily, once through the still and a couple years in the barrel and it fixes it right up.

Home Bar Recommendations: One of Each

When Jonny Raglin and Jeff Hollinger were looking to open Comstock Saloon (hopefully this month), they had a big limitation to work with: the size of the back bar. It only has room for one or two types of each base spirit. This is a challenge for Raglin in particular as between his former post as Bar Manager at Absinthe and his consultant gig at Dosa on Fillmore he was working with probably 30 different types of gin alone. 

This inspired a story I wrote for the April edition of 7x7 magazine. I also spoke with Martin Cate of Forbidden Island who had the luxury of choosing over 200 rums for the bar, but that didn't leave room for much else. Before opening he sent out an email requesting advice on one of each tequila (blanco, reposado, anejo) for the bar. I also spoke with Marcovaldo Dionysos, who was very selective when choosing the bottles for Clock Bar. He said he had to balance familiar brands that consumers know with less-recognized spirits he'd prefer to work with. 

In the story I asked each of Raglin, Cate, and Dionysos to pick one of each- vodka, tequila, rum, whisky, and gin- that would work the best in the most cocktails, while also being good enough for sipping. The results should point home mixologists who may also not have room for 30 brands of gin toward the one bottle to buy.

The Ultimate Five-Bottle Bar, Perfect for Apartment Dwelling

by Camper English

What happens when the city’s top bartenders are forced to choose? Introducing the ultimate five-bottle bar, perfectly sized for apartment dwelling. 

Click the link above to read the story. In the print edition there are also recommendations for one each of sweet and dry vermouth and an orange liqueur/triple sec.

Guatemala Miscellany

My post on how rum is aged at Zacapa will have to wait another day- I thought I fully understood it but an item on a slide tripped me up. Time for a fact-check!

In the meantime, here are some other items of interest:

- There is now an Alcademics channel on YouTube. 

- I am new to taking video, so most of them are shaky and boring. You have been warned. 

Highlights:

A demonstration of sugar cane being cut by hand. Note that this is cleaned up and un-burned sugar cane, but the process is otherwise the same. The machetes they use have a sideways blade to allow more of the root of the plant to be cut.

View from the helicopter going to aging facility. You can see cloud-covered mountains, farmland, and other dramatic scenery. Guatemala has rich and fertile mountainous terrain, great for growing coffee and by the ocean, sugarcane for rum. Fun fact: Guatemala is also a major export market for mini vegetables that get sent to Japan. If you're ever in Guatemala I recommend a helicopter tour unless, like me, you find it absolutely terrifying. 

This is the village soccer field where we landed the helicopters. Everybody came out to check us out. 

 At the aging facility they re-char ex-bourbon barrels that are used in part of the rum aging process. This is the machine that does it. Fire!

The straw bands around bottles of Zacapa? They're woven by hand and each one takes 20 minutes to make. Here is a demonstration they did for us. You can (sorta) hear the English translator talking as well as the weavers. 

After the rum tour, we did some fun stuff in Guatemala including hiking up a volcano and playing with lava (fast-forward to :40)!

A Trip to Guatemala for Zacapa Rum

The other week I went to Guatemala to learn about Zacapa rum at the source. It was great.

The sugar cane for Zacapa is sourced from the western part of Guatemala, near the Pacific coast where it is hot and humid. Here they cleaned up the cane field for the demonstration of cutting. In reality they burn the fields first to get rid of all the low leaves and any critters that might be hiding. This is pretty common practice where sugar cane is cut by hand, as it is for Zacapa.

Then the cut sugar cane is trucked to the distillery not far away.

 

At the distillery, the cane is crushed with giant roller mills to extract the juice.

For most rum production, this juice is then processed to make sugar. The sugar is sold separately and the leftovers from the production, molasses, are used to make rum. (There is still enough sugar left in molasses to ferment and be distilled.)

But at Zacapa, like on Martinique (rhum agricole) and in Brazil (cachaca) they don't bother making sugar out of it but turn all the juice into rum and aguardiente. For rhum agricole and cachaca they directly ferment and distill the sugar cane juice. Here at Zacapa, they instead condense the juice into a syrup by filtering and heating the juice to boil off the water. This condensed sugar syrup (they call it 'virgin sugar cane honey') can be stored for up to a year so that they can harvest the sugar cane during its season but distill year-round.

The 'honey' is fermented and distilled here at the distillery near the sugar cane fields. But the newly-distilled rum is barrel aged elsewhere.

All the premium rums made at the distillery (Zacapa and Botran) are trucked up a mountain where the weather is cooler and temperatures are more consistent year-round. This allows for slower aging of the rum. 

Rather than truck up the windy roads, we rode in helicopters over the mountainous terrain. I found this terrifying.

It was so cloudy when we arrived we couldn't land at the tiny airport, and had to land in a soccer field a short distance away. This was a *big deal* in the village, and probably a hundred people came out to see us land and slowly get up close, take photos and touch the helicopters. People were super curious and we all felt like rock stars for the attention.

At the aging facility, it was much cooler than at the sugar cane fields.

There the rums are aged and blended according to Zacapa's unique process. I'll address this in tomorrow's post, because it's kinda complicated.

Fun with Sugarcane

Sugarcane grows in California, so it's not uncommon to see short stalks of it for sale at farmer's markets and in Latin grocery stores. I was at one of these farmer's markets recently looking for un-cured olives that I didn't find, so I picked up a three-foot long sugar cane segment for two bucks. 

Sugarcane is a type of grass that was transported to the New World by Columbus on his second journey. Once the stalks are cut, the sweet juice contained within the blade begins to oxidize- sort of like how an apple turns brown as soon as you cut it- which is why we don't see sugar cane juice for sale in bottles. So when sugar cane is harvested it is transported to the factory for processing immediately. I have no idea how old the stalk I bought was.

Sugar cane juice is directly fermented and distilled to make rhum agricole (from French islands like Martinique) and cachaca (from Brazil), or it is processed to make sugar. The byproduct of sugar production is molasses, which can be fermented and distilled to make all other rum.

Seeing as how I don't have a still at home (yet), I just wanted to play with the sugar cane juice. I found the stalk to be far heavier than I expected, but as it's mostly liquid I shouldn't have been surprised. Sugarcane is very fibrous, which makes it hard to cut and squeeze out the juice. Sugar cane refineries use huge roller mills that squish the sugar cane stalks and shred the fibers.

I cut a section of stalk and sucked on one of the pieces. I expected it to taste like sweetened water, but that wasn't at all the case- sugar cane juice has a bright, delicious raw vanilla flavor. (I've identified this as "Mexican vanilla" and "Lik-M-Aid/Fun Dip stick vanilla'" in tasting notes but maybe "sugar cane vanilla" is a better descriptor.) I haven't had the pleasure of visiting Brazil where they crush sugar cane to make juices on the beach (yet), but I completely get how refreshing this juice can be now. 

Having sucked the juice out of pieces of sugar cane, I wanted to see how hard it would be to extract the juice from sugarcane at home. It was hard.

You certainly can't just wring it out. I cut the sugar cane into small chunks and tried muddling. I couldn't muddle more than one or two tiny pieces at once, so this was a slow process that produced very little juice.

Then I tried using a rolling pin (in reality, an empty bottle of Purista Mojito Mix, which is surprisingly delicious) to roll over longer pieces of sugarcane and squish out the juice that way. It worked a little. 

I poured the juice into a glass with soda water, and found it to be far less tasty than the juice on its own. Oh well.

So anyway, now that I've determined that sugarcane is really hard to get any juice out of, I need to figure out other ways to extract the liquid (Anyone know where I can buy an affordable sugar cane press?) or other uses for raw sugarcane. Since they sell it in stores around here, people must use it for something...

Montego Bay, By Way of Heaven's Dog

I can't stop thinking about the delicious drink I had during Tiki Week at Heaven's Dog. So I asked bar/general manger Erik Adkins for the recipe and he was nice enough to share.

"The Montego Bay is listed in Beachbum Berry's 'Intoxica'.  He says that it is a Don the Beachcomber Drink from the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas 1940's."

The version they made at Heaven's Dog is this:

Montego Bay

(adapted from Beachbum Berry's Intoxica by Erik Adkins of Heaven's Dog)
1/2 oz lime
1/2 oz grapefruit
1 oz honey syrup (1 to 1 dilution with water)
2 dashes Angostura bitters
4 dashes absinthe
1/4 oz all spice dram
11/2 oz Smith & Cross Jamaican rum

Shake all ingredients and strain over crushed ice.

This is one of those drinks where Smith & Cross completely makes the drink. So funky.

Smuggler's Cove in Pictures and Words

Smuggler's Cove, the San Francisco tiki bar by "Shoeless" Martin Cate, opens in San Francisco on Tuesday, December 8th. I got a sneak preview along with other members of the press on Thursday night. To give you an idea about the level of excitement around this bar opening, some cocktail nerds drove up from Los Angeles or flew down from Portland to witness it in person, assuming they'd see it now before it is packed for the next few months as the very enthusiastic tiki crowd swarms in.

Smuggler's Cove has a gorgeous menu featuring 80 mostly rum cocktails and will have over 200 sipping rums. There are incentives for drinking them all. Join the "Rumbustion Society" and work your way through the rum list to gain access to samples from very rare bottles. Or join the "Voyager of the Cove" club and try all the cocktails for unspecified super secret perks.

Ah, but what does it look like? Sort of like the entrance to a theme ride at Disney World. Rather than being a design theme or decor, the three-story (yet small) bar is filled with props and sets. The giant anchor that hangs menacingly over the main stairway is thankfully not made of solid metal, nor is the canon that threatens to squish the bartender. Giant rocks poke out from the walls, some sort of tribal spears adorn a wall, and rum crates are used as tables in the basement. It's like drinking on a movie set, not that I've ever done that.

It's all very unreal, except for where it's not. The bar is actually packed with historic artifacts from tiki bars around the country- the the ship's wheel and Boathouse sign above the downstairs bar, vintage tiki mugs, totem polls, and other flotsam and jetsam once adorned the walls of various Trader Vic's and other bars. The three display windows at the entry level bar are mini-museums dedicated to past San Francisco tiki bars, including one where the first tiki mug was created. There is so much history in the place I'm considering asking Martin to train me as a docent to give regular tours.

So here are the pictures.

The top floor is a bamboo hut lounge where journalists take notes about the bamboo hut lounge on the top floor.

 

The street level bar is small and backed by endless bottles of delicious rum.

Recent LA transplant Matty Eggleston was working there on preview night.

 

The ceiling in this room is tall and packed with barrels, boxes, and other stuff held up with ropes and pulleys. 

In the basement, Dominic Venegas works the bar.

No wait! That was a pufferfish lamp. This is Dominic Venegas working in the basement bar.

And this is the guy who built this magic playground for us, "Shoeless" Martin Cate. Congratulations Martin!