Alcademics.com

The New Madonna Video and Smirnoff Vodka Product Placement

The latest music video from Madonna "Give Me All Your Luvin'" includes some product placement luvin' for Smirnoff vodka. 

 

 

 

It's far enough in the background that it's not entirely clear what the brand is, unless of course one is already familiar with these things. 

The full video is below. 

 

 

Smirnoff and Madonna did some work together this fall in a promotion called the  Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project, in which dancers auditioned to go on tour with Madonna. So I guess it shouldn't be a surprise. 

 

 

 

Of course, it's not unusual for pop stars to put liquor in their music videos, I just don't watch them very often to notice. Lady Gaga did tons of placements as I covered here before here and here. 

 

 

The Weird Affinity Between ZU Vodka and Cocchi Americano

 

ZU vodka, known in the rest of the world as Zubrowka, is starting to appear in more serious drinks than just mixed with the usual apple juice.

 

Oddly enough, in each of these better drinks in which I've seen ZU used, it has been used in concert with Cocchi Americano. 

At Providence in Los Angeles:

Ellis Island
ZU Bison Grass Vodka, Cocchi Americano, Gruner Vetliner wine, and celery bitters

At AQ restaurant in San Francisco:

 

Bison Rose
Zubroska Bison Grass Vodka, Cocchi Americano, Meyer Lemon, Rosemary Shrub

At Blackbird in San Francisco:

Golden Glove
Zu vodka, Cocchi Americano, Apple Juice, Celery Bitters

Weird.

Instant Infusions in Tasting Panel Magazine

I have a short piece in Tasting Panel Magazine about the instant infusion method - using a whipped cream charger filled with nitrous oxide to infuse flavors in spirits - and Purity Vodka's promotion of the technique. 

The story is at this link, which opens a digital magazine reader. 

By the way, the original Dave Arnold post annoucing this method is here at CookingIssues.com.

A Trip to Sweden with Purity Vodka

This summer I went to Sweden (twice this year!) with Purity vodka. Purity is located not far from Malmo, across the water from Copenhagen, in a building on the estate of Ellinge Castle.

Now, Ellinge doesn't look like a typical castle, but there has been one in some form here since the early 14th century when the area belonged to Denmark. The building changed a lot over the years, but it still has a moat.

Currently the castle owners live in a big house also on the property, but rent out the castle itself for weddings and other events. I got to sleep there one night. I've never slept somewhere with a moat before, so that was awesome. 

The castle is beautifully furnished with antiques and paintings, including one of Jesus turning water into wine at a dinner party. That's not the only connection the castle has to alchemy: there has always been a distillery on the property, as was commonplace in farming areas. (The farmlands around the castle grow things like wheat, barley, and rye, but they are not used in Purity because they're not certified organic.)

Making Vodka

Purity is made in this little building just across the moat from the castle. It's a tiny building, but they only do one part of the process here. Purity is a blend of a neutral, column-distilled spirit with a flavorful house-distilled spirit, brought down to proof with a blend of natural mineral water and deionized water. At the distillery, they produce the custom distillate.

The distillate made at the castle is a blend of wheat and barley, which is combined and fermented at a brewery near Copenhagen that is certified organic. Once that mash is brought here, the work begins.

The still has a pot still base with two columns attached. The distillate passes through the pot, then continues through the columns in a batch process. Each column has eight plates in it. At each plate the spirit passing through touches it and condenses.

If my understanding of this still is correct, what makes it different from others is that 95 percent of the spirit that condenses at each plate doesn't drop down to the plate beneath it, but all the way down to the bottom of the column. They consider each plate a full distillation, so the pot, plus eight plates in each of the two columns is 17 distillations. They run this process twice, so they figure it as 34 distillations before they get the final spirit.

I don't place a lot of importance on advertised number of distillations (as opposed to the taste), but the math makes sense. 

Speaking of taste, we tasted the core spirit that comes out of the still. It is incredibly flavorful, tasting of strawberry jam, bread dough, blueberry figs, and a finish that's all herbal and wintergreen. In the mouth, a spiciness leaps out. It's quite an amazing distillate, and once I tasted it on its own I can now taste all of that in the finished bottle of Purity.

It takes them 10 hours for the first distillation, and because their cuts are so small, it takes 7 of the first distillations to get enough low wines to do the second distillation, which takes 6 hours. So that means to get one 'batch' of the flavorful spirit for Purity, it takes 76 hours. 

Purity also tastes and smells of minerals, and I suspect that is from the mineral water used to dilute it to proof. Blender Thomas Kuuttanen says that it reminds him of rain falling on brackish water, and I can totally see that.

In the process of developing Purity Kuuttanen tried to use all mineral water, but found some minerals came out of solution after bottling, and left a white ring around the neck of the bottle. His task was finding the right balance between mineral and de-ionized water so that this didn't happen. 

We were talking at the distillery about how rare it is to have more than one ingredient used in the mash of a vodka.  Purity uses wheat and barely. Reyka uses the same two ingredients. Hangar One blends grape distillate with neutral distillate (wheat I think). 

Anyway, I'll be writing a lot more about Purity for the Tasting Panel magazine, so I'll be sure to link to those in the future. 

Warsaw By Day and Night

On my trip with ZU Vodka to Poland, I also had a little time to check out Warsaw.  I was last in Warsaw about four years ago for all of 1.5 days, so for this trip I came in a day early. That evening a few us us went to see what the nightlife in Warsaw was all about.

Warsaw has a lot of nightclubs for a city of 1.7 million. On my last visit, we popped in to two or three of them. This time we hit five clubs, one bar, and one late-night restaurant on the first night.

We could have done more, too. That's because on a stretch of Mazowiecka Street, there are about 6 or 8 clubs right next to each other on either side of one small stretch of the street. Most I'd call mid-size, and they pretty much look like nightclubs everywhere. They have the central dancefloor and bottle service booths lining the walls. The crowds and the music varied from place to place, from popular dance hits to hip hop to progressive house.

We also hit one of the few cocktail bars in town, Paparazzi. It's actually a chain, with ones in other cities. The place was pretty high-energy - it's no speakeasy- clubby but without a dancefloor. The drinks were divided into categories like classics, martinis, fruit, Latin, and staff creations. We ordered drinks like a Dill Martini made with Zubrowka, a Caiprinha variation, and a Rum Old-Fashioned. They were pretty good.

On the next night after the trip started, we visited the bar Sense. I was there on my last visit to Warsaw as well and had an equally good time. They created a special menu of Zubrowka drinks just for us, so I felt obliged to try them all.

Late night on the first night, we stopped into Przekaski Zakaski, a late-night snack bar place serving Polish food to very drunk people after the bars close. One guy slumped under a table to the left of us. A fellow writer asked for recommendations (the menu was in Polish) from guys sitting nearby, but they kept trying to trick her into ordering gross stuff like gelatinized pork. The place was fun and fortunately right near our hotel for a quick walk home. 

Warsaw By Day

The next day we had a few hours to kill. We took a cab to the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which I also saw on my last visit to Poland. It was great but as free day is on Sunday, it was packed.

Then we walked around Old Town Warsaw. The name is quite inaccurate, as around 1944 pretty much all of it was raized to the ground. It was rebuilt starting soon after, so the dates on the buildings tend to be from the 1950s yet the buildings are designed to look much older and grander. Still, it's pretty gorgeous, with big open squares, live music, shopping, and lots of room to walk.

One thinks Warsaw will be old and post-commnist ugly, but it's really not the case. The Old Town is great, the nightclubs are numerous, and the vodka flows freely.

Hunting Bison in Poland with ZU Vodka

No bison were harmed in the writing of this blog post.

This summer I flew to Warsaw with ZU vodka, known in the rest of the world as Zubrowka. Zubrowka is bison grass vodka; vodka flavored with grass. The stuff tastes like caramel and jasmine and hay, and makes apple juice taste like apple pie.

Unfortunately, that delicious flavor comes from coumarin, a naturally-occurring compound that is banned as a food additive in the US. It is also in the tonka bean, which is why we can't have a historically-accurate recreation of Abbot's Bitters in the US either. (See this NYTimes story for more on that.)

(Mmm, delcious Coumarin. Image from Wikipedia.)

Coumarin is a blood thinner (anti-coagulant), and it is used to make Coumadin, a medicine that some people with blood clot disorders have to take before flying. Ironically, one of the people on the press trip had to take a shot of Coumadin before coming to Poland. If they had real Zubrowka in the US, she could have just chugged a bottle.

They've recreated the flavor of Zubrowka in ZU, using naturally-derived ingredients. In a blind taste test you can guess which is which, but they're pretty close.

A Trip to the Forest

We took a train for a few hours from Warsaw to Bialystok, where the distillery is located. But before seeing that, we went to see the Bialowieza Forest where the bison live and the bison grass grows.

The forest has various levels of protection in different parts. The first visit we took to it was by carriage, to the most protected part. The carriages aren't just for old-timey charm: no mechanical transportation is allowed in the forest and you must be accompanyed by a licensed guide.

The reason this forest is special is that it has for centuries been the protected property of the kings. It was used as their personal hunting ground for bison and a food reserve for the army. The forest is a UNESCO biosphere preserve and on the World Heritage List.

The forest is quite pretty, with tall skinny trees. This is the type of forest that would have covered most of Europe long ago.

Looking for Bison in All the Wrong Places

But to actually see the bison, you've got to get up pretty early in the morning. At 5AM we drove into the forest (this time, outside of the strict reserve but still where bison can be found) and walked along a path looking for them.

Unfortunately, none were to be found. The guide says at this time of the year the bison go into the deep forest to hide from the mosquitoes and flies, the very same ones that were biting us ferociously.

But it wasn't all for nothing. We also went searching for bison grass. The bison grass for Zubrowka is hand harvested by 21 or 22 families who know secret spots to pick it. Apparently you can grow bison grass on farms, but it doesn't have the same aroma as the natural stuff.

We walked down a trail in the forest, veered off it, cut through the woods, and found a whopping three blades of bison grass. Obviously, this wasn't one of the spots where they harvest it. But still, success!

We did manage to see actual bison, though they weren't free-roaming. We went to a reserve (sort of an outdoor zoo) where they show off the bison and other forest animals. Hi bison!

At the Distillery

After our forest visit, we went to see the distillery in Bialystok. The place is huge, as they make a lot of vodka for their unflavored Zubrowka (not available in the US) as well as other brands. Interestingly, this is not the start-to-finish point for ZU and other brands.

Closer to the farmlands where the rye is grown, there are smaller distilleries that do the fermentation and initial distillation. Polmos Bialystok (the name of this distillery) refines the distillation and adds any flavoring.

The bison grass is stored in a dark, refrigerated room in big paper bags.

The grass used to flavor the vodka is soaked in alcohol and water in a big washing machine thing for a couple days. They make a concentrate of the bison grass flavor, then add whatever amount they need to the final blend.

The grass that's used to decorate each bottle (there is a blade of grass in each) is soaked in higher-proof alcohol to suck out all the coumarin. It's then dried and inserted by hand in the bottling line.

In Your Mouth

The way ZU/Zubrowka is most commonly consumed is mixed with apple juice in a drink called the Szarlotka. It tastes kinda like apple pie. It's dumb and fun and more American bars should offer it. In Poland the apple juice was pretty cruddy, and it would certainly be improved with unfiltered apple juice.

 

Drinkable Potatoes

Hey, here's a drink with Karlsson's Vodka, brought to you by Kiowa Bryan of Lexington Social in Los Angeles. 

I didn't adapt the drink too much, but I did get all crafty and used some special salt.

The recipe is over at FineCooking.com.

An Amusingly Disgusting Way to Drink Vodka in Sweden

While I was in Sweden with Karlsson's Gold vodka, we learned a traditional way to drink vodka. It is called Kaffegök, and it is gross.

You take a cup and put a coin in the bottom.

Then you fill it with coffee until you can't see the coin anymore.

Then you add vodka until you can see the coin again. That's how you know you have enough vodka in there.

Then you drink it. Damnnnn that's some kinda breakfast.