Monthly Archives: August 2014

American Craft Distilleries

Posted on by
Reply

According to a recent article in The New York Times American craft distilleries numbered in the dozens no more than five years ago and have now exploded to more than 600 at last count. What, you ask, is a craft distillery? Or a micro-distillery? Or a boutique distillery?  For starters, they’re smaller. A lot smaller. Whiskey writer Chuck Cowdery puts it into perspective by explaining that the Distilled Spirits Council offers a small-distiller membership to distillers producing no more than 40,000 cases a year. The two Kentucky distilleries that make Jim Beam produce 28,000 cases a day and Jack Daniel’s is on track to ship 13,000,000 cases this year.

The American Distilling Institute defines craft spirits as the products of an independently-owned distillery with maximum annual sales of 52,000 cases where the product is physically distilled and bottled on-site. This definition bars quite a few craft distillers from membership – that would be the ones that buy their spirits already distilled and aged, then simply bottle and label them on-site. The labels usually extol the virtue of handcrafting, of small batching, of using local resources but that may or may not describe what’s actually in the bottle.

The Daily Beast posted a story on July 28, 2014 by Eric Felten that names a massive distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana that “cranks out mega-industrial quantities of beverage-grade alcohol” as the go-to place for marketers who want to bottle their own brands without having to actually buy and operate a still. According to Felten, MGP (Midwest Grain Products) sells bulk vodka and gin, wheated and rye bourbons – all well-made, just not what one thinks of as artisanal. But then, the big distilleries tend to advertise their products as “handcrafted” and “old time” so, in a way, this is nothing new. To my mind, if it tastes good, then what’s in the bottle is what you want – regardless of provenance or size of distillery. The problem seems to be that we expect more from an artisanal product therefore we don’t mind paying more, because we assume it required more time and expertise in the making. And nobody likes to be hoodwinked. Still. If it tastes good….

A case in point is published in the September 2014 Atlantic, written by Wayne Curtis and titled “How Rye Came Back.” Curtis writes that we’re in a “new golden age” of rye because of the craft movement. He writes that “what few people know, however, is that an awful lot of the craft whiskey found in these different bottles traces back to a single distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana – and it wasn’t originally intended to be bottled as rye at all.” But these barrels of rye from Indiana are being hailed as the best in the history of rye. Seems they were originally distilled by Seagram’s, who sold the distillery to MGP in 2011, and not intended to be consumed as rye but to be used as a component for Seagram’s blended whiskeys.

To make a long story short, Seagram’s went belly up and sold off the rye. Curtis writes that some was sold to Diageo, which branded it as Bulleit rye; some went to independent bottlers “who blended it with other whiskeys or aged it further and then slapped their own labels on it. You’ll find this ur-rye in bottles of Templeton, High West, Redemption, Willett, and Old Scout, among others.”

Curtis interviewed the former Seagram’s distiller who explained they had been researching and experimenting with their rye for a while when they bumped into a breakthrough with a shipment of rye grain from Sweden. He recalled that “this was some of the sweetest-smelling rye grain and made some of the best rye whiskey we had ever produced.” That sounds a little bit artisanal although the distillery was, and is, not.

The point is, all good whiskeys don’t necessarily start small nor do all bad whiskeys necessarily start big. Most craft distillers pride themselves on making – or bottling – a distinctive product. If it tastes good, then drink it, whether its provenance be small or huge, local or global. Just don’t believe everything you read on the label.

Bourbon on Fire

Posted on by
2

In 1996, the distiller’s worst nightmare came true when Warehouse I at Heaven Hill Distillery in Bardstown caught fire. Within four hours of the call to the fire station, seven warehouses holding 90,000 barrels of aging bourbon, each one containing forty-five gallons, were burning out of control. With flames leaping as high as 35 stories, firefighters abandoned attempts to extinguish the fire and turned their efforts instead toward protecting the remaining 37 warehouses. A storm front was moving through the area with northwesterly winds of 50 mph and gusts of up to 75 mph.

Warehouse J went from ten percent involvement to ninety percent in less than three minutes. And as the warehouses collapsed, the whiskey flowed. “When that fire started laying down on the ground, it was really a run for your life situation,” said one of the firefighters. An 18-inch deep flood of flaming bourbon covered the main road linking the warehouses with the distillery building downhill. Rivers of fire covered the surrounding 40 acres, spilling into the creek and riding the water like so many dancing ghosts.

Finally the storm opened up with a downpour and nature helped end what she might have started with a bolt of lightening, but the cause remains undetermined. The early morning light revealed smoldering, flattened rubble where the seven-story, 100-by-200 foot warehouses had stood the day before. All Heaven Hill employees reported to work as usual and the bottling, processing, shipping and distribution facilities operated at full capacity.

According to a news release from the Kentucky Farm Bureau, the loss of the Bardstown distillery impacted farmers all over Nelson County who had depended on the spent mash as nutrient-rich, low-cost feed for their stock. One farmer claimed his production had dropped by 500 pounds of milk a day without the high protein feed to which his cows had grown accustomed.

In 2000, a fire at Wild Turkey distillery in Lawrenceburg destroyed a seven-story warehouse holding nearly a million gallons of bourbon in 17,200 barrels, and sent flaming bourbon coursing into the Kentucky River, killing fish and setting fire to woods. Then in August of 2003 lightening sparked a fire that engulfed a seven-story warehouse at Jim Beam, sending flames more than 100 feet in the air before the warehouse collapsed two hours after the fire was reported. About 19,000 barrels of bourbon, or less than 2 percent of its bourbon inventory, were lost. Flaming bourbon from the warehouse ran off into a nearby creek, also resulting in a large fish kill.

Since the state bills distilleries for every dead fish—50 cents for a bass and up to $5.00 for the more exotic species— many distillers have built berms around their warehouses to contain the fire should such misfortune fall their way.

It’s All in the Barrel

Posted on by
2

Barrels are more than packaging – they’re critical to the process of aging new whiskey. Once white dog is in the wood, the congeners, or toxins, generated during mashing and fermentation and retained during distillation, engage in a synergistic partnership with properties of the barrel wood; and with air and wind, cold months and hot ones, rainy days and drought, and with time itself. The raw, grainy white dog that entered the barrel clear as water emerges years later as an amber liquid suitable for sipping.

Federal regulations dictate that bourbon must be aged in new, charred, oak barrels. So, once they’re emptied of bourbon, most barrels are sold to distilleries in other countries and used for aging other products. Ninety-eight per cent of all Scotch is aged in bourbon wood as well as a few dark rums and tequilas. American white oak, or quercus albus to be specific, is the tight-grained hardwood used for bourbon barrels. White oak contains a substance called tyloses that naturally blocks the sap-conducting pores of the wood, giving it the right porosity for holding the whiskey while at the same time allowing it to breathe, which oxidizes and evaporates the congeners. A 53-gallon barrel is standard to the industry.

When I talked to Jimmy Banks in 2003, his job was visiting sawmills all over the country buying white oak wood that’s 75 to 100 years old for Bluegrass Cooperage. He carries a 14-inch hatchet in his briefcase. “You got to get into the wood,” he explains. The skin on his hands was thick as leather and he used a thumbnail to groove the piece of wood he held while explaining that the heads are flat sawn but the staves are quarter sawn to get the proper orientation of the growth rings and grain for maximum strength and leak resistance. “It’s bastard sawn if it exceeds 45 degrees,” he says.

The rough boards are sawed to a thickness of 15/16 of an inch and the soft outer layers of sapwood are ground off. The grinding eats up a lot of wood but the process is important because a sappy stave will taint the bourbon. The boards start out with a thickness of 5/4. “That’s 5/4,” clarified Banks, “not one and a quarter.”

The boards are stacked and seasoned for up to a year in open air but this time frame varies with distillery specifications. As it dries, the wood stabilizes by giving up moisture and lingering sap. After air-drying, the wood is kiln-dried then cut into staves for the sides and planks for the heads. The staves are shaped wider in the middle than at the ends and wider at the top than at the bottom to create the bilge of the barrel and make it liquid-tight.

The cut staves are ready for the coopers. “Raising” the barrel requires skill and experience. The cooper eyes and selects staves one by one as he begins standing them on end inside the circle of a heavy iron truss hoop lying on the floor. The bung stave, which will accommodate the bunghole, is the widest at four inches and it goes in first. The cooper snugs each one tightly to the next until the circle is complete with twelve to fourteen staves. The loose ends are pulled together with a temporary hoop and the barrel is placed on a conveyor that moves it to the steam box. A good cooper raises about 270 barrels a day.

Sometimes an exceptional cooper comes along. When one Charles Harden did this job at Bluegrass Cooperage, he raised 450 to 500 barrels every day, prompting a colleague named Spitty to observe “that boy’s not gonna last long.” Other coopers theorize that Harden could do this because he simply never made a mistake in his selection of staves. If they’re not fitting right, the staves are pulled out and the process begins again. Harden never had to start over.

The steam makes the wood pliable so the top end can be windlassed, or drawn together as tightly as the bottom end. This process bends the staves into the familiar bilge shape. The open-ended barrels are placed upright and conveyed into the toasting room. The insides are first toasted with a heated instrument for about 30 minutes to remove the surface moisture acquired in the steam box. The toasting also caramelizes the natural wood sugars. These sugars will leach into the bourbon during aging and flavor it with traces of caramel and vanilla.

When the barrels have toasted enough, the truss hoops are tightened and the barrel insides are literally set on fire for about 12 seconds to char. The depth of charring varies among distilleries with some preferring a light or medium char and others going for the deepest char, identified as a number 4. The heads are charred separately and placed on the barrel ends and the permanent quarter and bilge hoops are placed.

The barrels are cooled for an hour and all the hoops are tightened. The bung hole is bored and each barrel tested with a pressurized blast of water. Any showing leakage are turned back to hand coopers for repair. Charles Harden moved on to hand coopering.

Old Crow and Sour Mash

Posted on by
Reply

By 1850 America’s population had grown to twenty-four million and that year Americans consumed 51,833,473 proof gallons of distilled spirits, not including moonshine and bootleg. A proof gallon is one gallon of 100 proof whiskey and that was the measure then and is still the measure used to calculate federal taxes, with a higher proof taxed proportionately more and a lower proof less. America’s thirst pushed distilling away from local stills and toward commercial production and standardization. 

Before standardization distillers found their results on more or less an empirical basis. Gerald Carson writes in The Social History of Bourbon that a distiller had his own formula, techniques and discoveries about which he was less than garrulous. A recipe printed in the Lexington Gazette in 1823 describes just how empirical the old methods were by instructing the distiller to let the cooked mash stand until cool enough that the distiller can bear his hand four inches within the surface of the mash with no more pain than a slight stinging sensation at the ends of his fingers.

An early innovator who had a major and documented hand in shaping American whiskey during these times of rapid change was Dr. James Crow, a Scot who migrated to Kentucky in the 1820s. Crow, a physician with an interest in chemistry, introduced scientific measure into the industry with such basic instruments as the saccharometer and thermometer. He worked at Old Oscar Pepper Distillery which eventually became Labrot and Graham Distillery. Today Woodford Reserve Distillery stands on the same space. He insured the quality of his own brand, Old Crow, by aging it in charred oak barrels and he advanced standardization from batch to batch by introducing the sour mash method of fermentation.

This process calls for a portion of the previous fermentation (usually about 25%) to be added to the new batch of unfermented mash. The old fermentation is ‘sour mash’ because the sugar has been consumed by the yeast. This produces a higher acidity in the mash that protects against undesirable bacteria and promotes continuity of character from one batch to the next. The sour mash is called backset, setback, thin slop, or yeast back, depending on the distillery. All American whiskey today is made using this process, whether specified on the label or not.

The Violet Hour

Posted on by
2

This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow again and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen magically along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn.
Bernard DeVoto, The Hour

The concept of Mr. DeVoto’s violet hour was not one of familiarity in my family, this hour spent sipping cocktails in the gloaming while quietly discussing the day just finished. But being the experienced drinkers we are, no telling how many unicorns have been sighted.

The Violet Hour has become a play, a novel, a band, a song, and a bar in Chicago, the kind with mixologists rather than bartenders. DeVoto, who published The Hour in 1948, kept it simple however. He was of the opinion that there are only two cocktails: a slug of whiskey and the martini. The first, and my personal favorite, was made by simply pouring whiskey over ice, and he goes into loving detail about the making of a martini. Six o’clock is the hour and the goal is purification, apparently from the woes and cares of the day. With the first sip of the first cocktail “illusion ebbs away; the water of life has swept us into its current…. Your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart.” Not to mention the unicorn.

On my bookshelves reside several other fine old volumes that include recipes from the early days of cocktail culture. The Gentleman’s Companion, Volume II, Around the World with Jigger, Beaker, and Glass, by Charles H. Baker, copyrighted in 1939, is one and includes indigenous recipes from Singapore to Saigon to Cuba and ports in between. His adventures included drinks with Hemingway in Key West and Havana. Baker set out to “…bring you famous liquid classics from odd spots of the world—classics which, through the test of time and social usage, have become institutions in the place of their birth.” A number of these classics are still around, like the daiquiri, mojito, Fish House Punch, and some, like the Sazarac, are making a comeback. (Volume I, by the way, is about food—Around the World with Knife, Fork and Spoon.)

“One comfortable fact gleaned from travel in far countries,“ wrote Mr. Baker, “was that regardless of race, creed or inner metabolisms, mankind has always created varying forms of stimulant liquid—each after his own kind. Prohibitions and nations and kings depart, but origin of such pleasant fluid finds constant source.” Indeed. Here’s to unicorns.