A few years back I wrote a long feature about the Blood and Sand cocktail, made with scotch, cherry brandy, orange juice, and vermouth.
It was written for the German magazine Mixology, but recently they have put the story online in the original English.
For the story I covered the origins of the drink as best as I could find them, and many variations of the drink. There is a large discussion of the best type of orange juice to use, alternates to sweet vermouth and Cherry Heering, and how to find out if your flamed orange peel is spitting wax and pesticides onto your drink.
Nearly five years ago I figured out a method to make clear ice blocks in a picnic cooler in what we now call the Directional Freezing or Cooler Method. It works from the top-down. Now a reader has figured out a moderately easy way to freeze in a cooler from the bottom-up.
In the top-down method, one simply fills an insulated cooler with water and leaves the top off. The water freezes only from the top down, and all the trapped air and impurities are pushed to the bottom, where a cloudy 25% or so will form if you let it freeze that long.
Freezing From The Bottom-Up
Commercial ice machines like the Clinebell freeze blocks of clear ice by freezing from a cold plate on the bottom, while a water pump near the surface keeps water circulating (thus preventing ice from forming on the surface).
Reader Nome Park wrote me to tell me about a method he developed that sort of combines these two methods for the home user, producing a mini-Clinebell-type block.
The cooler is insulated on all sides except for the bottom, and a small aquarium pump is used to keep water circulating at the top.
The white area on the bottom is the interior of the cooler with the foam/plastic cut off so it's no longer insulated on the bottom.
1. Cut the cooler bottom outside layers off a few inches up from the bottom. Park did this using a Dremmel tool and a knife. *Important* You only want to cut off the outer plastic and the foam insulation. Do not cut out the interior plastic otherwise it will not hold water.
2. Insulate the top lid. Park made a 2.5-inch thick piece of foam that fits snuggly inside the cooler (since the lids on these coolers tend not to be insulated. (Pump is just there for scale. It is not attached.)
3. Fill the cooler with water up to where the foam will hit it from the top.
4. Hang the (unused for your fish tank) aquarium pump from the top, so that it's just beneath the surface of the water. Put the foam piece on top and the lid on that. Park cut a little section out for the pump power cord.
5. Turn the pump on and wait for it to freeze. In Park's freezer, it takes 2 days and 2 hours to freeze (50 hours) into a block that isn't all the way frozen. If it goes too long (t 72 hours or so) the pump will freeze into the block and probably break.
6. Remove the cooler from the freezer, turn off the cord, turn the cooler upside-down, and wait for the block to slide out. (An hour is about normal). Now you're ready to cut it up.
I asked Park if he tried this without the pump just to see what happens, but he had not tried it, basing his system on the Clinebell.
So, for you ambitious sorts with large freezers, this might be a way to make larger blocks than with the small cooler at home.
Thank you much to reader Nome Park who not only took the time to perfect this method but also to send me detailed description and pictures.
Way back in 2010, I wrote a story for Mixology Magazine about Eggnog. The story was published in German (I wrote it in English and they translated) but this year they put the English version of the story online.
It covers what I could learn about eggnog at the time (keep in mind this is 4 years ago), including the history of the drink and its possible relation to British egg drinks like posset and wassail, along with other American drinks like Grog and the Tom & Jerry.
It also covers international egg drinks, including:
This has been a great year for cocktails and spirits books- tons have come out, and the majority are written by well-respected bartenders and other experts. I haven't had time to read the majority of them, unfortunately, but below is a list of all the ones I know about.
Notable Cocktail and Spirits Books Published in 2014:
Whisky Books:
Whiskey Distilled: A Populist Guide to the Water of Life by Heather Greene
The Spirit of Gin: A Stirring Miscellany of the New Gin Revival by Matt Teacher
Distilled: From absinthe & brandy to vodka & whisky, the world's finest artisan spirits unearthed, explained & enjoyed by Neil Ridley and Joel Harrison
The fine folks at the Bay Area Newsgroup, which includes newspapers the San Jose Mercury, Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, and others, asked me to write a long profile of Trick Dog's Caitlin Laman, so that's what I did.
The story comes out in this Sunday's Eat Magazine, an insert into all those papers. I'm not sure if it's going online in traditional format, but here it is in Issu, the online magazine format. If it comes out as traditional text I'll share the link.
They did a nice job! Lots of photos and a lovely layout.
The article also includes illustrated recipes by 8 Bay Area bartenders:
Caitlin Laman of Trick Dog
Suzanne Long of Longitude
Nick Kosevich for Mortar and Pestle
Antoine Nixon of Jack's Oyster Bar and Fish House
Russ Stanley of Jack Rose Libation House
Jimmy Marino of The Lexington House
Brandon Clements of The Village Pub
Andrew Majoulet of Rich Table
They asked for ten but chose eight – sorry if yours was one of the ones left out.
Too early in the year for holiday gift guides? Perhaps!
Each year for Details.com I write a gift guide of spirits to consider for holiday gifting or just winter drinking. This year's list includes 11 spirits and 1 book, nearly all of which came out in the later half of the year (as Details is all about new stuff).
Spirits are mostly from well-known brands and include bottles from:
The physics of the thing made perfect sense but I hadn't actually tried it myself at the time. This post is just to say that I use this method now and make nice round ice. Lots and lots of it.
The ice in the picture above isn't cloudy; just some of it is frosty on the outside.
This the how many are in one bottle of Karlsson's Vodka, that is. That is one 15-pound bag of Russet potatoes and two 1-pound bags of mini-potatoes, all stacked in my extra-large salad bowl. Perhaps I need to get a real hobby.
Karlsson's uses about 17 pounds of potatoes- nearly twice as much other potato vodka brands, because Karlsson's uses small heirloom potato varietals from southern Sweden. These potatoes are rich in flavor and protein but lower in carbohydrates than traditional Russet potatoes shown above. They are less efficient for distillation than fuel potatoes- but delicious to eat and drink.
To put it in perspective, I took the picture next to an empty Karlsson's bottle:
That's a lot of potatoes! They (well not these) will be fermented, distilled up to 96% ABV, then diluted back down to 40% for bottling strength.
This post is part of a little project on potatoes and Sweden I'm doing for Karlsson's Vodka. Karlsson's Gold is a blend of seven heirloom potato vodkas.
Read about my adventures to Sweden with Karlsson's and learn how it's made here.
In the process of making many types of alcohol enzymes are used, but I didn't know very much about them. So I decided to do some reading and share what I've learned. Or what I think I've learned anyway.
Enzymes are used in spirits production before fermentation. They are used to expose fermentable sugars in base ingredients so that they can be fermented by yeast. For example, a raw potato with yeast added to it won't produce potato beer (or not much of it). But when heated and with enzymes added then it will.
Let's review spirits production:
The base ingredient is prepared for fermentation. This can be as simple as crushing a grape or stalk of sugar cane, but many other raw ingredients must be prepared by methods such as malting (barley), baking (agave), heating in water (many things, called 'mashing' in whisky), and/or adding enzymes.
The ingredient now has its fermentable sugars exposed, so yeast can do its job and convert these sugars into alcohol.
The result is a beer/wine with a low percentage of alcohol.
The beer/wine is concentrated through distillation.
What Are Enzymes?
Catalysts that perform and speed up chemical reactions. They are present in biological cells. They do a lot of work in nature.
They convert molecules into other molecules. An example of this is the enzyme lactase, which breaks a lactose down into two glucose molecules. People who are lactose-intolerant do not produce the enzyme lactase so they can't process lactose.
Enzymes aren't fuel for reactions – they're not consumed by the reaction they catalyze.
Enzyme activity can be affected by environmental things like temperature, pH, and pressure. (For most fermentable materials, the mash of hot water and raw material is heated to very specific temperatures so that the enzymes will work.)
The enzymes are B,C,and D in this illustration. The material A is broken up. Source.
Common Uses for Enzymes
Some easy-to-understand cases where enzymes are used:
In meat tenderizers that break down proteins into smaller proteins, making it easier to chew.
In stain removers to break down fats or proteins on clothing.
In digestion. From Wikipedia, "An important function of enzymes is in the digestive systems of animals. Enzymes break down large molecules (starch or proteins) into smaller ones, so they can be absorbed by the intestines. Starch molecules, for example, are too large to be absorbed from the intestine, but enzymes hydrolyze the starch chains into smaller molecules, which can then be absorbed."
Enzymes in Beer Production
The website HomeBrewTalk.com has a great, detailed chapter on enzymes in fermentation. They lay out how grains for beer are often mashed (heated with water) to two different temperatures.
Mashing is the process in which the milled grain is mixed with water. This activates enzymes that were already present in the barley seed or have been formed during the malting process. These enzymes work best in particular temperature and pH ranges. By varying the temperature of the mash, the brewer has control over the enzyme activity.
In barley starch makes up 63% – 65% of the dry weight. Starch is a polysaccharide (very large chains of glucose) which is insoluble in water. Brewer's yeast, however, can only ferment monosaccharides (glucose, fructose), disaccharides (maltose, sucrose) and trisaccharides (matotriose).
In order for that starch to be converted into water soluble sugars (fermentable and unfermentable), two processes need to happen. First the starch is gelatenized to become water soluble. For starch found in barley and malt this happens above 140ºF (60ºC). Secondly the activity of the amylase enzymes break the long chained starch molecules into shorter chains.
Enzymes in Scotch Whiskey
The malting process in scotch whiskey is a process to expose enzymes. To make malted barley, the dried grains are soaked in water so that the seeds just start to sprout, then the grain is dried to halt the process. Then when the grain is later mashed (has hot water added to it), the enzymes will convert the starches in the grains into fermentable sugars.
According to Ian Wisniewski in Michael Jackson's Whiskey,
"Growth hormones released by the grain also trigger the creation and release of enzymes that begin breaking down the cell walls and protein layers, in order to access the starch… The enzymes collectively termed 'diastase,' include alpha-amylase and beta-amylase (the latter is already present in barley). These enzymes are essential for the subsequent conversion of starch into fermentable sugars during the subsequent process of mashing."
Enzymes Used in Many Spirits
In other spirits, enzymes are added, which saves the malting step or speeds the natural reaction with enzymes naturally present. This is true in bourbon (from corn), in other spirits from grain (like vodka), and for potato vodka.
Most bourbon mashbills (recipes) contain a certain portion of malted barley. This is because the malted barley provides the rest of the batch with enzymes needed to break down the material into simpler sugars. However, in modern times many (if not all) major bourbon producers also add enzymes to the corn, wheat/rye, and malted barley mashbill to speed things up.
A good overview of the chemistry of this and list of enzymes available for purchase can be found on this IM biotech company site.
From the few potato vodka distilleries that I have visited, it seems that adding enzymes is standard in the process of preparing potatoes for fermentation. So I used this project as an excuse to learn more about enzymes.
If you think about a raw vs. cooked potatoes, they get a bit sweeter after you cook them so we can guess that heat helps break down the starch into sugars- at least partially. Enzymes help with the rest.
Karlsson's uses "virgin new potatoes" to produce their vodka. These are very small, skinless potatoes that are full of flavor that translates into the final spirit.
In Sweden, vodka was originally made from grapes and grains. Then the potato took over as did a government monopoly on production (except for a little export product called Absolut). But when the country joined the European Union, that all changed.
Sweden has a strange relationship with potatoes and vodka.
According to Nicholas Faith and Ian Wisniewski in their 1997 book Classic Vodka, distillation had reached Sweden by the 14th century, though this was used to make medicines. In the 16th century spirits became a luxury beverage, and in the 17th century they became a popular recreational drink for all classes.
Vodka in Sweden was likely made from grapes, then grain. It became a bit too popular as soon as the price came down. In 1775 a law was passed forming a state monopoly on spirits production, but this was abandoned soon after. It would come again later.
According to the book The Vodka Companion: A Connoisseur's Guide by Desmond Begg, "Potatoes, a cheaper raw material than wheat at the time, were first used in distillation in the 1790s."
With the invention of the continuous still and other technological advances, potatoes became easier to use as raw material in the early-to-mid 1800s.
The Swedish Temperance Society was founded in 1837. In 1860 home distillation was forbidden in Sweden. Throughout the mid-1800s, different cities granted exclusive rights to sell vodka to certain groups of tavern keepers. These taverns closed early at night to prevent excessive consumption, and vodka was only served with meals. Profits collected from vodka sales were reinvested in the local community, and in Vodka Politics by Mark Lawrence Schrad, the author asserts that this system was responsible for curtailing excessive consumption throughout the country.
These local city-wide companies were eventually merged into the national retailing monopoly, the Systembolaget, which is still in place today. Vodka rationing – limiting individuals to a maximum amount- continued into the 1950s.
In 1917 Vin & Sprit was formed when the state liquor company purchased the largest rectifying company, giving it a monopoly on manufacture, retail, and importation of all alcohlic beverages. This monopoly lasted until around 1995 when Sweden joined the European Union. They kept control of retailing (Systembolaget) but sold off state-owned production.
Peter Ekelund, the main creator of Karlsson's vodka, says that under V&S control all spirits were supposed to be made from potatoes as (it more like a compuslary agreement than a law). It was a farm subsidy agreement probably dating back to post-WWII. But these were ‘starch potatoes’ that had no real flavor.
That is, all vodka was made from potatoes, with one notable exception.
Absolut History
Absolut vodka was a brand dating to 1879, named for being "absolutely pure." The brand was resurected by Vin & Sprit for its centennial anniversary, and in 1979 was made from grains rather than potatoes.
According to Peter Ekelund, this was allowed because Absolut was solely an export product.
Obviously, Absolut was a huge success and in 1985 it was the largest-selling imported vodka in the USA.
But when Sweden joined the European Union they sold off V&S. Vin & Sprit was bought by Pernod-Ricard in 2008 for 5.69 billion euros.
Return to Potatoes (The Karlsson's Team)
When Absolut was created, this was a government product, so the people who created, blended, and exported the brand didn't take home a chunk of its enormous profits. But many of the same people who helped create it came back together to create Karlsson's, an heirloom potato vodka.
The vodka is named for Börje Karlsson. He is the blender of Karlsson's and was the Head of Laboratory and Product Development of V&S Group during the development of Absolut.
The founder of the brand is Peter Ekelund, who had helped lead the launch of Absolut Vodka in North America.
The bottle designer is Hans Brindfors, the former Art Director of Carlsson & Broman who designed the Absolut bottle.
And they also reunited with Olof Tranvik, who introduced Absolut to Andy Warhol back in the day.
It's pretty cool that some of the same team who helped create the vodka that broke the mold of what Swedish vodka could be gathered to break it again in a return to potato vodka.
When they started making Karlssons a lot had changed since 1979: There were no distilleries left in Sweden that could distill from potatoes anymore.
