That big feature I wrote on Sacramento's cocktail, coffee, and craft beer scene has gone up on the magazine's website.
Even if you're not a subscriber (and you really should be), you can read the story online here.
Blog
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The Trendiest, Yet Mostly Secret Cocktail Ingredient Right Now Is Salt
In a new story for Details.com I wrote about bartenders using salt in cocktails.
The first time I ever heard of such a thing (besides around the rim of a Margarita glass) was from Duggan McDonnell of Cantina. That was probably four years ago.
Now it seems that everybody is in on the secret and is using salt in their cocktails – whether they tell you about it or not.
Check out the story on Details.com about how and why and where bartenders are using salt in their drinks.
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13 Newish Bartender-Recommended Gins on Details.com
In my latest story for Details.com, I asked bartenders which new gins they love to drink.
I only included ones with multiple recommendations, and here is a list of 13 that rose to the top. I tried to limit them to gins launched in the last two years, though there may be an exception or two.
Rev your G&T with these new gins.
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Potential Dangers of Homemade Tonic Water
Coronavirus update March 28, 2020: Many people are coming to this page seeking advice on using cinchona bark to make their own medicine. You are not qualified to make your own medicine. The bark available for purchase online is not labelled as to its potency. And if you read the article below or this one, you'll also find that an overdose of cinchona bark can be dangerous or fatal.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MAKE YOUR OWN MEDICINE USING CINCHONA BARK. RESPECT SCIENCE, LISTEN TO DOCTORS.
More information about the safety of cinchona bark/homemade tonic can be found here at CocktailSafe.org.
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A few weeks ago, Avery and Janet Glasser drank some homemade tonic syrup in a Gin and Tonic at a bar and came down with the symptons of cinchonism, a condition caused by a buildup of quinine.
Tonic water contains quinine as its active, bittering ingredient. Quinine comes from cinchona tree bark. Homemade tonic waters begin with this tree bark either in chunk or powdered form. The powdered form is particularly hard to strain out of the final beverage, and this could lead to an accidental overdose.
The symptons of cinchonism (from wikipedia):
Symptoms of mild cinchonism (which may occur from standard therapeutic doses of quinine) include flushed and sweaty skin, ringing of the ears (tinnitus), blurred vision, impaired hearing, confusion, reversible high-frequency hearing loss, headache, abdominal pain, rashes, drug-induced lichenoid reaction (lichenoid photosensitivity),[1] vertigo, dizziness, dysphoria, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.
A scientific paper published in 2007 reported a case of a patient self-medicating for leg cramps with quinine and it turns out he gave himself cinchonism. His systems were intermittent fevers, chills, and tremors for approximately 12 days; general malaise that would begin with a bitter taste in his mouth that wouldn't go away. (On PubMed the article is at PMID: 18004031)
Glasser wrote about his incident on his Facebook page, and I asked if I could reprint it. The Glassers are the founders of Bittermens, makers of bitters, spirits, liqueurs, and other products. Thus they are very familiar with quinine. He wrote:How did it happen? Well, we work with cinchona all of the time, which means that our bodies already have a small buildup of quinine. During Tales of the Cocktail, we had a gin and tonic at a restaurant where they made their own tonic syrup. By the amount of the suspended cinchona dust floating in the drink and the distinctive earthy tannins that mark incomplete filtration, we should have stopped drinking it at the first sip. But we didn't, and spent the next two days dealing with the very uncomfortable symptoms of cinchonism.
Safe Amounts of Quinine in Tonic Water
The below information all comes from Avery Glasser.
There's a federal standard for the use of quinine in carbonated beverages, specifically that it cannot exceed 83 parts per million in the final tonic water (21 CFR 172.575). Now, if you're working with commercial quinine sulphate or quinine hydrochloride, it's easy to calculate. Basically, that ends up being 2.48 mg of commercial quinine per ounce of tonic water.
So, let's expand this out: a typical gin and tonic is 1.5 oz of gin and 4.5 oz of tonic, 6 ounces total. That means we can expect 11.16mg of quinine in that beverage.
However, most producers of tonic syrups don't use quinine hydrochloride/quinine sulphate… and there's the rub.
Cinchona bark is approximately 5% quinine.
The Most Popular Tonic Water Syrup Recipe Has Too Much Quinine
Let's take one of the most popular tonic syrup recipes, published by Jeffrey Morgenthaler: Basically, it's 6 cups of liquid to 1/4 cup of powdered cinchona bark, which is about 35 grams of cinchona. Extrapolate from that and we're talking about 35 grams of cinchona per 1.4 liters of end syrup, which is 25 grams per liter, and if it extracts fully, contributes 1.25 grams of quinine per liter, which equates to 1251 parts per million. That's 15 times the CFR standard.
If you use 3/4 of an ounce of that syrup in a Gin and Tonic, you're adding in 27.5 mg of quinine – more than double the amount of quinine in a commercial gin and tonic.
Note: Does a syrup extract quinine fully from the cinchona? No – but it extracts faster from powdered cinchona versus cinchona chips or quills.
Note: Does a syrup that is sieved through a french press or a coffee filter have a high percentage of solids still in suspension? Yes – and any of the solids you swallow contribute the full amount of the quinine as your body digests the powder.
Quinine in Bittermens Bitters and Liqueurs
Glaslser says, "We work with small amounts of cinchona in many of our bitters. At our concentration, there's only about 1.1 grams of cinchona per liter in the maceration, and all of the solids are removed down to 5 microns, which means there's barely any cinchona left in the mix. If we say that we get a full extraction of quinine from the cinchona before we filter it out, then we're talking about contributing about 57 mg of quinine per liter of bitters, or assuming a half ml of bitters per cocktail, we add no more than 0.0283 mg of quinine to a cocktail, or raise the total amount of quinine by 0.19 parts per million. Again, that's assuming that we left all of the cinchona bark in the final product, which we do not as we don't use powdered cinchona (we use larger pieces of bark). Most likely, we're contributing less than a tenth of that amount.
"Just for full disclosure, our liqueur division (Bittermens Spirits) makes a tonic liqueur – but we had that tested before releasing it to ensure that our liqueur was below 83 ppm, meaning that any beverage use would still be well below the federal limits."Avery Glasser's Conclusion
All I'm saying this this: be careful. Bitters and tonic syrups can be fun to make, but they can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. I'm not saying that you need to be a food scientist or a compounding pharmacist to do things safely, but you have to understand that you're working with potentially harmful substances! Indian Calamus root, Virginia Snakeroot or tobacco – even in small amounts can have horrible and irreversible effects. Just last week, I was told about a bar that was soaking stone fruit pits in neutral grain and had no idea about cyanide toxicity.
For us, it's now five days later and the symptoms are basically gone, but it also means we have to be careful about having cinchona for another week or so.
That's it. No rant. Just a plea for my health and the health of all of our friends and customers: think carefully before making your own tinctures, extracts, bitters and syrups.
Thanks to Avery Glasser for sharing his story – and the math – with us.
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Here I Am Talking About Ice Again
In the new issue of Cheers Magazine, I was interviewed by writer Kelly Magyarics about ice.She covered topics relevant to bartenders, such as machines, molds, making ice in industrial quantities, the Aviary's ice program, etc.
You can read the online magazine (page 32) at this link.
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Disaronno Distillery Visit in Saronno Italy
This July I visted the town of Saronno, Italy, and the blending and bottling house where they make Disaronno liqueur (formerly known as Disaronno Amaretto).
So The Legend Goes
Disaronno, as with many brands, is based on a legend involving a beautiful woman and a secret manuscript. We visited the chapel where the story begins.
In the 1400s, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Miracles was founded in Saronno. For a later addition to the chapel in 1525, a painter named Bernardino Luini found a model for the Virgin Mary in a local widowed innkeeper, and used her face in the paintings in the chapel.
As a reward for this honor, the innkeeper gave the painter a present of a flask of liqueur, which was what would become Disaronno. The brand claims that this was the first amaretto liqueur, “amaretto” meaning “a little bit bitter.”
In the 1600s, a member of the Reina family supposedly rediscovered the old recipe, and it was commercialized in the early 1900s. The Reina family still owns the company.
The Company Today
Today Disaronno is one brand from a big company named ILLVA. A big part of the company is a flavor company called Real Aromi. This part makes the flavors that go into the liqueurs. Other spirits made in the facility include Zucca, Tia Maria, and an amaro called 18.
How Disaronno Makes Bitter Almond Oil
Probably the most important ingredient in Disaronno is the essential oil made from bitter almonds.
Bitter almonds are illegal to sell as a food product in the US, because they contain a chemical that converts to the poison cyanide. Sweet almonds is what we crunch on. Neither type of almond is a true nut; they are pits of fruits.
As I understand it, there are many varieties of both sweet and bitter almonds, and both share the same botanical genus as the peach. While sweet almonds (as well as the tree) are just called almonds , bitter almonds can be either a particular almond tree/nut, or (as is the case at Disaronno) the pits of related stone fruits. The folks at Disaronno seemed to say that no matter if the pit comes from cherries, peaches, or apricots, it's still a bitter almond.
According to Wikipedia, "The fruits from Prunus dulcis var. amara are always bitter as are the kernels from other Prunus species like apricot, peach and cherry (to a lesser extent)."
For Disaronno they purchase 300 tons of bitter almonds (apricot pits) annually. They only use their oil for their product; they don’t sell it to other companies.
So, bitter almonds, which here are the kernels of apricots, are first crushed in a machine that grinds them into a flour. This flour is then soaked in hot water, which separates the flavor components from the sugars in the pits.
This is similar to making scotch whisky, in which ground malted barley is heated with hot water to separate the sugars from the solids. The sugary water is used and they leave the solids behind. For Disaronno, though, they don’t want the sugars and they do want the flavors.
The sugar and heated almond flour mix is then distilled under pressure (which allows you do to it a lower temperature), so that they don’t cook the bitter almonds. The run the still at a max of 50 degrees Celsius. Note that this is a water distillation, not an alcoholic one.
As is typical in distillation, the lighter components boil over and leave the heavy ones behind. This includes not only the almond solids (which are sold to make biscuits and other Italian treats), but also the poisonous arsenic that is contained in pits. (At ArtOfDrink, Darcy O’Neill studies the problem of cyanide in pits.)
The result of the distillation after condensation is oils and water. These are kept in a tank and left to naturally separate. They then pull off the bitter almond essential oil to use to make Disaronno, and save the water to use in the next distillation.
We smelled the raw essential oil – it has those high orange/cherry notes, sweet nuts, and marzipan notes typical of Disaronno, but also a bit of a marker smell that thankfully doesn't show in the final product. The essential oil is not bitter from the bitter almonds, as those aromas are heavier and don't pass through their distillation.
The Blending and Bottling Facility
The production and administrative offices for Disaronno, Real Aromi, and the ILLVA are in an industrial office park of sorts in Saronno. We were the first group of press ever allowed into the facility, but alas, no pictures were allowed of the production part.
While the office building is decked out in modern style with gray and white backgrounds with red accents and modern art on the walls, the rest of the facility seems to hold anonymous buildings in which all the magic happens. We visited a chemical analysis lab, the bottling room, blending room, and the areas where they make the almond essential oils and other flavors.
We started in the herb storage room, which was full of big sacks of things like Chinese rhubarb (which smells like smoky curry and I later tasted as a note in Campari), ginseng roots and vanilla beans, along with things like Glucinex, propylene glycol, and dextrose monohydrate.
The extraction room was filled with all different sorts of stainless steel vats and tubs, with a few older machines scattered about. (The flavoring part of the company only relocated to this spot a year ago – before that it was in southern Italy.)
Some of the vats were soaking vats, where water and/or alcohol is combined with a flavor to extract it. In front of one row of vats was a centrifuge that runs sideways, like the one I’d seen at Cointreau.
Other tubs rotate slowly sideways to keep liquids and solids mixing.
A set of cool-looking stills that basically hang from the ceiling perform distillation under pressure for the purpose of concentrating ingredients. So while in a typical alcohol distillation we distill over the parts we want and throw out what’s left in the bottom of the still, here they keep the reminders and discard or recycle what comes out of the still. They were making ginger and guarana concentrates when we were there.
Another room was filled with a single giant machine for making powdered flavors. The flavor components are combined with starches and the liquids are flicked around the inside of a big diamond shaped box. When the liquids hit the sides of the box (I think it is heated), the liquids evaporate and the starches and flavors remain together. The solids then fall to the bottom of the diamond and into a collection bag below.
Putting It all Together: How Disaronno Is Made
Bitter almond essential oil is one of the two main flavoring components of the liqueur. The other is vanilla. These flavors (and probably others, the recipe is a secret) are combined with water, sugar, alcohol, and coloring.
First water and sugar are combined to make a weak syrup. Alcohol and the flavorings are combined and added together. Then the coloring comes after the mixture has rested for 2 hours. The flavored oils are added with alcohol, as aroma molecules are soluble in alcohol (we learned more about this at that Mixing Star Lab), and with this method the water won't blow off the aromas.
Disaronno is then bottled. In most parts of the world it is bottled at 28% ABV but in Spain and Australia it is bottled at 20% (because apparently you can only advertise alcohols under a certain percent), and it is bottled at that same lower ABV for Ohio and Alaska due to bigger tax rates at higher strengths in those states.
The alcohol base is dervied from either sugar beets or sugar cane (they say it's the same once it's distilled up super high), and the sugar used to sweeten it comes from sugar beets.
Thanks to Disaronno for a peek inside the process.
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Notes on the Science of Flavour
Last week in Sicily I attended the Disaronno Mixing Star Lab. It was two long talks over the course of two days.
The first was called The Science of Flavour and it was given by food scientist Dr. Rachel Edwards-Stuart.
I took a lot of notes – and here they are:
By adding color to food (and drink) it changes our perception of its flavor. So a redder drink will appear sweeter. Green on a can of soda will make you think there is more lime in it.
Sugar and salt enhances flavor, so if you want to have something that you want to enhance the flavor you add that. So too does MSG and acidity.
Acidity as a flavor enhancer: If a food naturally has acidity in it, you can add more acid to boost flavor.
There was a study on mint gum – they found that the menthone stayed the same over time but as the sugar went away over time, you lose the perception of the mint. So you can dip mint gum in sugar and it will revive the mintyness.
pH shows sourness, but if sugar is present the perception of acidity will be lowered no matter what the pH meter says.
Malic acid brings out green apple ripeness in foods/drinks.
Tartaric acid you get in wine/grapes.
We did a tasting of pure taste solutions: sweet, salt, umami, acid, bitter. Then we all compared the intensity of them on a scale. It showed a huge range of perception of intensity of flavor. Also, it has been shown that people perceive intensity of taste differently on different days.
Lemons and limes – the difference in their flavor is due largely to their aromas.
Some countries in Asia have salty vanilla products, so they associate vanilla with salty rather than sweet.
We perceive aromas in the same part of the brain where we perceive memory.
With liquids, you don’t really get the aromas until you swallow. (That’s why wine tasters do that sucking thing.)
Trigeminal Stimulation – Everything that isn’t a taste or an aroma but is picked up in a chemical sensation in the mouth. Chile/spice, mint/cooling, carbonation.
Astringency is not technically a trigeminal stimulus (not in the same nerve/brain pathway), but we can categorize it similarly though it’s more of a mouthfeel. Tannins strip away proteins in your saliva.
Try ginger with a nose clip – it makes it taste way spicier as it enhances that trigeminal sensation.
Carbonation – bubbles bursting in the mouth activates mechanoreceptors. And CO2 turns into carbonic acid which activates pain receptors. It changes the balance of sweetness and acidity – that’s why flat Coke is so disgusting.
Research suggests CO2 increases bitter aftertaste and suppresses sweetness, but there is disagreement in the scientific literature.
Congruent flavors: sugar increases strawberry perception, but MSG for example doesn’t. So the color green + melon + mint are congruent. If you increase any of those elements it increases the overall perception of all of them. Incongruent flavors don’t enhance overall perception.
Potato chips are put in noisy packaging to increase the perception of crunch and freshness.
The color of the plate affects flavor perception. Strawberry mousse on a white plate tastes sweeter and more intense than on a black plate. Serving something in a heavy bowl increases perception of density, likeness, value, and fullness vs a light bowl.
Under blue lighting people liked a certain wine more, but also tasted fruitier and spicier. Under red lighting, it tasted sweeter.
Music- When they played German music in a supermarket, people bought more German wine, opposite with French music/wine.
People served same dish with different names perceived the flavor differently.
Flavour Chemistry in Mixology
All 5 tastes are water soluble. (Because water and tastes are both charged.) So sugar is soluble in water but olive oil is not. (Sugar is charged and oil is neutral).
Aromas are not charged – and are fat-soluble. So aromas are not soluble in water.
Alcohol will dissolve fat-soluble things as well as water-soluble things. So you get both taste and aromas trapped into alcohol. Makes it a great carrier of flavor.
The book Modernist Cuisine has tables of ideal infusion time/temp/substance for many ingredients.
You can use a centrifuge to separate oils, liquids, solids. Then use the oils for fat-washing into spirits.
In nitrous infusion in a whipped cream charger, nitrous is a neutral gas. In CO2 you get carbonation, plus the carbonic acid affects flavor.
Saltiness suppresses perception of bitterness, as does sweetness.
White chocolate and caviar contain the same aroma chemical – triethlyamine (sp?). They make an interesting food pairing. Use FoodPairing.com to look up interesting pairings based on chemistry.
MSG is probably not the cause of migranes; it’s something in refried rice when not prepared properly.
The Main Flavors of Disaronno (according to a trained flavor panel)
• Bitter Almonds
• Vanilla
• Fruit – overripe apple/cherry
• Sweetness – Caramelized/brown sugar/honeyWhen you dilute Disaronno with water, keep the nutty flavor equal, get more fruity flavors.
A mass spectrometer can only pick up 24 flavors in Disaronno. The human nose can pick up more. Some important ones for flavor pairings:
- Benzdaldehyde = marzipan note. Almonds cherries, peaches.
- Furfural – in heated food containing sugar, including toffee, whisky, coffee, cakes, and meat.
- Ethyl Benzoate – fruits (not citrus)
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Making Rye Whiskey at Anchor Distilling in San Francisco
This post is sponsored by Anchor Distilling, makers of three rye whiskeys in San Francisco, California.
Anchor Distilling makes three unique rye whiskies in a tiny corner of a big brewery in Potrero Hill in San Francisco. I visited, probably for my 6th time, to learn the story of how it all started and how the whiskies are made.
In the Beginning…
When you speak with start-up distillers, you realize that everyone wants to make whiskey, but whiskey takes time to age, it has the expense of barrels to age it in, and it requires space in which to age it. So most new distilleries launch vodka, gin, rum, and/or other unaged products first. That wasn't the case at Anchor Distilling, which launched an aged whiskey first and then gin later."We had a huge advantage in that we were all brewers, and the brewery was bankrolling all this. We didn’t have a time table to get a product out on the market. We could go until we had what we wanted," says Bruce Joseph, Head Distiller of the Anchor Distilling Company.
"We were lucky that we were able to spend a lot of time experimenting. There wasn’t a lot of information out there for small-scale distilling. It wasn’t what any bourbon distillers were doing." Joseph (interviewed in May 2014) had been a brewer long before Anchor's founder Fritz Maytag had the idea to launch a distillery.
"I was in my early 20s when I started working here. The brewery had just moved into this building. When I started working here there were 13 employees. I thought, 'I’ll do this for a little bit' and I started working here and there was a real sense that these were a group of people on a mission: making beer that the majority of people didn’t want to drink," Joseph says.Making products (beer, then spirits) that won't be appreciated by most people ever, and not by hardly anybody for a while after they hit the market, seems to be both a point of pride and the business plan at Anchor.
The still for second distillation of whisky and geneverIn a 2012 interview of Anchor Brewing and Distilling founder Fritz Maytag conducted by Alan Kropf of Mutineer Magazine (and now the Director of Education at Anchor), Maytag said his success with the beer company led to an explosion of other creative beer makers, and then it became less exciting the more other people were making equally exciting beers."It got to where our competitors were coming out with all kinds of things including things that were kinda goofy. It got to where if you brewed a chocolate-blueberry stout people would say, 'Oh another one of those,' and I didn’t find that very rewarding."[All quotes from Maytag come from the interview with Kropf, who gave me access to the recording.]A Plenitude of Points of DifferentiationBruce Joseph was there for the beginning of the experiments with distillation. He says, "Rye was perfect for Fritz because it was historical and it was hugely unpopular. No one gave a damn about rye whisky at the time."Not only was the choice to make rye a bold one, the choice to make it in a pot still was radical. At the time, in 1993, there were no legal pot-distilled whiskies being made in America – it was all made in continuous column stills.Furthermore, Maytag decided on a 100% malted rye whiskey to distill. He said, "The rules say 51% rye (to be legally called rye whiskey by US law) but the rye whiskeys don’t use malted rye- they just use rye- and probably some malted barley and some corn. Just as in Scotland they require that the single malt whiskeys be made with all barley malt mash, I thought, 'Why don’t we make rye whiskey but we’ll make it with malted rye?'"He continued, "And we thought we could steal the phrase 'single-malt.' We stole it fair and square – the Scots forgot to trademark it!"Malting is the process (required for all single-malt scotch whisky but with barley instead of rye) where the grains are allowed to germinate in wet conditions, then they're dried. This produces grain that is easily fermentable. (Most bourbons use a portion of malted barley in their recipes as this helps the other grains ferment, though today enzymes also help speed the process.)
The still for the first distillation of rye whiskey and geneverJoseph says, "Fritz had that idea that he wanted to do 100% rye. When we did early mashes we all just loved the flavor of the malted rye. It had a certain character and certain quality that was just real attractive. (Maytag described that taste as "a richer, warmer, friendlier flavor".) Once we started doing spirit distillation it just seemed that it was bursting with flavor."Fake It 'Til You Make ItYet another unique feature of the rye whiskeys made at Anchor is that the fermented mash goes into the still, not a wort. Or, in English: grains are fermented with water and yeast. After fermentation the whole thing goes into the pot still at Anchor.This is unusual: In Scotland where they use pot stills for single-malts, they separate the solids from the fermented beer before distillation (and the liquid beer is called wort). This prevents those grain bits from sticking onto the side of the still during distillation and burning.Additionally, rye is known for being very gummy and hard to distill because of that. Joseph says, "Rye is a sticky, viscous, mess – a brewer’s nightmare."Luckily, their copper still came with a built-in agitator that can be turned on to keep the liquids in the pot moving so that nothing sticks and burns. Joseph says, "The very first time we did it, if my memory serves me well, we at first used the agitator when we were heating up the mash then turned it off during distillation. It caked onto the inside of the still, and once it’s cooked onto the side you don’t get heat transfer. We learned that in the first day or two."And I bet somebody had a not-fun job of scraping out the inside of a small 600-liter still.Age Is Just a Number, Except in CaliforniaThe first single-malt rye whiskey from Anchor was aged barely over one year – 13 months. This was 1996, about six years before the whole white whiskey trend came to be.Maytag said, "I thought that after 6-8 months our whiskey was just charming. It was kind of almost sweet. And since the (federal) law said that there were no rules about how long it had to be in the barrel – it just had to state the age (if under four years)- I said why don’t we bottle it at one year old?"He continued, "Later we discovered we had broken the California law, which was a stupid mistake. But in California to be called whiskey, never mind rye whiskey, you have you to be in the barrel for at least 3 years, and some of the barrels have to have been charred. Which is absurd because there were no charred barrels until about 1840 or so."
Yes, another unique feature: one of the three single-malt rye whiskeys made at Anchor is aged in a hand-made, air-dried, toasted American oak barrel, while laws for bourbon specify charred oak and that's the standard. It was a combination of Maytag's wine expertise and dedication to make a historically valid whiskey that had led him to the toasted oak decision.
"We called it 18th Century-Style Whiskey because we couldn’t call it rye whiskey because it wasn’t aged in charred barrels. (But) that whiskey can’t be called whiskey at any age in California because there are no charred barrels. We still have a product that in California is labelled as a “spirit”; can’t call it whiskey, it’s crazy," he said.
This Is How It's Done
Anchor Distilling makes three rye whiskies.- Old Potrero Single-Malt Straight Rye Whiskey (sometimes called 19th Century whiskey)
- Old Potrero 18th Century Style Whiskey
- Old Potrero Hotaling's Single-Malt Whiskey
They all start with the same distillate, made from fermented 100% malted rye mash. Then they all go into different barrels at the same proof, "a little below the legal limit of 125 proof," according to Joseph.
- The Old Potrero 18th Century Style Whiskey is aged in toasted barrels for 2.5 – 3 years, sometimes with a little bit of older whisky mixed in. Joseph says, "Toasted barrels work better for a younger whisky."
- The Old Potrero Single-Malt Straight Rye Whiskey is aged in new charred oak barrels for 4.5 – 5 years. Joseph says, "We prefer the whisky not to age too long."
- The Old Potrero Hotaling's Single-Malt Whiskey is aged in used whiskey barrels. These have always been ex-bourbon barrels, but recent releases will have been aged in used charred barrels that were used to age something else (forthcoming) at Anchor. Joseph says, "We kept tasting it but for the first 7 years we didn’t like it as much as the other whiskies. But finally we tried it after about 8.5 years after we hadn't in a while and we said 'We should have been putting more of this away!' The age of the release changes each year, as there isn't very much of it around.
The barrels were aged on-site in Potrero Hill for many years, but now they age in Western Sonoma County in a warehouse that keeps a San Francisco-like temperature year-round.
This post about the pioneering spirits created by Fritz Maytag and his team is sponsored by Anchor Distilling.
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The Cocktail Menu for ABV in San Francisco, Opening Later This Week
While they haven't crossed all the T's and dotted the I's (or added the prices) to it, the good folks at ABV in San Francisco let me photograph their new menu.The bar is in soft-opening mode beginning Tuesday (and they'd really, really appreciate it if everyone didn't show up on Tuesday), and it will be open from 2PM – 2AM after that.
Reminder: ABV is a partnership between Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud (owner of Dalva, Dalva Hideout), Ryan Fitzgerald (former Beretta bar manager and Del Maguey Mezcal brand ambassador), and Todd Smith (former bartender at Dalva Hideout, former distributor rep with Pacific Edge, founding Bourbon & Branch bartender).
The menu contains 20 cocktails, including 4 non-alcoholic ones, divided by spirit. The menu flips at an angle and the bottle list of spirits is on the underside of the previous page. Click these photos to make them larger – you should be able to read it.
There will also be a food menu, written above the back bar, but I'll let someone else cover that.
ABV is at 3174 16th Street, in the former Tokyo GoGo space.
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Making Gin and Hophead Vodka at Anchor Distilling
This post is sponsored by Anchor Distilling, makers of Junipero gin and Genevieve genever-style gin.
Anchor Distilling currently has just three tiny stills in one corner of the large brewery on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Two of them make their rye whiskeys and Genevieve. The other one makes Junipero gin and Hophead vodka.In this post we'll look at the history and production of the spirits produced in one of the stills at Anchor.
Once Upon A Time
The first product released by Anchor Distilling was a 13-month aged malted rye whiskey in 1996, but by the time it was launched they had already been working on another product.
Head Distiller Bruce Joseph says, “As soon as we got our distilling procedures down we started working on Junipero right away. We took I think it was over a year and a half of experimenting before we came up with the recipe. Every Tuesday and Thursday we would meet in the lab and drink gin.”
Fritz Maytag, former owner/founder of Anchor Distilling, told a story about this testing process in an interview with Alan Krop for Mutineer Magazine back in 2012. Maytag said, “We had a team of people who’d been tasting the whiskeys the whole time. We called it the Water Committee because everything we were doing was top-secret, so we said that if anyone ever asked what we were doing we’d say we were tasting the water (for the beer) every morning.”
I asked Joseph how much assistance and consultation he and Maytag had with creating not just Junipero, but in distilling in general. He says of Maytag’s working style, “He fully throws himself into (new projects) and he would ask advice, but he also wasn’t afraid to deviate from that. He had very strong opinions about certain things. It wasn’t his way to just turn over a decision to someone from outside.”
He continues, “Fritz would throw himself into it and since he wanted to make a geneva, he bought a ticket and went to The Netherlands. Very much like he did in the early 70s when he wanted to make ales using traditional English brewing techniques. He went to breweries (in England) that weren’t even making it (that way) anymore and he’d talk to the old-timers working there.”
In April of 1996 they released Junipero, a bold, high-proof gin very much different from the less-juniper-intensive gins that had just started to change the industry.
Joseph says, “That was in the mid 1990s when some brands were trying to make lighter gins to woo vodka drinkers. But we wanted that intensity and crispness that would really stand up in a martini; not the softer rounder flavor of some other brands. ”
How Junipero is Made
There are many different ways to make gin, which is essentially a neutral spirit like vodka flavored with juniper and usually other botanicals.
The cheap and quick way to make gin is to add juniper oil and other flavorings to neutral spirit. But like most quality gins, Junipero mixes neutral spirit with real botanicals and redistills the mixture. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Fritz Maytag product if they didn’t at least consider doing it the hardest way possible.
Joseph recalls, “When we first started, Fritz was looking at producing his own neutral spirit but the amount of mash and space it would take weren’t possible.”
The base for Junipero is purchased wheat and corn spirit made elsewhere. To that they add their (top-secret) mix of botanicals and redistill it. This is performed in a hybrid-style still (a pot still with a column on top) now common in micro-distilleries for its versatility.
The Gin and Vodka Still at Anchor DistillingMany gin brands actually make a gin concentrate in the still – they add more botanicals to get a very flavorful gin, then dilute this with both water and more neutral spirit after distillation. Other brands make separate distillations of individual or groups of botanicals, then blend these distillates together and redistill the mixture.
For Junipero, all the botanicals go into the still at the same time with the base spirit. After redistillation, only water is added; not more neutral spirit. This is usually called “one-shot” gin-making.
In the process of figuring out how to make Junipero to their liking, Joseph says they attempted putting the botanicals in a ‘basket’ in the steam part of the still (as opposed to mixed into the liquid) as some other brands do, but it wasn’t producing the flavor profile that they were seeking. He says, “We found that the intensity and crispness (we wanted) came from putting it in the still.”
Junipero is bottled at 49.3% ABV.
HOPHEAD – Flavored Vodka, Made Like Gin
In the same still used for Junipero, Hophead Hop Vodka is made. Two kinds of hops are added to neutral spirit and the combination is redistilled.
Joseph says they experimented with just soaking hops in neutral spirit to achieve the flavor but that the bitterness was “out of whack” with the flavor and aroma. So they distilled the bitterness out of it.Still, Joseph says it wasn’t a cake walk. “It was more difficult that we thought. There’s a lot of sulfur compounds in hops.”
He didn’t reveal their solution to that problem, though he did mention an attempt at putting more sulfur-retaining copper in the still.
Hophead is a flavored vodka, made in the style of gin, tasting of the beer for which the company is famous.
HOPHEAD is bottled at 45% ABV.
This post is sponsored by Anchor Distilling, an innovative small distillery in San Francisco.
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