In my latest story for Details.com (upgraded to a feature!) I wrote about pechuga-style mezcals.
These are mezcal redistilled with seasonal fruits and nuts, plus a chicken or turkey (or deer or rabbit or pig) hanging in the still.
I thought there were only a couple on the market, but there are at least 8 different brands available in the US. I looked into the origins/history of pechuga and how a few of them differ from each other.
Plus: 26 different bars in which to drink it.
Irish Whiskey was once one of the most popular spirits in the world and declined from thousands of distilleries down to just two by the late 1900s. Sales are once again skyrocketing on the back of Jameson's success, but things were pretty grim for a while.
I knew many of the causes of the decline in Irish whiskey, but learned a few more in conversation with Kilbeggan brand ambassador John Cashman. Here are reasons that he laid out.
1. The Irish Temperence Movement in the late 1830s that flared up again later in the century.
2. The invention of the continuous/column Coffey Still, patented in 1830. Irish distillers were hugely reluctant to adopt the column still (despite Coffey being an Irishman) that they thought diluted the flavor of their whiskey. Before the invention of the column still, Irish whiskey was far lighter in flavor than scotch whiskey, and more popular because of it. However, the scots adopted the column still for making blended whisky and saw great leaps in sales because of it.
3. The Irish War of Independence, which ran from 1919 – 1921 and the retaliatory Anglo-Irish Trade War after. This pretty much killed the top market for Irish whiskey: Britain.
4. US Prohibition, which ran from 1920-1933. This killed the second largest market in America.
5. World War II, which ran from 1939-1945. Ireland was neutral in the war. American soldiers developed a taste for scotch, rather than Irish, whiskey. So that continued afterward.
In 1966, Irish Distillers was formed to stave off the continuing slump of the category by merging three big producers together. In 1972, Bushmills also joined the group so that there was only one company and two distilleries making all Irish whiskey.
When I was in Ireland recently I heard that there were 16 distilleries operating, being built, or in the planning stages. It's the dawn of a new era.
A while back I visited the Kilbeggan Distillery in the middle of Ireland. Kilbeggan is in partnership with the Cooley distillery, a much larger one (without a visitors' center) that was once independent but is now owned by Jim Beam. They make not only Kilbeggan Irish whiskey, but also Tyrconnell, Greenore, and Connemara.
The distillery dates back to 1757 and they claim it is the oldest licensed distillery in Ireland. You'll note that Bushmills claims they were founded in 1604 but Kilbeggan disputes that.
While today Kilbeggan is a working distillery, the stuff that is working is a tiny part of the overall distillery, and most of what you see on the visit is a somewhat-working display. That said, it's a really, really cool display.
Most of what one sees- the huge gears and equipment- dates back to the the 1860s to 1880s. It's all wonderfully steampunk.
The distillery is situated near a small stream where they pulled their water and powered the operations. The water powered the water wheel which powered the millstones that ground the grains that were used as the raw material for distillation. They also used the stream to cool liquids by running pipes through it.
Inside the distillery there is a 150 horsepower steam engine. This would have been used only a couple of times each year when the river was too low or two high to generate power. The engine still works and they turn it on a couple of times each year.
The old stills are nearly round in shape and though they're exposed to the elements now, they used to be indoors. They triple distilled the spirit here in the olden days, as is traditional for Irish whiskey. They also have original Coffey stills on display which were used to make column-distilled spirit.
According to my host John Cashman, Ireland stopped using peat when they could import coal by train, around the 1940s.
The strange bulbous building is an old warehouse that they now use primarily for dumping casks before transporting it to Cooley for bottling. In the warehouse they have a few special barrels including one that was laid down in honor of President Obama's election, and another one specifically for the band Mumford & Sons.
They are distilling at Kilbeggan, just in a small section with two tiny stills. They use a course grind of barley (because they use old wooden wash tubs that can't handle smaller grains) and ferment it for about 3 days until it reaches 6-8% ABV. They then distill it twice in tiny stills, first up to 20-22% then up to 68-70% ABV.
The still for the second distillation is actually the oldest working pot still in the world, according to Cashman. It comes from the old Tullamore distillery. (Part of the reason it has survived so long is that for a good while it was only used to distill water.)
During a tasting of the product range, Cashman made an interesting claim: "The smoothness of Irish whiskey is not due to triple distillation but it's due to our climate. It is the lack of extreme (temperature fluctuations) that allows Irish whiskey to age at a mild and mellow pace."
I got to try the range of whiskies made at Kilbeggan and/or Cooley:
Kilbeggan is one of the coolest looking distilleries I've visited, somewhere in technology between the amazing wooden gristmill of George Washington's distillery at Mount Vernon and the rhum agricole distilleries of Martinique with their huge working gears. It's defnitely worth a visit if you're driving across Ireland.
The most sought-after bourbon in the world, Pappy Van Winkle 23-year-old, begins life as 53 gallons of new-make whiskey at 114 proof.
What's left in the barrel after 23 years is a mere 14 gallons of bourbon at around 135-140 proof. What makes it into the bottle is even less.
So I decided to run the numbers on how much Pappy Van Winkle is left in the barrel every year after evaporation (aka the "angel's share").
According to Harlen Wheately, Master Distiller at Buffalo Trace, the angel's share is 10 percent for the first year (because whiskey is absorbing into the wood of barrel as well as evaporating), then 4 percent for the next 8 years after that, then around 3 percent per year after that.
(They store the future Pappy in barrels in the parts of the warehouse with the least evaporation as they know they want it to age for a very long time.)
| Pappy Van Winkle 23 Countdown | |||
| Year | Angel's Share (Percent) | Math | Total |
| 1 | 0.1 | 53 -(.10)*53 | 47.7 |
| 2 | 0.04 | =D3-(D3*B4) | 45.792 |
| 3 | 0.04 | =D4-(D4*B5) | 43.96032 |
| 4 | 0.04 | =D5-(D5*B6) | 42.2019072 |
| 5 | 0.04 | =D6-(D6*B7) | 40.513830912 |
| 6 | 0.04 | =D7-(D7*B8) | 38.89327767552 |
| 7 | 0.04 | =D8-(D8*B9) | 37.3375465684992 |
| 8 | 0.04 | =D9-(D9*B10) | 35.8440447057592 |
| 9 | 0.04 | =D10-(D10*B11) | 34.4102829175289 |
| 10 | 0.03 | =D11-(D11*B12) | 33.377974430003 |
| 11 | 0.03 | =D12-(D12*B13) | 32.3766351971029 |
| 12 | 0.03 | =D13-(D13*B14) | 31.4053361411898 |
| 13 | 0.03 | =D14-(D14*B15) | 30.4631760569541 |
| 14 | 0.03 | =D15-(D15*B16) | 29.5492807752455 |
| 15 | 0.03 | =D16-(D16*B17) | 28.6628023519881 |
| 16 | 0.03 | =D17-(D17*B18) | 27.8029182814285 |
| 17 | 0.03 | =D18-(D18*B19) | 26.9688307329856 |
| 18 | 0.03 | =D19-(D19*B20) | 26.1597658109961 |
| 19 | 0.03 | =D20-(D20*B21) | 25.3749728366662 |
| 20 | 0.03 | =D21-(D21*B22) | 24.6137236515662 |
| 21 | 0.03 | =D22-(D22*B23) | 23.8753119420192 |
| 22 | 0.03 | =D23-(D23*B24) | 23.1590525837586 |
| 23 | 0.03 | =D24-(D24*B25) | 22.4642810062459 |
According to those calculations, there are 22.4 gallons left in the barrel, but this assumes that the alcohol percentage stays the same as it started.
The actual final proof is around 140 (70% ABV), so the 14 gallons that Wheately reports are equivalent to about 17.2 gallons at the original proof of 114 (57% ABV). That's a lot closer to the calculated number.
Wheately filled me in on some other practical factors for the math discrepancy.
“We have done a lot of proprietary work to determine the real proof drop while the barrels are aging so I wouldn’t want to reveal all our info…. (but)
While processing such small batches you get quite a bit of loss during the bottling process during the filtration process.
Also, during the course of 23 years there tends to be other factors such as leaks that increase the loss and are difficult to put numbers to.
A typical/perfect 23 year old barrel of wheated bourbon should yield about 14 wine gallons with about a 1-2 gallon loss during bottling which gets it down to 12-13 wine gallons recovered.”
So when you're paying for a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 23 even at non-surge pricing, you're not just paying for the raw materials used to make and the time spent to age what's in that bottle, you're also paying for the raw materials and aging of 39 gallons of bourbon that evaporated before it got to the bottling facility, and a total of nearly 80% of the original juice that didn't make it into the bottle.
I've been bursting waiting for the Saveur 100 issue to come out so I could write more about Gamsei, a bar I visited in Munich this fall and included in the January issue of the magazine.
The story is now online at Saveur.com, with a lot more info below.
Gamsei comes from Matt Bax, the founder/co-founder of Der Raum and Bar Americano in Melbourne and Tippling Club in Singapore.
From the write-ups of Gamsei, it sounded like a place with a lot of rules (you have to wear slippers inside, no sugar in the drinks, no photos allowed) but much of that was either incorrect or more like a general policy than a rule.
The seating in Gamsei is on bleacher-style steps on either side of the central "bar", which is more of a low counter like you'd find in a science lab. Those slippers are for people who sit on the upper levels, so their muddy/wet shoes won't drip on the people below them.
I had also heard all about the hyper-local vision of the bar but not about the high-tech aspect of it. I was expecting a simplistic Japanese take on in-season cocktails, so the rotovap and liquid nitrogen came as a pleasant surprise.
Really, what Bax has done is just taken the idea of preserving local bounty and given it an exciting update. The bartenders forage in the forests (he said he checks with a plant expert to make sure certain things aren't poison before using them) and buy stuff at farmers' markets in season and use them fresh or preserve them using old-world techniques like fermentation, syrup-making, kombuchas, drying, etc. as well as new-world techniques like running infusions through the Rotavap so that they never spoil and flash-freezing other ingredients with liquid nitrogen.
As mentioned in the story, my favorite drink was the Lindenbluten, a local "lime blossom" (not the citrus tree) leaf and flowers frozen into an ice cube, and that ice cube used to chill and flavor house-carbonated local vermouth. Simple, elegant, beautiful. (But a terrible picture, sorry.)
At service, you get a mix of simple-looking drinks as well as some of the tricks you might expect from Bax – liquid nitrogen, beer foam, a drink in a flask. I had one that came with a a puff of cotton candy ("candy floss" to our European friends) that you use to sweeten a cocktail made with caraway liqueur, brandy, and riesling.
All-in-all, the philosophy isn't that complicated and the rules aren't that strict. It's a unique set-up for a cool bar concept. Absolutely worth a visit when you find yourself in Munich. (And Munich is pretty darn worth a visit on its own- I've gotta get back there soon.)
Here's the menu from that day:
If you hadn't heard, your host Camper English is the Contributing Drinks Editor at Saveur Magazine now. Hooray!
The current January issue is the annual Saveur 100: "Our favorite places, tools, ingredients, cookbooks, recipes, restaurants, and more."
I have two small bits in the magazine. The first is on Amari (plural of Amaro) and cocktails to use them in.
Read the story with tasting notes here and the cocktail recipes are in slideshow format here.
For the cocktail recipes, I sourced them from:
Thanks fellas.
A while back I enjoyed a brief visit to the Bushmills Irish Whiskey distillery, located at the northern tip of Northern Ireland.
Bushmills is located super close to the Giants' Causeway, a natural phenomenon that brings tons of tourists through town every day. Pretty much all the tours also stop at Bushmills, whether that's for a full distillery tour or just a meal in the visitors' center restaurant. 92,000 people visited the distillery in 2012.
Bushmills doesn't have column stills; all the whiskey made here is triple distilled from 100% malted barley. (Thus the same as single-malt scotch except that it's distilled an additional time.)
The barley for Bushmills is grown in Cork, down in the south of Ireland. It is malted and ground into a grist. The water for fermentation comes from a tributary of the Bush River nearby.
Like single-malt scotch, the malted barley has added hot water to it in a mash tun, and then its drained. This is to keep the fermentable sugars in the water but get rid of the solid bits that gum up the works. It is transferred to a wash back, where it is fermented with brewer's yeast for about 50 hours. The resulting beer is around 8% ABV.
The beer is then distilled. Bushmills has 10 pot stills (2 wash stills and 4 each feints and spirit stills) in a surprisingly small, crowded room. According to my guide, the whiskey is distilled up to 25-30% ABV on the first distillation, then 70% and 84% after the second and third distillations.
Like scotch whisky, they redistill the heads and tails in the next batch so there is no waste. The "pot ale" that is the leftover stuff from the first distillation is made into a syrup and sold for animal feed. The spent barley grain is also sold for animal feed, as it is at most grain distilleries.
The water used to dilute the whiskey to final bottle strength is reverse osmosis-filtered municipal water. They put whiskey into the barrel at 63% ABV.
Four different types of barrels are used to age Bushmills: ones that formerly held bourbon, oloroso sherry (from the Paez bodega), port, or Madeira. They said they reuse their ex-bourbon barrels 3 times before they're no longer useful.
While Irish whiskey by law must be aged a minimum of 3 years, the youngest Bushmills is aged for six, and Black Bush is aged for eight. Both the Original Bushmills and Black Bush are blended Irish whiskeys; made with a blend of triple distilled malt whiskey produced on-site and column distilled whiskey purchased from Midleton (but aged on-site here at Bushmills).
Original Bushmills is 55% single-malt and 45% grain whiskey.
Black Bush is about 80% single-malt and 20% grain whiskey. It is aged in around 70% ex-sherry casks and the rest in ex-bourbon.
The rest of the line are single-malts. The 10-year-old is about 90% ex-bourbon aged, with the rest sherry.
The 16 year old Bushmills is aged in bourbon and sherry casks in equal volumes. Then the whiskey is blended and finished in ex-oirt barrels fro 6-9 months.
The 21-year-old is also made up of whiskey aged in bourbon and sherry casks for 19 years, then finished in Madeira casks for 2 years.
All Bushmills is bottled at 40% ABV and chill-filtered. The only exception to that was the 1608 that is no longer available.
Bushmills sells around 880,000 cases annually, with the US its biggest market. They have 80 acres of land on which the barrels age. As it's such a small distillery, they distill 24/7 throughout the year with the exception of 2 maintenance periods.
No pictures were allowed inside the distillery, sorry for the lack of razzle-dazzle.
As mentioned in yesterday's post, rum is distilled from any sugar cane derivative like fermented fresh cane juice or molasses. But some producers add sugar to their finished rum after distillation.
Adding sugar to any spirit can soften it and hide some flaws, but if you look at the (allegedly) sweetened rums in this post on RefinedVices.com, you'll notice two general patterns among the rum bottlings that allegedly have sugar added:
Well it turns out that adding sugar to spirits also gives them the guise of age.
Ian Burrell, global rum expert and founder of Rum Experience, commented on the original Facebook post of the sugar values with some really interesting information. He wrote:
I recently did a private tasting for 50 consumers with two rums both finished in sherry casks. One was notably sweeter than the other. When I asked the guests to let me know which they felt was the oldest, 80% said the sweeter one. When I asked which they prefer 60% said the sweeter one.
I then gave them a 3rd rum, which they were unaware was actually Rum no.1 (the dryer rum) with a touch of sugar added to it. All agreed that this was the best rum of the three.
I then pointed out that Rum number 3 (which was in fact the OLDEST RUM) was the Rum no 1 with sugar added, and that they had perceived the added sweetness as extra aging and smoothness.
These rums with high levels of sugar added to them are what I call "Dessert Rums" but they still and will always have a place on our bars, restaurant and spirit cabinet because consumers will buy rums (& other spirits) according to how they taste and not how they are made. But WE must educate them, when feasible, that part of the taste that they are appreciating is the added sugar, wine, vermouth, spice, etc.
What was really interesting about my exercise with the 50 tasters was the ones that preferred the dryer rum also liked whisky. While the “sweeter loving” rum drinkers like cognac.
That last dig on cognac drinkers? It's because cognac also has a dirty secret: much cognac has sugar added to it too.
It's a funny thing about rum: It all is distilled from a fermented sugar cane derivative (fresh cane juice, molasses, or something in between), but sugar doesn't pass through the distillation process, so some producers add sugar back into the distilled rum to sweeten it up.
Recently on Facebook, people have posted lists of sugar levels in commercial brands of rum. One reportedly comes from the Finnish government and another from the Swedish government. I won't post them directly here but the lists are here on RefinedVices.com.
You should really take a look. They show commercial brands of rums with anything from 0 grams/liter of sugar added up to 46 grams per liter.
**Note – You should verify the content against the originals. The Swedish government's site is: https://www.systembolaget.se (thanks Magnus!) and the sugar content is listed for some individual products. I don't know about the other list so I can't verify its authenticity nor how current either of the lists/measurements are. Furthermore, I do not know if the rums we get in the US are the same as in other countries, even if the labels match. In other words, do not treat those lists as absolute truth.
But how much sugar is that really?
Allegedly, specific bottlings of rum by brands including Plantation, Bacardi, Zacapa, and Angostura contain between 17-22 grams of sugar per liter. This looks to be the average amount of sugar added by those brands that add sugar. Other brands are either much higher (40 g/l) or quite low (5-9 g/l).
So I wanted to know how much sugar is 20 grams and how sweet that makes a liter of liquid taste. So I measured it. My scale isn't the most accurate thing in the world, but here's how 20 grams came out:
Which comes out to a heaping half ounce, or probably a little under 3/4 ounces.
Heck, it's not uncommon for there to be that much sugar added to a single cocktail. And keep in mind that's the quantity for a full liter of rum, not 750 ml bottle.
I then added the sugar to 1 liter of water to see how sweet it was. In water, it was certainly noticeably sweet, but not soda-sweet.
For example, the driest soda I can think of is Q Tonic's grapefruit, orange, and lemon sodas. They have 13g sugar per 8 ounces, which by my calculation means 55 grams of sugar per liter; more than twice as much as is these rums.
I'm not saying that you want your rum as sweet as Coke, nor you necessarily want any sugar added to your rum at all. But for these rums having what sounds like a lot of sugar added to them, it's not really a ton.
On my last visit to the Buffalo Trace distillery in Kentucky, I took a very cool tour of the property that you can read about at that link.
On a visit this past February as part of the Bourbon Classic event in Louisville, I had another tour that was completely different and I learned all new stuff. I never mind going to distilleries multiple times as there is always something new to pick up.
Below are just some miscellaneous facts I picked up, rather than the whole picture.
As it has been operating since 1787, Buffalo Trace is the oldest continually operating distillery in the US. They have 100 buildings on a property that stretches 130 acres, with 320,000 barrels aging on-site.
Buffalo Trace makes 17 bourbons at the distillery (plus a few other products), distilling five days a week. Despite this, they use just one strain of yeast for all their products.
In the fermentation process, 2/3 of the mash is 'sweet mash' that has just been fermented, while the remaining third is 'sour mash' that comes as the waste solids of the first distillation.
They use four water sources: spring water, reservoir water, river water, and municipal water. The first waters are filtered through sand and used in fermentation. The river water is also used in cooling after distillation (I'm guessing unfiltered). The municipal water is reverse-osmosis filtered to bring spirits down to bottle strength, as is the norm.
There's always more to learn on future visits…
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