My first story for PopularScience.com is a report on the bartenders from BarBot, held this past weekend in San Franicso.
Go here to read the story!
It's mostly a slideshow with videos as well.
Blog
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Caring for Mini Barrels – Beware of Chlorine!
image from wikipediaIf you're using barrels or wood chips to make barrel-aged cocktails, be aware that they can develop 246-TCA, better known as "cork taint."
Cork taint doesn't only come from corks, it turns out; it can come from barrels. One way that it forms (in part) is when chlorine bleach is used to clean corks (or barrels).
Wikipedia says, "Chlorinated phenols can form chemically when hypochlorous acid (HOCl-, one of the active forms of chlorine) or chlorine radicals come in contact with wood (untreated, such as barrels or pallets.) The use of chlorine or other halogen-based sanitizing agents is being phased out of the wine industry in favor of peroxide or peracetic acid preparations."
Much tap water contains chlorine or chloramine, so don't clean out your barrels with untreated tap water.
Depending on whether your water is treated with chlorine or chloramine you may take a different approach to getting rid of that in the water (as opposed to buying gallons and gallons of distilled water). Chlorine and chloramine require different filters or amount of time boiling the water or time to leave it to fizz off.
A little bit of research gives widely different answers as to how long you'd have to boil water to eliminate chloramine (that's what's in San Francisco's drinking water). The answers are everywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours to 2 days of boiling. Carbon filters also remove chloramine, but they have to be really good/fresh filters. Some detailed information from a brewing perspective is here.
This was first brought to my attention by Carl Sutton of Sutton Cellars. I asked him what a good cleaner for barrels would be and he recommended Proxycarb. Some research tells me that has the same active ingredient (Sodium Percarbonate) as OxyClean (though I don't know if OxyClean is food-safe so you should probably buy it from a wine/beer store).
Have fun with your barrel aged cocktails, and remember to avoid chlorine when cleaning them out.
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ABV, A Forthcoming SF Bar from Dalva, Beretta Folks
Coming not-so-soon (January most likely) in the former Tokyo GoGo spot on 16th Street in the Inner Mission of San Francisco will be the bar ABV.
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 (bartender at Dalva Hideout, distributor rep with Pacific Edge, founding Bourbon & Branch bartender).
The specifics are likely to change a bit as they transfer the liquor license and build out the space, but here's what I learned in a meeting with the partners:
The concept is a bar that will offer about 10-15 cocktails and around the same number of small plates dishes, also priced around the same as each other (ten bucks more or less). So, like at Beretta, if you are having great drinks there you may as well order something to great eat as well.
The goal with the food (they're hiring a consultant chef to work out specifics) is to have high-quality, regularly-rotating, finger-friendly foods that will probably include some pickles and something fried, but not jalapeno poppers or standard pub fare like that. Food will be served until late; probably 1AM, and they are considering opening in the early afternoons, seven days a week.
The space won't be completely gutted for the rebuild, but they will make the kitchen smaller and remake the bar bigger; extending it to be the focus of the space. You shouldn't expect to too many bar design elements that they feel have become cliched, liked reclaimed wood and bare Edison bulbs. Seating will be primarily at high-top tables and shared tables in the back, to avoid that situation where people at low tables have standing bar patrons' butts in their faces. It will not be a lounge. They'll have some sort of table service and a doorman checking IDs, but not a host stand or typical restaurant reserved seating.
The drink program doesn't have a specific direction outside of "things that we like," according to the partners. "We're not trying to have every single whisky or tequila," says Reichborn-Kjennerud, though with Fitzgerald's mezcal affiliation you should expect to see a fair amount of that.
The team spoke mostly about what they are planning to avoid: barrel-aged cocktails, bottled cocktails, cocktails on tap; things they feel are more gimmicky than practical. "There's not going to be a uniform and it's not like everyone is going to wear a certain kind of hat." That said, they will have "great ice".
Cocktails will reflect their personal preferences and those of the bartenders who work there. Smith says, "A few years ago I was really into boozy drinks, but lately I've been enjoying lighter aperitif-style drinks, so for example you should expect to see some of that." The plan is for a good portion of the drink menu to change fairly regularly.
As time goes on, they plan to have a themed night or two, educational programming likely to take place in the balcony area, and perhaps some different food at brunch. They mentioned a quality soundtrack as a focus, but also that it could be radically different from night to night depending on who is working (as it is at Dalva Hideout currently).
The key words for the bar are "comfortable" and "affordable" they say. "We're not trying to reinvent anything," says Fitzgerald.
My overall impression is that they're trying to create a casual-but-quality themeless bar with great music, easy-and-delicious food, and amazing cocktails, reflecting the preferences and tastes of the owners. It's fair to say that's that goal of most people opening up a new neighborhood bar these days, but in this neighborhood with these owners, our expectations probably should be raised to match.
As ABV will be the second-closest cocktail bar to my house, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to keep you updated on its progress.
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Which Whisky Chiller Works Wonders?
I have a story in the new Fall 2013 issue of Whisky Advocate magazine that's not online. In it I compared a range of devices meant to chill down whisky.
- Teroforma Whisky Stones [buy]
- Teroforma Whisky Stones MAX [buy]
- Balls of Steel [buy]
- Skybar's Wine Chill Drops [buy]
- Tilt Spheres [buy]
- Steel Ice [buy]
- A glass put in the refrigerator
- A glass put in the freezer
So, which one is best? I guess you'll have to pick up a copy of the magazine to know.If the story goes online, I'll share the link here.
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Making Absolut Vodka: A Trip to Ahus, Sweden
Absolut vodka is made in southern Sweden, in the town of Ahus in the Skane region. I took a trip there this winter to learn how the vodka is made. The distillery can produce 650,000 bottles of vodka per day and I had about that many questions for the producers.
I think it's best to break the process of making the vodka down into its components.
Wheat
Absolut purchases 20 percent of the wheat grown in the large Skane region of Sweden; about 125,000 tons of it annually.
It is winter wheat, planted in September and harvested in August, nearly a year later. The wheat grown in the southernmost part of Sweden near the distillery is best for producing vodka, while much northern wheat is better for use in making bread.
Wheat best for making bread is high in protein and gluten, and is heavy. It also has a low yield per hectare. Wheat for vodka is lower in protein but of course high in starch as that is what is turned into fermentable sugars.
Wheat crops are rotated with sugar beets, barley, and/or rapeseed.
Because Absolut is such a huge operation, grain is delivered to the distillery every two hours as they don't have space to store months' worth on-site.
Once the wheat reaches the distillery, it is ground into a flour and checked in a sizing machine to make sure that every bit of it is ground to less than 1.5mm in size.
Fermentation
The region is set upon a natural aquifer from which they pull water 146 meters below ground. For the fermentation process, they only filter the water through sand. (For dilution to bottle proof, they use reverse osmosis filtration.)
They then heat up water with flour but instead of making paper mache with it, they add enzymes to break down the wheat into fermentable sugars. They actually use two types: a "liquification enzyme" that turns the wheat into long-chain polysaccharides, and a "sacrification enzyme" that turns these polysaccharides into fermentable sugar.
Then it's ready to be fermented in one of ten of their 600,000 liter fermentation tanks. They use a dried yeast culture that is first hydrated for 8 hours, and then added to the tanks where fermentation takes between 50 and 55 hours.
Heat and carbon dioxide are captured from this process and recycled or sold.
Legal Break!
According to European Union law, vodka must be distilled to above 95 percent pure alcohol and bottled at a minimum of 37.5 percent ABV. It can be made from anything but if it is not made from grain or potatoes (as in the case of vodka made from sugar beets or molasses or grapes) it must specify that on the label.
Distillation
No surprise, the column stills at Absolut are very big. Here's how they break them down:
- The first column is the mash column – where the yeasty, grainy, sugary beer goes in and is separated from the water and alcohol.
- The second column is the raw spirit column that helps remove some sulphurous compounds. The spirit has been distilled up to 85% alcohol after this point.
- The next column is the extraction column. The spirit is diluted with water then redistilled to remove aldehydes.
- The main rectification columnn (actually divided into two columns to keep the height down) further refines the spirit and brings it up to 96.4% alcohol.
- The last column for making vodka is the methanol column, which removes methanol. Unlike most columns, in a methanol column the spirit comes out the bottom of the column, while the vapors to be discarded – the more volatile methanol- comes off the top.
- There is a final column called the recovery column. Some of the stuff that goes through it is pulled off and redistilled into vodka, while other is sold to make cleaning products and such.
For a larger write-up of multi-column distillation, see this post on how multi-column distillation works on Alcademics.
Filtration and Dilution
The water used to dilute the vodka to bottle strength comes from the local aquifer, filtered with reverse osmosis. They say that their water still affects the mouthfeel of the product. One representative said, "The cleaner the water source in the fist place the less you have to clean it. It doesn't affect the taste of the vodka but it does the texture. It contributes a greater mouthfeel to the final product."
Unlike many vodkas, Absolut does not undergo "active filtration," also known as carbon filtration. Nor, they say, do they use any 'rounding' agents (like sugar or glycerin) in the unflavored vodka.
Bottling
We visited one of the bottling facilities, which are usually pretty boring. But at the one we saw, three weeks' worth of vodka were stored in this massive warehouse. One room looked to be about 8 storeys tall with racks to hold palettes of vodka from floor to ceiling. In the tiny aisles in between the racks, computer-controlled forklift things would whip around in three-dimensions lifting cases and placing them on shelves or retrieving them to fill an order. It looked a lot like the things that hold the doors in Monsters, Inc.
From the bottling facility, the majority of the vodka is shipped over water to Germany, where it is distributed to the rest of the world.
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A Visual Guide to Herbs Used to Make Vermouth
This summer I visited Turin and Pessione Italy with Martini vermouth. The distillery hosts the Martini visitors' center and museum, and in this post you can read about how Martini vermouths are made.
On one particularly lovely day, our group piled into cars and drove around the countryside to see the local herbs used to make the vermouth.
We turned off into one field where we saw many local herbs growing: a few varieties of wormwood, chamomille, cilantro, and the very aromatic local peppermint.
Then we stopped into a farm cooperative where Martini sources many of the botanicals for the vermouth. Helpfully they set out fresh and dried herbs that go into the vermouth, so I snapped shots. In the case where I found both the dry and the fresh version of the herb, I've put them together in the image- click the thumbnail to expand.
Artemisia Absinthim: They grow three types of wormwood locally.
Artemisia Pontica (Roman wormwood):
Artemisia Valesiaca:
Artemisia Volgare (Mugwort):
Roman Chamomille:
Gentian Root, Gentian Flowers:
Iperico (St. John's Wort):
Melissa (Lemon Balm)
Menta Piperita. This is the highly-aromatic local peppermint.
Santoreggia (Savory):
Tarassaco (Dandelion):
Salvia Sclarea (Clary)
Hopefully that will be a useful guide to some herbs used in vermouth and other drinkables. -
How Martini Vermouth is Made: A Trip to Pessione, Italy
This summer I took a trip to Pessione, Italy, the home of Martini vermouth. Pessione is a small town just outside of the city of Turin, in the northwestern part of Italy.
The distillery site was chosen as it is close the the railroad, though it is also close to both wine-growing and herb-growing regions. At the distillery, they produce not just vermouths, but also a range of sparkling wines.
They also produce more than that: 17 wine-based products and 12 spirits are made at the distillery altogether. But we were there to talk about vermouth.Luckily, a series of signs made it easy to understand and explain.
Martini vermouths are a combination of wine, fortifying alcohol, herbs in the form of extracts and distillates, sugar, and coloring caramel for certain products. Then the vermouth is cold filtered.
The secret, of course, is in the combination of herbs, spices, flowers, roots, and bark that go into each type of vermouth.These get into the vermouth either in the form of distillates (they are added to alcohol and distilled), or extracts (they are infused into alcohol).
Seventy percent of the botanicals used for the vermouths come from a local cooperative that we visited.
They have a lot of funky looking stills in the distillery. Click on the thumbnails below to see a few different ones.
To make extracts, they use rotary extractors. As you'll see in the chart below, some extracts are aged afterward.
In the new Gran Lusso vermouth, one of the extracts was aged for 8 years.The extracts, distillates, wine, sugar, and caramel coloring (if used) are combined in gargantuan stainless steel tanks to blend. They are added in a certain order so that materials won't precipitate out of solution.
These resting rooms hold 5.6 million liters of vermouth on-site.
After blending, it's a 20 day process until bottling. They let the blend rest so that some stuff does precipitate out, then cold filter it, then bottle.(Filtration nerd bonus: They use both .65 micron cellulose filters and diatomaceous earth to filter the wine).
Every day they make 400,000 liters of Martini vermouth in this facility.
In the next post, we'll look at some of the locally-grown herbs used to make Martini.
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A Handy Chart for Categorizing Sherry
In my talk on sherry at Tales of the Cocktail, I was trying to summarize sherry in a way that makes it easy to understand what is in the bottles you find on shelves.
I think the three slides below get us pretty close (though I had 90 slides during the talk!). The last chart is the most important one if you want to skip ahead.
Sherry is aged in three ways:
- With a layer of yeast called flor that floats on top of the wine in the barrel. This is biological aging. This sherry usually tastes yeasty, light, and often salty/ocean-influenced. Fino and Manzanilla sherries are exclusively aged biologically.
- Explosed to air in the barrel. This is called oxidative aging. This sherry is darker in color and richer in flavor, tasting of leather, walnuts, and tobacco. Olorso sherries are exclusively aged oxidatively.
- Or some of each. Amontillado and Palo Cortado sherries are aged first under biological and then oxidative aging; with Amontillado sherry spending more time under flor than Palo Cortado.
Each of these types of sherry can be unsweetened, or sweetened to different levels, and all are aged.
Sherry is not sweetned with sugar, but with naturally-sweet Pedro Ximenez (PX) and/or Moscatel wine made from those grape varietals respectively. These wines are aged in the solera system and are also sold on their own as sweet wines. Another sweet wine (that I've not seen on US store shelves) is Dulce sherry, which is a sweet wine made from any of or a combination of PX, Moscatel, and the Palomino grapes.
Oloroso, Amontillado, and Palo Cortado sherries are either dry (without a sweetness label) or labelled as Dry, Medium, or Cream.
Fino and Manzanilla sherries, when sweetened, are often sweetened with rectified wine musts instead of PX/Moscatel (because those wines are dark and would alter the color of the wine). These are called "Pale Cream" sherries.
Thanks to Sandeman sherry for providing this information.When Fino and Manzanilla sherries are aged a long time (this is not easy to do, and more often the case with Manzanilla), they can be labelled as "Pasada," as in Manzanilla Pasada.
The other sherries can have average age statements (the solera aging and blending system makes exact age statements impossible). The only approved average ages allowed to be put on bottles are for 12, 15, 20 (VOS), and 30 (VORS) years of age.
Anada sherries, which are hard to find outside of Spain, are vintage-dated wines not aged in the solera sytem.
Finally, many/most Fino and Manzanilla sherries are filtered through carbon to make them light in color, though this will affect the flavor also. "En Rama" sherries are unfiltered (except to get rid of the flor).
So, putting it all together, I came up with this chart:
I hope all that makes sense.For more information on sherry, check out all posts about sherry here on Alcademics, and Sherry.org has some great information as well.
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Bottled Waters Most Resembling Waters of Scotland
In this post we'll look at commercial brands of bottled water that resemble water from the Speyside, Highlands, and Islay regions of Scotland.
We saw before that different waters bring out different properties in scotch whisky.
We can then look at properties of bottled water from Scotland. Thanks to UisgeSource, we can look at the properties of Highland, Speyside, and Islay water that they collected. See this post for more details.
But as this water isn't available everywhere yet, we can look at their water analysis and try to find other bottled water that is somewhat close in pH level and mineral content.
For reference on mineral waters, I used the book Fine Waters, which I wrote about here and here and here. The mineral content for all mineral waters is available online, so you can look up other brands to see if they match Scottish waters. Fine Waters is a few years old, so it is possible the numbers have changed on some waters.
Also note that the UisgeSource numbers are approximate based on information on their website and tests I conducted at home.
The closest bottled waters to UisgeSource water are bolded. Note that I've never heard of any of those Islay-style water brands.
Update: If you want to help look for other bottled waters most resembling Islay waters, check out this ordered list by pH on MineralWaters.org and see if any waters that you have heard of are a good match for pH and TDS. And let me know!
So, should you want to try diluting whisky with different regional-style bottled waters, this should give you some starting points on how to do so.
The above images were taken from slides I presented at the Tales of the Cocktail convention in July 2013.
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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page. -
(Re)Introducing Noilly Prat Extra Dry Vermouth
Last year I had the pleasure of visiting the Noilly Prat vermoutherie in Marseillan, France, where I learned about how it is made. Shortly after the visit, I wrote a blog post about the differences between Noilly Prat Dry (aka Original Dry), Noilly Prat Ambre, and Noilly Prat Rouge.
It took a year, but they are finally releasing Noilly Prat Extra Dry on the US Market nationally, so now I'll explain the difference and Extra Dry and Original Dry.
From 1979 until 2009, the dry vermouth from Noilly Prat sold on the US market was called "French Dry Vermouth". It was different than the version sold in the rest of the world.
In 2009 they replaced this bottling with Original Dry, which was the version of Noilly Prat sold in the rest of the world.
Starting this summer, the former US version "French Dry Vermouth" will be called "Extra-Dry" and the Original Dry will also still be sold. So:
Original Dry = International Version
Extra Dry = US Version that was sold until 2009 and is now back on the market.
There are four production differences between Original Dry and Extra-Dry. In order to best understand them, it might be helpful to read about how Noilly Prat is made in general. Then read the below.
Differences between Noilly Prat Original Dry and Extra-Dry
- Extra-Dry uses only clairette wine while Original Dry uses a combintation of clairette and picpoul. This is because clairette oxidizes less.
- Extra-Dry uses less of the sweet mistelle wine, so it is, in fact, drier.
- Both Original Dry and Extra-Dry use the same 20 herbs and spices, but in different ratios.
- The wine for both Original Dry and Extra Dry is aged outdoors for one year, but after infusing that wine with herbs and spices, the Original Dry is aged an additional 6 weeks to 3 months. Extra Dry is bottled without this extra aging step.
Extra Dry tastes fruitier than the dry, and less woody. It is also clear as opposed to lightly yellow, and clearly intended for use as a mixer in Martinis and other cocktails. Original Dry can be mixed into cocktails or consumed on its own as an aperitif.
Hopefully soon both Original and Extra Dry will on store shelves again so you can compare the two side-by-side.
Noilly Prat Rouge is still on the market, and Noilly Prat Ambre will soon be available in major US cities.
Below are a few pictures from my visit.
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