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Bar Agricole Cocktail List Revealed

The SF Chronicle's Jon Bonne gets the scoop on Bar Agricole's forthcoming cocktail list.

The story has lots of information about the bar/restaurant (one we've been awaiting for about 2 years). The bar is set to open August 15 or 16. So go read it.

For those of you not lucky enough to have sampled Thad Vogler's cocktails at Slanted Door, Beretta, and other venues, here's the gist: Simple, local, organic, seasonal, custom-made ingredients; small twists on vintage cocktails; consistency and elegance.

While the older style of California cocktails was sometimes called the "salad in the glass" style- tons of fresh herb and citrus ingredients muddled together- this menu is more of the refined simplicity Vogler has been seeking all along. For this project, many of the ingredients (even distilled ones) were produced locally just for the bar.

I cannot freaking wait!

Whiskey Cocktail with dry vermouth and grenadine, absinthe, orange bitters
Traditional Sour of Blanche d’Armagnac, lemon, egg white
Brandy Cocktail with curaçao, Italian vermouth, absinthe and bitters
Daiquiri of white rum, lime, grapefruit, maraska, aromatic bitters
Jersey Sour: California brandy, lemon, apple, maple, aromatic bitters
Tequila Daisy with lemon, vermouth blanc, apricot preserve, chartreuse bitters
Petit Zinc: farmhouse vodka, orange juice, red vermouth, farmhouse curaçao
Whiskey Sour: lime, port, and orange bitters
Presidente: California agricole, farmhouse curaçao, grenadine, orange bitters
White Rum Swizzle with 2 vermouths, lemon, farmhouse curaçao, raspberry
Ti Punch made with hibiscus bitters
Gin Cocktail with riesling and stonefruit bitters
Star Daisy: Calvados, gin, grenadine and lemon
Capitan Cocktail: Blanche d’Armagnac, aromatic bitters and chinato
Dry Pisco Punch with pineapple gum and hibiscus bitters

July 13, 2010
The Safety of Milk Thistle

A few months ago, founder Mike McAdams of Drinkwel reached out to me. This product is meant to be a vitamin for drinkers rather than just a hangover cure.

I told them that I was unsure about one of the ingredients in the mixture, milk thistle, as I'd heard reports that rather than being good for the liver it may actually cause harm.

This caused a conversation that I thought I'd share. McAdams replied:

It's also funny you mention milk thistle because that was really our only ingredient that had an interaction paper on it. I've taken it on and off for a couple years but make sure my dosages are not too high.

In case you're interested, here is what our doctor who helped formulate had to say (unfiltered):

Milk thistle is probably the most well known liver protectant on the market. As far as alcohol intake, new studies have shown that milk thistle has both liver toxicity protection from ethanol [18] and protects against liver fibrosis in non-human primates [19].

Safety

There is the possibility of an adverse reaction with milk thistle (possible Pk interactions regarding the decrease of CYP, UGT, and P-Gp activity) [20]. These decreases seem limited so should not be a concern. Therefore, I believe this drug to be a safe and positive addition to the formulation.

and:

The biggest concern would be Milk thistle with only one interaction paper. I think for the most part its use in this formulation would be fine. It has been used for this type of treatment for numerous years without a major side effect case report being brought to light.

18. Song, Z., et al., Silymarin protects against acute ethanol-induced hepatotoxicity in mice. Alcohol Clin Exp Res, 2006. 30(3): p. 407-13.

19. Lieber, C.S., et al., Silymarin retards the progression of alcohol-induced hepatic fibrosis in baboons. J Clin Gastroenterol, 2003. 37(4): p. 336-9.

20. Wu, J.W., L.C. Lin, and T.H. Tsai, Drug-drug interactions of silymarin on the perspective of pharmacokinetics. J Ethnopharmacol, 2009. 121(2): p. 185-93.

I followed up with McAdams and he send some more information. Then I followed up with the National Institutes of Health. This is all below the jump.

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July 12, 2010
So, So Many Orange Liqueurs

(Craig Lee / Special to The Chronicle)

My latest story from this Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle is now online.

Quest for best orange liqueur comes full circle

Camper English, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, July 9, 2010

When a critic complained that the orange liqueur in the margarita at Tacolicious had an "off flavor," owner Joe Hargrave decided to do something about it. The margarita is the Marina district restaurant's top-selling cocktail.

"After I was finished being (ticked) off, I decided we should see if this has merit," he said. Hargrave arranged a blind tasting of margaritas with different orange liqueurs to find the best replacement for the bargain-priced Bols triple sec he was using.

With a flood of new orange liqueurs on the market, picking a reasonable number for the tasting was no easy task.

My story about all the new orange liqueurs on the market– and the thrilling result of the orange liqueur taste test at Tacolicious- can be found by following the link.

There's also a recipe for a drink (see picture above) from Kevin Diedrich of the Burritt Room.

For more information on the history and differences between triple sec and curacao, this discussion has some good information. And for the biggest orange liqueur comparison on the internet, see Jay Hepburn's blog posts.

July 9, 2010
Tiki Drinks in Fine Cooking Magazine
Oh hey, my latest story for Fine Cooking magazine is online already.

Tiki Time

Showstopping tiki drinks are back on the menu, and they’re causing quite a stir. Here’s how to create these tasty cocktails at home—don’t forget the swizzle sticks and umbrellas.

by Camper English

Sipping from opposite sides of a cocktail served in a hollowed-out pineapple, a young couple poses for a photo by a waterfall. This isn’t a scene from a Hawaiian vacation in the 1960s, but one I observed earlier this year at Smuggler’s Cove, a buzzing new San Francisco bar. This establishment, and the many others just like it springing up across the country, is a tiki lounge, serving classic Polynesian-themed cocktails. These once-out-of-favor joints and their kitschy cocktails, like the mai tai, zombie, and planter’s punch, are making quite a comeback.

So what makes a cocktail a tiki cocktail? These drinks have several common characteristics….

Read the rest of my feature on the return of tiki.

Not only does it contain thrilling information on tiki, it has recipes from three people you may have heard of:
- Lift Off! by Blair Reynolds, alias Trader Tiki
- Chi Chi Pache by Martin Cate, alias Shoeless Martin Cate
- Barbary Swizzle by Jeff Berry, alias Beachbum Berry
July 7, 2010
The Double Rainbow Cocktail

I decided to create a drink to honor the best video of the weekend, "Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10". (Scroll down to see it if you haven't already.)

It's guaranteed to make you say, "DOUBLE COMPLETE RAINBOW! What does this MEAN?"

The Double Rainbow
by Camper English

1 ounce vodka
1 ounce St. Germain elderflower liqueur
4 or so ounces of soda water
4 dashes of grapefruit bitters (Fee Brothers brand)
lemon peel for garnish
rainbow ice cubes

Make rainbow ice by adding food coloring to an ice cube tray, filling with water and freezing. (For more fun with ice, see the index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics here.)

Cut lemon peel into stars. Add all ingredients to a glass filled with ice in rainbow order (two cubes per color, making it a double complete rainbow). Garnish with lemon stars.

This cocktail I actually created for a wedding several months back, but thought it would be appropriate here. (It's not so original that I would be surprised if many other people have created this same drink. I just poured it on rainbow ice.)

Note: If you enjoyed this video-inspired cocktail, perhaps you'd also enjoy the Honey Badger Shot.

The video that inspired the drink is after the jump. Double rainbow all the way!

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July 5, 2010
Erick Castro to Leave Rickhouse at End of Month; Take Brand Ambassador Job

Erick Castro, bartender and general manager of Rickhouse in San Francisco (up for three awards at Tales of the Cocktail this year) has revealed that he'll be leaving the bar at the end of July. He'll now be the West Coast Brand Ambassador for Plymouth and Beefeater gins.

This is another bittersweet announcement in the San Francisco cocktail community, right on the heels of Neyah White leaving NOPA to become a brand ambassador for Yamazaki whiskies at the end of June and Jackie Patterson leaving Heaven's Dog (soon) to become a brand ambassador for Solerno and Lillet.

So congratulations to Castro on the sweet new job but we'll miss seeing you behind the bar.

I suppose the good news is that, like the rash of bartenders who were leaving bars for brands I wrote about in 2008, this makes way for a new crop of folks to step forward as mixological masters behind the bar.

July 2, 2010
Latin, Packing, Pisco: A Few Articles I’ve Written Lately

I've had several stories come out recently, so I thought I'd share them here. This blog is also my resume, after all.

Friday I wrote about my recent piece in the daily email Tasting Table San Francisco. This one is about Encanto Pisco, brought to us by a bartender, a sommelier, and a distiller.

Attention people attending Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans this July: My story about what to pack for the week (for media, speakers, bartenders, PR, and brand reps) in the June issue of Tasting Panel Magazine is now online.

In the July issue of Executive Travel Magazine I have a story on the Latin libations that are hot and the ones that soon will be.

I have recently become a regular contributor to SilverKris, the in-flight magazine for Singapore Airlines. Unfortunately the magazine is not online. Recent stories have focused on new classic cocktails, the return of absinthe, and where to drink in Wellington, New Zealand.

June 27, 2010
More Fun With Distillery Waste

I am a big fan of distillery waste. Not bathing in it, but learning about it.

In most cases where a grain is distilled into whiskey or vodka, the spent grain (after all the sugar has been removed to be fermented) is sold off as animal feed. In Cognac (at Hennessy anyway) the spent lees (grape parts) are taken to an industrial distiller to get more alcohol out of them, and the "heavy sediments" of the grape juice go for cattle feed and for use in pharmaceutical products. In tequila production, the spent fibers from the agave pinas are sometimes put back on the fields as fertilizer, sometimes mixed with the heads and tails of distillation.

(There is a lot of leftover vegetation in tequila production.)

Many sugar cane distillers (either at the sugar factory for rum or at the distillery for rhum agricole) burn the spent sugar cane stalks to heat the steam engine that powers the distillery.

(Spent sugar cane to be burned at Rhum Clement distillery on Martinique.)

(Huge steam-powered gears at Rhum Clement distillery on Martinique.)

The heads and tails are the waste products of distillation, made up of alcohol, water, and undesirable flavor compounds that distillers don't want in their final products. These are also recycled. In scotch whisky, these are put back into the still for the next batch of distillation. (Somehow they never build up and overwhelm the spirit- weird.) Many companies sell the heads and tails to industrial distillers who make pure spirit, cosmetics, and other products. Some use this alcohol as fuel to heat their distilleries in winter.

(The condenser at Fettercairn.)

Speaking of heat, many (if not most) distilleries are mainly powered by hot water; heated either by an oil burner or by burning waste materials like the sugar cane stalks mentioned above. The hot water heats the stills to convert the liquids into steam. Cold water is also needed in the condensers of the still to convert the alcohol in steam form back into liquid form. Typically this cool water comes from a nearby stream or river. After it is used in the condenser it is now hot water, which isn't usually suitable for dumping back into the water stream from whence it came until it is cool. In some distilleries such as the one for Blue Ice Vodka, this hot water is used to lightly heat a warehouse in the winters.

What About the Water in the Still?

On my recent trip to the Isle of Jura, The Dalmore, and Fettercairn distilleries I learned about more industrial waste. This made me very happy.

For some reason nobody talks about the leftover water from distillation. Distillation is really just separating alcohol from water in order to concentrate the alcohol. Concentrate alcohol in beer and you get (unaged) whisky or vodka. Concentrate it in wine and you get brandy. The heads and tails contain alcohol and this is valuable so it gets recycled, but there is still the water left in the still.

(Stills at Fettercairn.)

At Fettercairn, Jura's master distiller Willie Tait explained it: After the first distillation, the leftover water also contains yeast bodies from fermentation. This water/yeast mix is called "pot ale," and it can be boiled down into a high-protein syrup used as cattle feed or as fertilizer.

After the second distillation the leftovers are mostly water with a high copper content with some congeners. Tait said this mixture is called the "spent lees," which is confusing because in cognac this means something different. I also failed to write down how this water is recycled if it is at all, so I have more fun facts about distillery waste to learn!

June 23, 2010
Fettercairn Distillery Visit- Single Malt Scotch Whisky Distillery Tour

Last week I visited the Isle
of Jura, The Dalmore, and Fettercairn distilleries in Scotland. These
brands are all owned by White &
Mackay. This post is about visiting the Fettercairn distillery.

(Fettercairn marked with red pin. Map made with Google Maps)

From The Dalmore distillery we went on yet another gorgeous drive over two mountain ranges to reach Fettercairn, a distillery named after the town where it is located. As you can see on the map below, after you come down from the mountains where much of the vegetation is heather (brown at this time of year) like low scrub bushes, you hit the eastern farmlands with rich soils and plenty of water coming off the hills.

The Fettercairn distillery is about a five-minute walk from the center of Fettercairn with its one pub and stone arch commemorating a pit stop from Queen Victoria. It is surrounded by fields and there are cattle grazing across from the distillery.

The distillery is full of much original equipment from 1824 with a few technological improvements. They no longer do floor maltings (I think only five or six distilleries still do) but otherwise things look pretty old-fashioned here.

(Fettercairn Distillery. Cows in foreground.)

The mash tun is an old copper-topped one with mechanically-driven (see below) stirrers inside. The drainage at the bottom of these older mash tuns is different from newer models, so to compensate the barley must be ground to a courser level.

(Above: Copper-topped mash tun. Below: Inside the mash tun.)

The distillery also has wooden washbacks where fermentation happens. Most wooden washbacks I've seen are made from Doug Fir pine from Oregon.

(Wooden washback)

Unlike at The Dalmore distillery that uses the brown-colored peat-rich river water, Fettercairn uses water from an underground spring for mashing, fermentation, and reducing to barrel proof. It is crystal clear and rich with minerals- you can taste a sort of metallic-granite flavor and it is very drying in the mouth, almost a tannic feeling.

(Stills at Fettercairn)

Fettercairn has two pairs of stills and the still for the second distillation (the "spirit still") has a pretty unique feature.

On yesterday's post about The Dalmore I noted that the still has a reflux box (don't know the technical name for it) in which cold water runs around the top of the neck of the still to encourage only the heavy flavor molecules to cross over.

At Fettercairn they do this in a different way: during the part of the distillation when they're getting the heart of the spirit (the part that will actually be put in barrels rather than recycled), cold water runs down the outside of the neck of the still. I've never seen anything like this on a still before.

It's hard to capture in pictures, so I took this short video. I think this is supercool, but I'm a nerd.

After the whisky is distilled and put into barrels it is stored in traditional dunnage warehouses- old, earthen floor warehouses in which barrels are stacked no more than three-high. There are thick walls and in this case a slate roof. The walls are super moldy and reminded me a lot of the aging warehouses in Cognac.

In these dunnage warehouses (about 12 of them for Fettercairn, all local), there is not a great deal of temperature difference between the top and bottom row. This is quite different from a racked warehouse (think of the tall bourbon warehouses), in which casks are stacked several stories high and temperature, evaporation, and rate of aging vary greatly in different parts of the warehouse.

Now for the bad news: Fettercairn is not available in the US. Even in Scotland its pretty rare to find it as a single-malt. They released a new bottling called Fior that's really tasty and they can't keep it on the shelves. They also sell some 30-year-old and 40-year-old expressions but who can afford such things?

We tasted several barrel samples and they were really wild- a 2004 ex-bourbon had a salty finish and a bourbon grain taste. A 1997 sherry refill cask sample tasted fruity-savory with flavors of sundried tomato and cranberry. The 1974 and 1973 ex-American oak hogsheads were insane floral explosions of lilac, jasmine, rose, and other candied flower flavors.

I assume that most all Fettercairn goes into blends, as most whisky goes toward blends even if it is from a notable single-malt. I do wish they sold this single-malt in the states because:

1. It tastes good.

2. Unicorns!

June 17, 2010
The Dalmore Distillery Visit- A Single Malt Scotch Whisky Distillery Tour

Last week I visited the Isle of Jura, The Dalmore, and Fettercairn distilleries in Scotland. These brands are all owned by White & Mackay. This post is about visiting The Dalmore distillery.

(The Dalmore distillery indicated by red dot. Map from Google Maps.)

From Jura, we took a boat to the mainland and then drove diagonally northeast to reach The Dalmore. It was a long and gorgeous drive into the Highlands that took the better part of a day.

(The Dalmore distillery)

There are many things that make up the final flavor profile of a single-malt scotch, including the variety of barley, the peating levels of it, the water used in the mashing and fermentation, the size and shape of the stills, the size and type of barrels used to age it, where the barrels are aged, and of course the length of aging of the whisky.

The water for The Dalmore comes from Loch Morie, and inland lake. The water then runs through a river to the distillery that is located on another body of water, the Cromarty Firth. As the water travels through a whole lot of peat on the way, by the time it reaches the distillery it is brown in color. This water, not filtered, is used in the mashing and fermentation, and to dilute the whisky to barrel proof for aging.

You can see how it might add to the flavor of the whisky.

(Peat-filled brown water flowing into The Dalmore distillery.)

In the previous post I talked about Jura's tall stills that produce a light and fruity spirit full of high esther notes like pear. At The Dalmore the stills are quite differently shaped and this impacts the spirit.

Photography wasn't allowed in the still room so you'll have to make due with my artistic renderings below.

The stills for the first distillation almost look decapitated- they just stop with a flat top and the lynne arm is not a gentle curve from the top, but a tube sticking out from a foot or two below it.

(Artistic rendering of stills at The Dalmore. Not to scale.)

The still for the second distillation isn't quite as ugly, but it's even more interesting. I think this is the first time I've seen a water-filled reflux section on a still in Scotland. On the tubular pipe near the top of the still is a section that is rinsed with cool water inside.

This makes it difficult for light elements to reach the top of the still, leaving the more robust heavy molecules to cross over to the condenser. You get a spirit that's a lot less light and esthery, very much unlike Jura we'd visited the day before.

Thus The Dalmore comes off the still as a big bold heavy liquid before it goes into wood. It is then the job of the Master Blender, Richard Patterson in this case, to tame the spirit as it ages and shape it into the final product.

I thought that the role of the Master Blender was simply to take what was given to him- a bunch of scotch in barrels- and mix it together, but it is much more than that, at least at The Dalmore.

Patterson chooses the types of barrels (going to Jerez to pick out the sherry ones personally) in which the spirit will be aged, decides on the flavor profile he's seeking for a particular bottling, manages the aging process and checks up on the spirit to see how it is doing as it develops, and puts the blends together. It is product development, wood management, and blending.

Keep in mind that this is still just for a single-malt scotch whisky, a blend of whiskies from the same distillery. A vatted malt or a blend would involve whiskies from other distilleries and grain (column distilled) whisky also. Patterson does this for the Whyte & Mackay blended scotch whisky that is not available in the US.

On this trip I learned a great deal about the different roles of the master distiller and the master blender, and how some spirits need gentle nudging as they age to get them to the right final flavor profile, and others need an aggressive and more hands-on approach to bring them into line. Funny enough, the lighter, softer spirit is made on an island and the full-bodied bruiser comes from the Highlands.

June 16, 2010