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An Auchentoshan Distillery Visit

On the last day of my trip to Scotland with Bowmore, we went to another distillery, Auchentoshan. This distillery is located just outside of Glasgow, on a former estate.

Auchentoshan is in the Lowland region of Scotland, one of just five single-malt-producing distilleries there. It’s also unique as the only scotch distillery that triple distills all of its whisky. This gives it a lighter flavor profile than most single malts, and a thinner body/mouthfeel. This makes it both an entry-level whisky for drinkers new to the category, and one that can be easily mixed into cocktails.

Scotch whisky distilleries usually (always?) have stills in pairs for two distillations; a smaller one for the second. Rather than adding a third still at the end of the process, Auchentoshan has an ‘intermediate still’ between the other two.

(I couldn't fit all three stills in the picture. They do exist, though.)

The spirit is distilled to a high alcohol percentage before the final distillation that will make the cut of the heads and tails. (Previous to that, they're mostly concentrating alcohol. The final distillation/cut will pick out the desired flavor elements for the whisky by discarding portions of the distillate.) According to Auchentoshan's distiller Jeremy Stephens, the higher level of alcohol sitting in the still forces the volatile aromatics in the alcohol to rise to the top first, rather than the heavier, oilier compounds that they want to avoid in this whisky.

After a trip through the distillery, we took a spin through the one of the aging warehouses then went for a tasting.

The Auchentoshan line includes the Classic, which bears no age statement but holds scotch most between five and eight years old, all aged in ex-bourbon casks. The twelve year old contains about 25% whisky aged in ex-sherry casks. We sampled the 18 and 21-year-old expressions as well, along with a 1988 Bordeaux finished bottle that I really liked. The Three Wood is matured in ex-bourbon, ex-oloroso sherry, and ex-Pedro Ximenez casks.

And then it was on to the blending room… see the next post.

May 3, 2010
Aging and Terroir on Islay

When we last spoke, I was talking about the distillation process of Bowmore, the Islay single malt scotch whisky that I visited a few days ago. The malting and distillation are only the first two weeks in the life of a scotch whisky: the aging time in barrels is where the liquid spends the vast majority of its existence- and where it gains much of its flavor.

At Bowmore, they use ex-bourbon barrels primarily from Heaven Hill, ex-sherry barrels, and miscellaneous ex-wine barrels for special blends.

Different ratios and preparations of bourbon and sherry barrels are used for the various bottlings. The 12-year-old and 18-year-old expressions are a blend of scotch from ex-sherry and ex-bourbon barrels. The 15-year-old “Darkest” bottling is a 12-year-old finished for three more years in ex-sherry casks.

Bowmore aging warehouses on Islay are located right next to the sea. The partially-below-sea-level No.1 Vaults are the most famous, as that's where Black, White, and Gold Bowmore are from.

The Terroir Question

Bowmore distills with a percentage of barley malted on site, along with a majority of commercially malted barley from the mainland. Distillery Manager Eddie MacAffer said that though there are differences in the flavor profile of the peat from Islay versus the mainland, he didn’t feel they were significant.

The aging barrels are also mixed: some Bowmore casks age on Islay and others on the mainland, but according to Eddie MacAffer this has more influence on the flavor of the final blend.

Camper English: At Bowmore you have the combination of the local peat, local malting with the stuff from the mainland and you have aging in both locations as well. Can you taste the place in Bowmore, do you think?

Eddie MacAffer: The fact that we do mature our whiskies in the old warehouses right beside the seaside, the sea air definitely has an influence on the maturation, with the slow, steady, and the cool situation that it's in, in my opinion definitely has an influence on the final product; the flavors and the tastes that come off from it.

Camper English: Do you think that's where you see the most influence of the location is there, as opposed to the peat or the local malting?

Eddie MacAffer: Obviously we put the peatiness in , but definitely the location that it matures in is definitely gives it the biggest influence on the taste; right beside the sea.

(Distillery Manager Eddie MacAffer shows where sea level is in the Bowmore No. 1 Vaults.)

May 1, 2010
A Visit to Bowmore on Islay in Scotland

Hello from Islay! I'm in Scotland on a trip with Bowmore.

After a first night of bar exploration and jetlag adaptation in Glasgow, I was ready for the press trip to begin. I spent the morning blogging about the previous night, then had a day to explore Glasgow. I can't say I learned a ton about the city, except that I love the look of Glasgow University and had a great time exploring the Kelvingrove museum.

By the next morning I'd met up with the rest of the group and we flew together to Islay. To get there by car/bus and ferry apparently takes almost nine hours, but the flight was just 45 minutes from the Glasgow airport.

Over the course of the day, the weather changed from the Islay/Scotland weather you see all the time- mildly raining with low visibility- to sunny and bright in the later afternoon/early evening. Islay always looked to me like it is built for dreary weather, with all white buildings as the one color that looks good in the fog, but when it's sunny it takes on a happy little seaside town feel.

I should mention that we're in the town of Bowmore, the capital city of Islay, but are driving to various spots on the island to sample other restaurants and attractions.

But first, the distillery tour. As you probably know, Islay single malt scotch whiskies are known for a smoky/peaty flavor profile, often with seaside flavors like seaweed and salt. Bowmore has less of the seaweed/iodine flavors so present in Laphroaig, but to my palate is still dominated by a smoky charred flavor with a lurking sherry cask flavor present in different amounts depending on the bottling's expression. I didn't realize that there is actually a lot less phenol content- the amount of smokiness/peatedness in scotch- than other brands. Bowmore comes in at about 25 parts per million, whereas I believe Laphroaig comes in at 40 and Ardbeg at 60.

At Bowmore, like at Laphroaig and The Balvenie, they malt some of their own barley. This involves purchasing barley, soaking it in three cycles over a 24 hour period, spreading it out on a malting floor, and turning the malt over again and again until the grain germinates and sends out a little shoot about one-quarter the length of the grain.

Germination is then stopped by drying the barley with a combination of hot air and peat smoke to the desired level of smokiness. I actually got to harvest peat from a bog, turn and rake some barley, and even step into the kiln after it had recently stopped blowing the peated air through it.

At this point the malted barley is ready to be fermented and distilled. Allowing the grain to germinate starts an enzymatic process that will convert starches in the grain to sugars when hot water is added again. The malted barley is ground to separate the floury innards from the husk, then this is washed with hot water in three cycles to release the sugar.

The grain is then discarded (sold to farmers as cattle feed) and the sugar water is fermented and then distilled. The new make spirit is then aged in ex-bourbon and/or ex-sherry casks for the different expressions. We took a look into Vault No. 1, where the barrels of Bowmore Gold were housed, some beneath sea level adjacent to the salt-crusted warehouse sea wall.

More posts from Bowmore to follow!

April 27, 2010
Dashing Don Lee and Greg Boehm’s Old Tools
On Monday April 5th, Greg Boehm of Cocktail Kingdom and Don Lee of Momofuko Ssam Bar gave a talk at Rickhouse in San Francisco.

Boehm's plane was delayed so Lee gave an impromptu talk on one of his bar science projects. (When I last spoke with him, he was measuring the BRIX count of sugar syrup in all the bars in New York.) Recently he's been trying to determine how much is a "dash" of bitters in a drink.

Lee noted that different bottles of bitters release different amounts of liquid in a dash; not only just between brands but also between different-sized bottles of the same brand, and within one bottle when it is very full or very empty. (I currently have a jumbo sized Angostura bottle and the darn thing spits out a dash before I can tip it over far enough to get it in the glass.)

As a starting point of his experiment, he measured the average size dash (in weight) from the middle 80% of a ten-ounce Angostura bottle, a Regan's Orange Bitters bottle, and Angostura in a Japanese dasher bottle. He found that Angostura released a smaller amount on average than Regan's. He also found that the 90 ml Japanese bitters dasher bottle delivered extremely consistent results (but only 1/4 of the size of a Regan's dash), probably because the long neck allowed for a consistent launching distance for the liquid.

Future experiments might include testing how sensitive the palate is to these minute differences in dash size, so that we'll know how much difference a dash makes.

When Greg Boehm arrived he was mostly playing show-and-tell with his vintage barware. Boehm collects functional barware, imports barware from Japan and other countries to sell, and is now beginning to make recreations of vintage barware when nothing as good is being made today. I learned a few things:
- Patents on cocktail shakers seem to start around 1880
- Brazil and Argentina are the only two countries that use uniquely-shaped shakers; Brazil's with a built-in strainer that seems pretty handy until you start bashing it with large Kold-Draft ice cubes and Argentina's a conical shaker that's really hard to separate.
- All of those fancy-shaped shakers (penguins, bells, zeppelins) were launched at the end of Prohibition in the 1930's
- Japanese barspoons are not really meant for measuring, but for stirring and pulling out a drop of liquid from the glass. I noticed this in Japanese bars in Singapore- that instead of the bartender tasting the drink using a straw, they taste it by putting a drop of the drink on the back of their hand then licking it off.
- The reason many barspoons (like this one) have the flat end is that they're based on apothecary spoons that were used to crush pills.
April 12, 2010
California Rum

Last week I visited the St. George Spirits distillery to sample their new rum, Agua Libre, and watch them distill more of it.

The new release was distilled from fresh California-grown sugar cane juice (not molasses) and aged for two and a half years in French oak barrels.

From the media contact:

After pressing 25 tons of sugar cane from Kalin Farms of Southern California's Imperial Valley, with a press imported from India, they distilled 750 individually numbered bottles. We still need to slap some labels on the bottles and will probably start
selling them late May/early June for $60 a bottle at the store in
distillery tasting room. Bar Agricole will be the first account to
carry the rum when they open in May.

This isn't the first rum released from St. George Spirits though. They also made Eurydice, a rum exclusive to Smuggler's Cove in San Francisco. Distiller Lance Winters said that one was made from different varieties of sugar cane, and if I remember correctly it was aged in an ex-bourbon barrel as well as French oak. I've just had each of the rums once but if I remember correctly both are grassy and vegetal, but Eurydice is a lot more funky/gamey than Agua Libre.

I really like the Agua Libre and I think fans of agricole rums and Smith & Cross will really like this one as it's sort of a combo of the two styles.

As for the new rum being distilled on the day of my visit, it is made from sugar cane grown in Brawley, California. The grower, Carson T. Kalin, was at the distillery to speak to us and I sort of nerded out on sugar cane. The farm is apparently located at California's last sugar beet processing facility, (I didn't know sugar beets even grew in CA) and so far the sugar cane is purely experimental. Kalin said he is trying to find varieties suited to the hot and dry weather that would be watered by irrigation as there isn't the rainfall of the tropics there. And as sugar can has the opposite growing season of sugar beets, they could always be harvesting.

In the short term, the only thing the cane is being used for is making rum. They harvest the sugar cane by hand rather than by machine, because the sugar cane crushing machine in the distillery needs to use tall stalks of cane rather than the small segments the machine produces. After crushing the cane in the distillery, they ferment the cane juice for 15 days before distilling. I tried the fermented sugar can juice and it was crazy sour and I am glad nobody took a picture of the face I made. Luckily, once through the still and a couple years in the barrel and it fixes it right up.

April 6, 2010
How Beachbum Berry Saved Easter

My friends were throwing a zombie-themed Easter party (raising from the dead, get it?) and planned cocktails to serve at it. They had a Painkiller, Hemmingway Daiquiri, and Dark n' Stormy on the menu. Obviously something was missing: the Zombie.

As they went shopping for booze and mixers, my friend kept texting me about specific ingredients. Grenadine? Oh just make that with POM Wonderful and sugar. Cinnamon syrup? You can borrow mine. Passionfruit syrup- wait a minute, that's not in my Zombie recipe…

The Zombie is one of those drinks with a long history and an obscured recipe due to secret ingredients, as tiki bar owners back in the day had to prevent staff poaching by not even sharing their drink recipes with their own bartenders. They'd have to use "Don's Mix" in certain quantities rather than grapefruit-cinnamon syrup, which is what Don's Mix turns out to be. Because of this, every bar offered its own take on the Zombie so even in the 1940s there were tons of recipes for one drink.

How do we know this, and the real Zombie recipe? Because Jeff Beachbum Berry tracked down people who knew the recipe, and the history of this and other tiki cocktails.

I used the Bum's latest book, Beachbum Berry Remixed, to find the recipe for the Zombie served at Easter. I actually made two different versions; the original (3 rums, 2 liqueurs, 2 syrups, bitters, lime) and the Simplified Zombie (2 juices, one syrup, two rums). There are three other Zombie variations listed in the book, but I figured two were plenty. The drinks were a hit and Easter was saved.

Another classic tiki drink with many variations is the Mai Tai. Beachbum writes in the book about the history of the drink, which was contested by Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic. It may be the case the Trader Vic's recipe was inspired by one of Don's, but not Don's Mai Tai. It's an interesting history, and one that the Bum speaks about at different events.

He'll next be at Smuggler's Cove in San Francisco giving the talk April 24 and 25. The tickets may be sold out already: check here.

April 5, 2010
Japanese Bartending Technique

(Photo taken at Orgo in 2009)

Last summer when I was in Singapore I had the chance to experience Japanese bartending for the first time. I went to Koffe Bar K, a chain with I think just one outpost in Sinagpore. They do ice ball carving there, though I didn't think to ask to see it. The menu was a giant picture book of mostly-awful looking blue and green drinks, but my friend always orders classics like the Sazerac there. I had the only good Singapore Sling I would drink in Singapore.

Before making the drink, the bartender pulled down all the bottles and set them label-facing the customer. His movements were precise and nearly robotic, as he measured each ingredient and mixed the cocktail while keeping his work station meticulous, pausing to wipe away any stray drop with a white bar cloth. When we finished and got up to leave the bar, the bartender literally ran out from behind his post to go hold the door for us. He asked if we were taking a taxi and ran again out to the curb to hail one for us, again holding the door and bowing ridiculously low as he did so.

Later that week I went to Orgo, a rooftop bar specializing in blended mixto margaritas also run by Japanese barmen. They did a surprisingly good job with what sounded like awful recipes. Here too, a formality was in place with each person behind the bar handling specific tasks and each task having a specific movement associated with it. It's kind of a formal form of flair bartending.

What I remember most about these two bars was not the drinks, but the bartenders and the level of service. There are plenty of bars in the US with ultra-attentive and doting bartenders, most often the bars at fine dining restaurants where the bartender is also your waiter and busboy. I've found most of them to have a friendly, rather than formal, demeanor, and that's just fine with me.

There is a lot that American bartenders can learn (or at least study then decide to dismiss or not) from the Japanese style of bartending. From tricks like carving an ice ball (is this neccesary anymore now that there are machines to do it for us?) to the Hard Shake (a shaking technique that may be more about aeration then it is chilling) to the deft handling of bar tools: are these useful in an American bar (professional or home) or just flair?

I hope to find out. I'm attending a seminar on just that topic in New York on May 3 and 4: Japanese Cocktail Technique.

The seminar features Japan's most famous bartender Kazuo Uyeda of Tender Bar in Tokyo, along with Stanislav Varda, a student of Uyeda who spreads the word of the Hard Shake and other Japanese bartending techniques with his Analog Bar Institute. This will be Uyeda's first time speaking in New York, coinciding with the release of the English language version of his book Cocktail Technique.

Part of the session will be dedicated to technique- making ice balls and learning the Hard Shake- and part to philosophy with topics like "exploring color" and "developing your ability to concentrate." I'm also hoping to learn about the mentor and apprentice programs they have in Japan- people tell me that there are several levels of bartenders working beneath the head bartender and that you have to reach a certain level before you are even allowed to pour water for a customer.

Tickets are available at CocktailKingdom.com for $675 for two days. Yep, it's a lot, so there's that.

April 5, 2010
Home Bar Recommendations: One of Each

When Jonny Raglin and Jeff Hollinger were looking to open Comstock Saloon (hopefully this month), they had a big limitation to work with: the size of the back bar. It only has room for one or two types of each base spirit. This is a challenge for Raglin in particular as between his former post as Bar Manager at Absinthe and his consultant gig at Dosa on Fillmore he was working with probably 30 different types of gin alone.

This inspired a story I wrote for the April edition of 7×7 magazine. I also spoke with Martin Cate of Forbidden Island who had the luxury of choosing over 200 rums for the bar, but that didn't leave room for much else. Before opening he sent out an email requesting advice on one of each tequila (blanco, reposado, anejo) for the bar. I also spoke with Marcovaldo Dionysos, who was very selective when choosing the bottles for Clock Bar. He said he had to balance familiar brands that consumers know with less-recognized spirits he'd prefer to work with.

In the story I asked each of Raglin, Cate, and Dionysos to pick one of
each- vodka, tequila, rum, whisky, and gin- that would work the best in
the most cocktails, while also being good enough for sipping. The
results should point home mixologists who may also not have room for 30 brands of gin toward the one bottle to buy.

The Ultimate Five-Bottle Bar, Perfect for Apartment Dwelling

by Camper English

What happens when the city’s top bartenders are forced to choose? Introducing the ultimate five-bottle bar, perfectly sized for apartment dwelling.

Click the link above to read the story. In the print edition there are also recommendations for one each of sweet and dry vermouth and an orange liqueur/triple sec.

April 1, 2010
Traveling in Style at the Cocktail World Cup

[This is one of many posts submitted live from the 42Below Vodka Cocktail World Cup
international cocktail competition. For official event photos, go here. For my
photos, go here.]

On the fourth day of the Cocktail World Cup in New Zealand, we began the day in Queenstown, New Zealand and ended it in Wellington. Keeping with the theme of this year's event, Love, Drinks, and Rock and Roll, we did it all in superstar style.

First we had a morning lecture at top of the Gondola in Queenstown with Jim Meehan of PDT in New York (now the second person I've traveled with to three non-US countries) and Vernon Chalker of the Gin Palace in Melbourne.

Then we took helicopters from the top of the mountain down to the airport.

Then we took a private plane from Queenstown to Wellington. In the seat pockets were costumes and sunglasses that made the ride a heck of a lot of fun.

Then we were met by a team of people dressed as 1950's journalists with flashbulbs swarming the bartenders like paparazzi. We made our way through the crowd and into ridiculous stretch Hummer limos to the hotel. What a way to travel.

More updates to come…

March 25, 2010
The New Sweet

The story on cocktail sweeteners I wrote for the April/May issue of Fine Cooking magazine is now online.

You can read it here.

March 14, 2010