Category: distilling

A Visit to La Caravedo, Home of Pisco Porton, in Ica, Peru

Hacienda La Caravedo is the oldest working distillery in the Americas and the place where they make Pisco Porton. It's located in Ica, Peru, about a four hour drive south of Lima. I visited in the spring of 2014.

The distillery dates to 1684. Below is a picture of the document establishing the distillery.

The grounds hold the distillery, vineyards, and this huge house, which is newly-constructed.

You might recognize it from the bottle label. The house belongs to the owners of the brand. They were preparing for Easter when I visited so I didn't get to peep inside.

The vineyards are located between the house and the Andes mountains you can see in the background.

The Old Part of the Distillery

The distillery is an imaginative combination of the very old part dating to the 1600s and a very new part dating back a couple of years.

The original distillery was all run by gravity. A schematic from the Porton brand book is below. The process goes grapes to juice to resting to fermentation to distillation to resting again.

The grapes would come in from the winery and be carried up the stairs into a large circular pit with drains. That shallow (a few feet deep) pit is under the central round canopy in the picture below.

People would stomp on the grapes to release the juice, which would flow down to the next level for resting and fermentation.

Then in the part where the square canopy is, grapes would be further crushed using the old grape screw press.

The grape juice ran down into a set of vats. They would allow the juice to sit together with the grape skins for a day. Pisco Porton still does this step, which distiller Johnny Schuler says is unusual.

Then the juice is transferred to another adjacent vat and fermented. The below picture shows the maceration and fermentation vats in the old distillery.

From the fermentation vat, the wine flows through a channel over to the old stills. Somehow I didn't get a picture of the channel, but it's a small open cement trough that runs across the lawn at ground level.

The old style stills at La Caravedo and other distilleries are called falcas. The top of the stills are at ground level (where the wine runs in), and the bottom is a level down. These old-style stills don't have a bubble cap like a typical pot still; they're like big boxes with a pipe running out the side. On top they're just a big copper cap.

These particular copper falcas, built into the original distillery's footprint, are probably 150-200 years old.

The stills are wood-fired from below.

After the spirit comes off the still (from a pipe on the side rather than through a swan's neck like in a pot still) it passes into the next chamber, the condenser.

The condenser is just a big pool with a copper coil running through it. The vapor from the still condenses back into liquid as it travels around the coil deeper into the pool.

Here is a view from the top of the pool, which is at the same level as the top of the falca.

Then in the next chamber down at the bottom of the pit the spirit is received. From a full distillation of 1500 liters, they produce 450 liters of pisco puro or 250 liters of pisco mosto verde (more on that in another post).

Peruvian pisco is distilled a single time, not twice like almost every other spirit in the world.

In the olden days, pisco would then have been rested in botijas, the ceramic/clay vases seen in every pisco distillery (often just for decoration now that we have cement and stainless stell).

The New Part of the Distillery

The new part of the distillery is a tall building of cement and glass, located across a small courtyard from the grape press structure. This is a view of the new distillery from the top of the grape press.

The fountain in the picture isn't just an aesthetic touch. The water used to cool the condensing steam from distillation heats up and needs to be cooled. At La Caravedo, they shoot that hot water up the fountain to cool in the air, a trick I haven't seen used at any other distillery.

Inside the distillery are rows of huge stainless steel tanks. These hold the fermenting wine.

On either side of the distillery are gargantuan cement tanks for holding the distilled pisco. Pisco always rests after distillation. In the old days, it rested in the ceramic botijas jugs. These cement tanks, which are on the outsides of the distillery to catch the sun, are meant to mimic the resting in botijas.

The still room is enclosed by glass. The stills are traditional copper pot stills, with round caps on top. Thus these produce a different spirit than the old-style falcas.

So, now we know the two ways that pisco is distilled and rested at La Caravedo in the modern and ancient distilleries on the property. In the next post we'll look at how these technologies are combined to give us the mosto verde blend of Pisco Porton. [Here is the post.]

Below are some more pictures from the grounds and my awesome day at the distillery.

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How Pisco Porton is Blended

January 6, 2015
Enzymes in Spirits: What Are They and What Do They Do?
In the process of making many types of alcohol enzymes are used, but I didn't know very much about them. So I decided to do some reading and share what I've learned. Or what I think I've learned anyway.

Enzymes are used in spirits production before fermentation. They are used to expose fermentable sugars in base ingredients so that they can be fermented by yeast. For example, a raw potato with yeast added to it won't produce potato beer (or not much of it). But when heated and with enzymes added then it will.

Let's review spirits production:
1. The base ingredient is prepared for fermentation. This can be as simple as crushing a grape or stalk of sugar cane, but many other raw ingredients must be prepared by methods such as malting (barley), baking (agave), heating in water (many things, called 'mashing' in whisky), and/or adding enzymes.
2. The ingredient now has its fermentable sugars exposed, so yeast can do its job and convert these sugars into alcohol.
3. The result is a beer/wine with a low percentage of alcohol.
4. The beer/wine is concentrated through distillation.
What Are Enzymes?
- Catalysts that perform and speed up chemical reactions. They are present in biological cells. They do a lot of work in nature.
- They convert molecules into other molecules. An example of this is the enzyme lactase, which breaks a lactose down into two glucose molecules. People who are lactose-intolerant do not produce the enzyme lactase so they can't process lactose.
- Enzymes aren't fuel for reactions – they're not consumed by the reaction they catalyze.
- Enzyme activity can be affected by environmental things like temperature, pH, and pressure. (For most fermentable materials, the mash of hot water and raw material is heated to very specific temperatures so that the enzymes will work.)
The enzymes are B,C,and D in this illustration. The material A is broken up. Source.

Common Uses for Enzymes

Some easy-to-understand cases where enzymes are used:
- In meat tenderizers that break down proteins into smaller proteins, making it easier to chew.
- In stain removers to break down fats or proteins on clothing.
- In digestion. From Wikipedia, "An important function of enzymes is in the digestive systems of animals. Enzymes break down large molecules (starch or proteins) into smaller ones, so they can be absorbed by the intestines. Starch molecules, for example, are too large to be absorbed from the intestine, but enzymes hydrolyze the starch chains into smaller molecules, which can then be absorbed."
Enzymes in Beer Production

The website HomeBrewTalk.com has a great, detailed chapter on enzymes in fermentation. They lay out how grains for beer are often mashed (heated with water) to two different temperatures.

Mashing is the process in which the milled grain is mixed with water. This activates enzymes that were already present in the barley seed or have been formed during the malting process. These enzymes work best in particular temperature and pH ranges. By varying the temperature of the mash, the brewer has control over the enzyme activity.

In barley starch makes up 63% – 65% of the dry weight. Starch is a polysaccharide (very large chains of glucose) which is insoluble in water. Brewer's yeast, however, can only ferment monosaccharides (glucose, fructose), disaccharides (maltose, sucrose) and trisaccharides (matotriose).

In order for that starch to be converted into water soluble sugars (fermentable and unfermentable), two processes need to happen. First the starch is gelatenized to become water soluble. For starch found in barley and malt this happens above 140ºF (60ºC). Secondly the activity of the amylase enzymes break the long chained starch molecules into shorter chains.

Enzymes in Scotch Whiskey

The malting process in scotch whiskey is a process to expose enzymes. To make malted barley, the dried grains are soaked in water so that the seeds just start to sprout, then the grain is dried to halt the process. Then when the grain is later mashed (has hot water added to it), the enzymes will convert the starches in the grains into fermentable sugars.

According to Ian Wisniewski in Michael Jackson's Whiskey,

"Growth hormones released by the grain also trigger the creation and release of enzymes that begin breaking down the cell walls and protein layers, in order to access the starch… The enzymes collectively termed 'diastase,' include alpha-amylase and beta-amylase (the latter is already present in barley). These enzymes are essential for the subsequent conversion of starch into fermentable sugars during the subsequent process of mashing."

Enzymes Used in Many Spirits

In other spirits, enzymes are added, which saves the malting step or speeds the natural reaction with enzymes naturally present. This is true in bourbon (from corn), in other spirits from grain (like vodka), and for potato vodka.

Most bourbon mashbills (recipes) contain a certain portion of malted barley. This is because the malted barley provides the rest of the batch with enzymes needed to break down the material into simpler sugars. However, in modern times many (if not all) major bourbon producers also add enzymes to the corn, wheat/rye, and malted barley mashbill to speed things up.

A good overview of the chemistry of this and list of enzymes available for purchase can be found on this IM biotech company site.

A Word on Karlsson's Vodka

I'm doing a research project on potatoes for Karlsson's Vodka, which I visited a few years ago.

From the few potato vodka distilleries that I have visited, it seems that adding enzymes is standard in the process of preparing potatoes for fermentation. So I used this project as an excuse to learn more about enzymes.

If you think about a raw vs. cooked potatoes, they get a bit sweeter after you cook them so we can guess that heat helps break down the starch into sugars- at least partially. Enzymes help with the rest.

Karlsson's uses "virgin new potatoes" to produce their vodka. These are very small, skinless potatoes that are full of flavor that translates into the final spirit.
October 7, 2014
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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July 11, 2014
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 genever

In 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 Differentiation

Bruce 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 genever

Joseph 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 It

Yet 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 California

The 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.
July 9, 2014
A Preview of Bombay Sapphire’s New Distillery

This fall the new Bombay Sapphire distillery will open at the site of Laverstoke Mill in Hampshire, about 2 hours' drive from London.

While I was in town for the Most Imaginative Bartender competition we visited the site, still very much under construction (and thus, no pictures allowed). You can see a few more pictures on this Google image search though.

Laverstoke Mill is a former paper mill that used to make bank notes for the Church of England, though archivists have found that there has been a mill of one type or another on the site nearly-continuously since the year 903.

Eco-Forward

It is situated on a small river that runs right through the middle of it. The river turns a horizontal water wheel (now being repaired) that will help power the new distillery.

The water wheel is one of several sustainable design features. The distillery in general is powered by a biomass boiler. It is fueled with scrap wood chips, as well as the spent botanicals from distillation.

The heads and tails of distillation are sold off to be used for pharmaceutical and other purposes, as is quite standard.

They also plan for rainwater harvesting and to use photovoltaic cells for additional energy from the environment.

They cool water from the condensor (cool water washes through it and heats up) by piping it outside and running it through a radiator-type thing to release some heat into the air. Spare heat from the distillation is used to heat the two greenhouses.

About Those Green Houses

The distillery has an on-site horticulturalist overseeing the two swirly 14-meters-high greenhouses (or glass houses, as they call them) that were in the middle of construction while I was there. One will be kept at a Temperate climate; the other a Tropical one. With these two climate settings, they'll be able to grow all ten botanicals used in Bombay Sapphire: juniper berries, corriander, angelica, lemon peel, bitter almonds, orris root, cassia bark, licorice root, cubeb berries, and grains of paradise.

People will be able to walk through the greenhouses and the river runs around the outside, so it's as if they're seated in the river.

The Site

There are actually two sets of stills, a giant brand-new pair, and a pair dating back to the 1800s. Both will be operating.

On the grounds there are outdoor areas for seating or walking, a gift shop (but they assure us they'll only sell gin and bar supplies, not key rings and tchotchkes).

The small river has not only trout in it, but it's visited by otters and kingfishers. To lead themselves around the distillery, guests will have a map that with hidden ink that shows up in light, and a built-in RFID chip so that exhibits will speak to them in their chosen language.

The heritage building has a small event space bar and an open bar downstairs for visitors, so there are a lot of large and small spaces both for public and private events.

How Bombay Sapphire is Made

Like nearly all gins, the process starts with neutral grain spirits purchased from other distilleries – basically high-proof vodka. This is brought to Laverstoke in 30,000 liter trucks, which take an hour to offload. This amount of spirit lasts for about 3 days of making gin. The raw spirit comes in about 96.3% ABV but they water it down to 80% before distillation.

Bombay Sapphire is made with "vapor infusion." This means that unlike many gins, the botanicals do not soak with the neutral spirit in the still. Rather, dried botanicals sit on perforated trays in a column. The steam from the boiling alcohol passes through these trays and picks up the botanical notes. Then the steam passes into the condenser, where it is cooled back into liquid. Here is a blueprint-quality scale diagram of the stills I drew.

We had a look into the column where the vapor infusion takes place. The trays are large- let's guess 5 feet accross- and several of them are stacked atop each other. Each tray contains one or more botanicals, neatly arranged.

The heads cuts in distillation are done by nose – the distiller waits until a fresh citrus aroma comes off the stills during distillation. The cuts, however, are always done at 65% ABV (as long as it still has a good aroma at that point.)

Distillation lasts about 10 hours in total. Starting this month they'll run the stills 24 hours a day to keep up with demand.

After distillation, the gin is at 86% alcohol. It then leaves Laverstoke in trucks, where it is sent to a bottling facility in Warrington. There it is reduced to bottle strength and put in bottles (duh).

So that's what I know for now. I look forward to seeing it when it opens.

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June 30, 2014
A Visit to the Kilbeggan Distillery in Ireland
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:
- Greenore Single Grain – an Eight year old grain (column distilled) whiskey
- Kilbeggan – a blend of Cooley grain whiskey and malt whiskey distilled at Kilbeggan
- Kilbeggan 18 Year, which has been discontinued
- Kilbeggan Distillery Reserve Malt, which is aged 3-4 years ina quarter cask
- Tyrconnel, apparently the biggest selling Irish whiskey in the US before Prohibition. It is a single malt that is finished in casks: Madeira, port, or sherry. All of them are 46% non chill filtered
- Connemara, which is the peated Irish whiskey made at Cooley. It is 100% peated single-malt with no age statement. It's peated to just 14 ppm phenol but since the whiskey is so light the peat has a stronger effect. They use 4, 6, and 8 year old whiskies in the blend.
- Connemara Turf Mor, which is a heavily peated (54 ppm) single malt aged 3 years and sold at cask strength
- Connemara Bog Oak – a blend of 3 year Turf More and 18 year Connemara that are married in a barrel with "bog oak" cask ends
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.
February 3, 2014
Distillery Visit: Bushmills in Ireland

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.

January 10, 2014
Buffalo Trace: A Second Visit to the Distillery

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…

December 24, 2013
Jim Beam’s Newish Distillery Tour
I've been to the Beam distillery three times now. I wrote about my first visit in 2008 here, with an additional post about the bottling line. Then I stopped by for another brief visit in 2012 where I got a preview of some of the outdoor displays as part of the new visitors' center.

In early 2013, I revisited the Jim Beam distillery during my visit for the Bourbon Classic, held in Louisville. In 2014 the Bourbon Classic will be held on January 31 and February 1.

This time, the new visitors' center, called the Jim Beam American Stillhouse, was fully operational and we went on a really cool tour. I'm not sure if this is the same tour offered to everyone or not, but it quite likely was.

As I learned on previous visits, the actual distillery is quite industrial and not super pretty, so they built a new microdistillery where they do small batch versions of bourbon. It makes 1 barrel batches at a time.

They took us through a room where we'd put a scoop of grains into the cooker and saw the small column still, so we were able to see the whole production process though not the actual equipment used to produce Beam for the most part.

But anyway, here are some things I learned:
- The mash is 6% ABV after fermentation
- They use 41% sour mash. Other distilleries I visited used roughly 33%. I do not know what the difference that makes in the flavor of the final bourbon.
- The cooked mash goes through over a mile of pipes before fermentation to chill it without using tons of electricity.
- The fermentation process takes 3 days.
- Their fermenters are closed-top rather than open
- The big column still has 23 plates. It is 5 feet wide and 5 storeys tall.
- They distill to 125 proof in the column still, then to 135 proof in the doubler.
- They fill 300,000 barrels every year and have 1.8 million barrels in storage.
- They give their barrels a #4 char
- The whiskey goes into barrels at 125 proof, which is the maximum
- There are 72 warehouses where they age whiskey, 28 of them are on-site at the distillery
While this post focuses on production, between the microdistillery, outdoor displays, visitors' center, and new restaurant on site, the Jim Beam distillery has gone from an industrial distillery to a great tourist attraction.
December 12, 2013
Four Roses Bourbon Distillery: A Second Visit

In 2008 I first learned about Four Roses Bourbon and its history. Then in 2010 I had the chance to visit the distillery and wrote it up here.

In early 2013 on a trip to the Bourbon Classic event in Louisville I had a chance to visit a second time. These are some notes from that visit.

Four Roses fills 280 barrels per day, a drop in the bucket compared with other bourbon brands.

Their corn currently comes from Indiana and rye from Denmark. The grains are smashed up with a hammer mill before cooking. In the cooking process first they add corn and cook it, then cool it and add rye, then cool it more and add malted barley.

They have 23 fermentation vats and ferment for 75-90 hours depending on the season. About 25 to 30 percent of the fermenting mash is "backset" aka "sour mash" – the solids that come out of the still of the previous batch.

The water they use comes from the local river, and they have to stop production if the river water gets too low or too hot in the summer.

They distill it to 132 proof in the column still, then up to 137-140 proof in the doubler (which is like a continuous pot still – see this post for more info). Unlike other bourbon distilleries I've seen, the doubler at Four Roses looks like a traditional pot still with a lyne arm rather than just an oval container with no swan's neck at all.

The whiskey is then diluted to 120 proof before aging in the barrel. 125 proof is the legal limit for this.

So hopefully with this post, plus the previous ones on blending and brand history, a fuller picture of Four Roses comes to be.

December 10, 2013