Category: distilling

Distillery Visit: Town Branch Distillery in Lexington, Kentucky

In early 2013 I visited the Town Branch Distillery in Lexington, Kentucky. At the time it was the newest addition to the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.

My visit was part of the Bourbon Classic, a great event that is taking place in 2014 on Jan 31 and Feb 1.

The distillery goes by a lot of names, so let me try to clarify as best as I understand it. The Town Branch Distillery is owned by the Lexington Brewing & Distilling Company, which is a division of Alltech.

Alltech is a huge international company dealing with yeast and I believe that yeast is primarily used in animal feed supplements. The company was created by Dr. Pearse Lyons, who studied brewing at Guinness and Harp in his early days. So the yeast connection all makes sense.

Before the distillery part of the operation was created, they began making beer here. The flagship brand is Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale, which is aged for six weeks in ex-bourbon barrels. It's only available in a handful of states, and I recommend trying it if you can get your hands on some.

Model display of brewery/distillery

Distilling

The distillery was added on to the small brewery and is the stills are housed in a glass-walled room with gleaming copper pots.

With the exception of Woodford Reserve, all the major bourbons in the US are made in continuous column stills. At Woodford, they distill three times in copper stills. The first distillation primarily separates the solids in the fermented mash from the liquids (alcohol and water), then the second and third distillation separate most of the water and impurities from the alcohol.

At Town Branch, there are just two pot stills. The reason they don't need a third distillation is that the mash (beer) doesn't contain solids. (Note that in Scotland they also distill twice, but they have a step where they remove the solids from the beer that they don't usually do in the US.) Town Branch uses something called 'gelatinized corn' as a raw ingredient that they don't have to grind up and cook, unlike most distilleries.

The Town Branch Bourbon uses a grain recipe of 72% corn, 15% malted barley, and 13% rye. In the fermentation process they use enzymes and after this is done there are almost no solids left in the mash.

The Pearse Lyons Reserve in a single malt, so it uses all malted barley.

The beer, which is fermented to around 8% alcohol, is distilled to 28-30% on the first distillation and up to 67-68% on second distillation.

After distillation, the Pearse Lyons Reserve ages in new barrels, used barrels, and wine barrels. The cool thing about the used barrels is that they were the ones used for the beer, so in fact they were used once for bourbon, then once for beer, then again for the single-malt.

The Pearse Lyons Reserve single-malt is aged for nearly 4 years, and the Town Branch is aged for 3.5 years at minimum. They also make a coffee-infused bourbon called Bluegrass Sundown. They use this in a version of the Irish Coffee at the on-site tasting room by adding boiling water and cream on top.

This visit was a great chance to see a small-batch distillery making American whiskey a different way along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.

Related articles

A Doubled Jameson – A Return Visit to the Midleton Distillery in Ireland

The Wide Variety of Irish Whiskey Made at Midleton

December 9, 2013
All About Absolut Elyx and “Sacrificial Copper”

Absolut Elyx is the newish, high-end expression of Absolut vodka. On a trip this past winter to Ahus, Sweden, where Absolut is made, we took a day to learn about Elyx.

Elyx is a single-estate vodka made in Absolut's old distillery (the new one is only 5 years old), in amazing copper column stills dating to 1921. I wish I had more pictures to share but they weren't allowed on our tour.

The winter wheat for Absolut Elyx is grown on an estate named Rabelof. Rabelof is located near Ahus, and everything for the vodka comes from within a 25km radius of the town. Here's a picture of a wheat field.

Like regular Absolut, the water comes from the large aquifer beneath Ahus.

The first distillation of the wheat is actually done at Absolut's newer distillery in Nobbelov. There, they use the same yeast and the same two first columns to distill Elyx.

The old distillery, scanned from a brand book they gave us.

Sacrificial Copper

In the tops of the column stills, they add "sacrificial copper." I recently learned and shared how in column distillation, copper is very important, but only needs to be present in certain parts of the distilation process in a column still.

From my understanding, the first stage of distillation is stripping out the liquids from the solids, and then the alcoholic vapors are refined often within the same column. This happens at the top of the column in a bourbon still, where you'd find "bubble caps". Bubble caps are a method of adding more copper into the process, and copper combines with sulphurous compounds so that they don't make it into the final spirit.

Beyond bubble caps, some distillers use a version of Brillo pads (shredded copper) in their stills. At Absolut they use small segments of copper pipe that are further punctured increase surface area exposed to the alcohol. They use this sacrificial copper in regular Absolut, but apparently for Elyx they use new ones for every distillation run.

After the first distillation (in the first two columns) at Nobbelov, the 85% alcohol spirit then travels to the old distillery at Ahus. There it is rectified in column stills dating to 1921. This part of the distillery is rather gorgeous, with huge tall copper columns with wooden insulator jackets surrounding them. The building is filled pre-computer analogue dials, gauges, old pumps, leather belts, and big piston engines.

Here, the spirit is distilled in one extraction column, two rectification columns, and in two methanol columns. As at the new distillery, there is also a recovery column that recycles waste products.

Absolut Elyx is bottled at 42.3% ABV.

Related articles

A Doubled Jameson – A Return Visit to the Midleton Distillery in Ireland

How Column Distillation Works: Multi-Column Rum and Vodka Edition

November 19, 2013
The Wide Variety of Irish Whiskey Made at Midleton
Jameson, Redbreast, Green Spot, Midleton Very Rare, Powers John Lane, Paddy: These Irish whiskeys and more are all made at one distillery: Midleton in County Cork, Ireland.

On a recent trip the distillery for a big celebration (I wrote about that here), I learned more about the differences between various products, and gained some perspective on where Irish whiskey sits in with other products.

To hugely oversimplify what are the constants and what changes in different types of whiskey:
- Single-malt scotch whisky is made from 100% malted barley and distilled in pot stills. They typically make one distillate, and the single malts that come from a single distillery are differentiated by how long they're aged and in what type of barrels they're aged (ex-bourbon, sherry, etc.)
- Many bourbon distilleries focus on a single mash bill (blend of grains) that they distill in column stills into a single distillate. Since it's all aged in new American oak casks, the various bourbons that come out of a single distillery are differentiated by their length of aging and final proof of the spirit.
- For Japanese whisky, they use many different shapes of still as well as many different types of barrels and often buy grain at different peating levels. They have a lot of different whiskies aging that they blend to make both blended and single-malt products.
There are big exceptions to all of the above.

For Irish whiskey, there are three main distilleries. Midleton makes triple-distilled malted/unmalted pot still whiskey (called "pot still" on its own and "single pot still" when it comes from one distillery) as well as column distilled grain whiskey. Bushmills makes triple-pot-distilled malt whiskey ("single malt") that they sometimes blend with Midleton's column still whiskey. And Cooley makes double-pot-distilled malt whiskey ("single-malt") and column still grain whiskey. [See this blog post for a handy chart.]

But just looking within Midleton, they don't make just one triple-distilled pot still whiskey; they make four. I believe these are designated internally as light, two different medium ("mod pot"), and a heavy. These are made by different variations on the mash bills (ratio of malted to unmalted barley), how high they distill to, and where they cut heads and tails in the distillation.

They use these distillates in different ratios in the final products. That's why the Single Pot Still Irish Whiskeys made at Midleton can have such distinct personalities, despite all sharing certain characteristics such as apple and butter notes. They're made from any of four malt/unmalted pot still whiskies, aged for a different number of years in different types of barrels, and bottled at different proofs.

From one distillery comes many options.

Blends:
- Jameson
- Jameson 12 Year Old
- Jameson 18 Year Old
- Jameson Gold Reserve
- Jameson Signature Reserve
- Jameson Select Reserve
- Jameson Rarest Vintage Reserve
- Paddy
- Midleton Very Rare
Single Pot Still
- Redbreast 12 Year Old
- Redbreast 15 Year Old
- Redbreast 12 Year Old Cask Strength
- Green Spot
- Yellow Spot
- Powers John's Lane Release
- Midleton Barry Crockett Legacy
November 13, 2013
A Doubled Jameson – A Return Visit to the Midleton Distillery in Ireland
A couple of months ago I returned to the Midleton distillery in Cork, Ireland, for a party they were throwing to celebrate the newly-expanded facility.

I wrote a one-page story about it for November's issue of Tasting Panel magazine, which you can read here (digital magazine, go to page 149), but I have more to say than just that.

I last visited the Midleton distillery in early 2011 (as well a a stop into the former distillery and current visitor's experience in Dublin). A write-up on that visit is here on Alcademics.

The Midleton Distillery looks like it did a few years ago with the exception of gleaming new column stills and the new Garden Stillhouse. These are the new column stills:

(On all pictures on this post, click the thumbnails on top for a larger picture below)
The existing stillhouse (where the pot stills are based) holds four pot stills, which are used to make all the triple-distilled pot still products, as well as the pot still part of the Jameson blended whiskies.

The brand new Garden Stillhouse, enclosed in glass, holds three new pot stills so that they can nearly double capacity- and it has room for three more to be installed within a few years. (That's how fast Jameson is growing, folks.)
Each of the copper pot stills holds 80,000 liters. As you should be able to tell from the pictures, they're pretty huge. The stills are used for the same thing each time: there is a Wash still, a Feints still, and a Spirit still for the first, second, and third distillation.

I was curious as to how they're all the same size, since they're cutting heads and tails during each distillation. It turns out that they collect the result of each distillation in holding tanks before moving it to the next still, so they could add the results of 1.5 runs from the first still into the second distillation, for example.

In addition to the distillery expansion, they added an archives and a Whiskey Academy. We didn't get a chance to do an in-depth training but the Academy was really cool – there are a wall of mini-stills so students can actually distill whiskey there.
A second major reason for the celebration was that it was Master Distiller Barry Crockett's last official function. After 32 years with the company, he was retiring and handing the reigns to Brian Nation. Crockett was instrumental in moving the distillery operations from Dublin to Cork in the 1970s, as well as developing the Single Pot Still range that includes Redbreast, Green/Yellow Spot, Midleton Very Rare, and others.

To honor his career, they renamed the older stillhouse the Barry Crockett Stillhouse.

During the day of the celebration, they had guided whiskey tastings, food carts by local purveyors, inspirational talks by the likes of David Wondrich and Nick Strangeway. At night, they threw a hell of a party inside a barrel warehouse with food and music including The Chieftans.
So yeah, that was one heck of a party and a great return trip to the Midleton distillery. In a future post, I'll write a little more about the process of making Irish whiskey.

Related articles

Caring for Mini Barrels – Beware of Chlorine!

Drinking in the Czech Republic
November 11, 2013
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.

Related articles

How Column Distillation Works: Multi-Column Rum and Vodka Edition

Interview with a Water Sommelier
August 15, 2013
How Column Distillation Works: Pot-Column Still Edition

At the Tales of the Cocktail convention this year, I moderated a panel with three distillers who run column stills; one 5-column rum still, one continuous bourbon still, and one pot-column hybrid.

John Jeffrey is the Head Distiller for Death's Door Spirits. He makes vodka, rum, and white whiskey and will be releasing aged whiskey in the future. The below information is what I learned from John and on my visits to other distilleries.

They run what I've been calling a pot-column hybrid still, though I'm sure there must be a better name for it. There is a pot on the bottom and then it is attached to one or several columns depending on how they configure it.

Part of the reason I proposed the seminar for Tales is that I would see these types of stills (usually in start-up or small distilleries) and dismiss them as being column stills in another form; or working just like other column stills.

However, these stills, unlike those for bourbon and rum/vodka, are not continuous stills but rather batch stills. You make a batch, then start over with a new batch; as opposed to the other stills that can run 24/7 without stopping.

In some of these stills, solids and liquids (beer with grains, fermented fruit chunks, etc) are put into the pot on the bottom. The pot separates out the solids from the liquids, as well as separates out water from alcohol. The mostly-alcohol vapors then go up through the column for rectification.

Stripping Column

At Death's Door, they don't put solids in the pot still though. They employ a separate 'stripping column', which is basically a bourbon column that separates the solids from the liquids as well as concentrates the alcohol a bit. (The column is mostly stainless steel, but as we talked about in the bourbon column post, the copper is important to have in the top of the column – you can see in the picture that the top of the stripping column is copper.)

Stripping column at Death's Door Spirits. Note copper at top of column.

Making Whiskey, Vodka, and Gin on One Still

This liquid alcohol then goes into the pot and is distilled. It is run through different columns depending on what product they're making. For whiskey, they don't run the alcohol over a ton of plates in several columns to remove all the flavor. However, they want to increase the amount of time the liquid spends in contact with copper in the column, so they run the vapor through one or more columns with no plates inside.

Death's Door Spirits Stills

Jeffrey said that for aged whiskey, they wouldn't do this, as many of the congeners break down over time in the barrel. But as they make unaged white whiskey, they want to get rid of more of those congeners right from the start.

For gin, they do not put botanicals into the pot still, but instead pack them into a different column (circled in pink below). The alcohol alone passes through the pot and column on top of it, then the refined vapors pass through the botanical column.

Gin botanical column circled in pink. Stripping column circled in blue.

In order to make vodka, they want a high-proof, clean spirit. Thus they refine the alcohol through several of the columns with lots of plates in them – over 40 plates in all. The two columns on the right are used for their vodka.

So that's what I think I know about this type of still. If you have any questions, let me know and I'll try to get them answered.

Related articles

How Column Distillation Works: Bourbon Edition

How Column Distillation Works: Multi-Column Rum and Vodka Edition

A Visit to the Fernet-Branca Distillery in Buenos Aires, Argentina

August 2, 2013
How Column Distillation Works: Multi-Column Rum and Vodka Edition
At the Tales of the Cocktail convention this year, I moderated a panel with three distillers who run column stills; one 5-column rum still, one continuous bourbon still, and one pot-column hybrid.

Liza Cordero is the Process Director for DonQ rum, made at the Serralles distillery in Puerto Rico. She runs a pretty gigantic 5-column still. It makes DonQ rum and also custom products for other brands. The information below is from the seminar as well as what I've learned in my distillery visits around the world.

The stills that make DonQ Rum

In my last post, we discussed how bourbon is made in a single column. The single bourbon column specializes in being continuous (as opposed to a batch-run pot still) and separating the alcohol from the water and from the solids in the low-alcohol beer that is put into it.

In a 5+ column still, this is also what is happening, but just in the first column or two. (It seems that columns can be split or divided in two according to purpose, or in some cases just to keep the height down so that airplanes don't hit them.) The center columns are for refinement of the spirit. The final column is for recycling of waste alcohols.

I can't claim to fully understand what is happening in each of the three middle columns exactly (yet!) but between the seminar, a detailed description of Grey Goose, and two Absolut vodka distillery visits it seems that the columns do five different things:
- The first columns separate solids from liquids, and the alcohol from water. The alcohol can be partially refined in this column above the level at which the beer enters the still (as mentioned in the previous post).
- In one (or more) columns they dilute the newly-distilled spirit with water and redistil it, and remove certain components. This is hydro-selection.
- In another one (or two) rectification columns they take out other components – "high and low oils". At Grey Goose, this is split into two columns; one that uses pressure to separate components and another than uses a vacuum.
- One column removes methanol from the final spirit.
- Sometimes a final column captures waste alcohols pulled from other columns and processes them into a recyclable form.
So that's what I think I know about multi-column distillation for high-proof products like rum and vodka. If you have any questions, let me know and I'll try to get them answered.

Related articles

How Column Distillation Works: Bourbon Edition
August 1, 2013
How Column Distillation Works: Bourbon Edition

At the Tales of the Cocktail convention this year, I moderated a panel with three distillers who run column stills; one 5-column rum still, one continuous bourbon still, and one pot-column hybrid.

Kevin Curtis is the Distillery Operations Manager for Michter's Whiskey. This company is building a new distillery with a continuous column still. He filled me (and the audience) in on how bourbon stills work. The below post is a combination of information gleaned from distillery visits, books, and Kevin's information at Tales.

The Purpose of a Bourbon Still

As opposed to some other types of stills, for bourbon the focus is not on getting a pure alcohol out of the still. By law, bourbon must not be distilled to above 80% alcohol by volume. The focus seems to be more on the continuous and stripping nature of the column still, as opposed to a discontinuous (batch) pot still.

Scotch Vs. Bourbon Distillation

More on that: If you know about single-malt scotch whisky, you'll note that it goes through a copper pot still. However, only liquids go into the still. Grains are fermented into beer, just like in bourbon, but in scotch the solids are separated from the liquid beer before going into the pot stills. In bourbon, the solids and liquids go into the still together (in practice; there is no law about this). In a pot still, one would have to be careful that the solids didn't burn against the still, making it even harder to clean than just scooping out the leftover solids.

A bourbon column still thus performs two functions: It separates the solids from the liquids, and it separates the liquids into mostly-alcohol (to keep) and mostly-water (to recycle).

How Liquid and Steam Moves Inside a Column Still

As you probably know, a column still is filled with perforated plates. The beer to be distilled is pumped in near the top of the column (but not at the very top), and steam is pumped up from the bottom of the column. While the plates are perforated, this lets the steam come up through the still, but the beer does not drip down through these holes. Rather, the beer runs across each plate to the other side, flows down to the next plate and flow across it to the other side.

The steam coming up through the column vaporizes the alcohol from the beer (which then flows to the top of the column), while leaving the water and grain solids to keep dripping down to the bottom. (As in every still, it is tuned so that the alcohol that has a lower boiling temperature evaporates off, leaving the water with its higher boiling point behind.)

Artwork by Camper English

The Top Part of the Still

As I mentioned, the beer initially doesn't enter the very top of the still but near the top. Above that point in the still, the steam is being rectified on those plates. It is up there where copper is crucial, and where you find "bubble caps" in stills. More on those:

Column stills can be built from stainless steel but there needs to be interaction with copper at some point. In other stills (as we'll see in a future post), the part of the still where beer is being separated and distilled is stainless, and where the steam is being rectified there is copper.

Bubble caps provide additional refinement of the spirit and increase contact with copper. Some other stills (I learned this at Absolut) are filled at the top with bits of shredded copper or copper pieces that look like jacks for similar reasons.

This also makes it easier to replace the copper at the top of the still or inside the top when needed, rather than the whole still column that can last for decades.

The Doubler or Thumper in Bourbon Distillation

Most bourbon undergoes a second distillation in a continuous pot still called a doubler of a thumper. Sometimes it looks just like a regular pot still. In other distilleries, it looks just like a flat-topped metal container- you wouldn't know it's doing anything.

In a doubler, the vapor off the column still is condensed back into liquid and this is run through the pot still. In a thumper, the vapor itself goes into the still to be redistilled (and makes a thumping sound that I've never heard but I associate with the sound of radiator pipes clanging in East Coast apartment buildings).

This second distillation is needed to raise the proof of the distilled spirit a little further, and this can be done in a pot still because there are no longer any solids to worry about. The waste product of the doubler/thumper is additional water.

The only other place I can recall seeing continuous pot stills was in Jamaica for Appleton rum. According to my tour guide at Jack Daniel's, they do not run a second distillation through a thumber/doubler at all. (see comments for a dispute on this)

Update: I was given permission to post this bourbon still schematic. You'll see that the beer goes into the still at Plate 15, the new-make spirit is condensed and sent to the pot still (doubler), then recondensed before entering the High Wine Tank at the end.

Anyway, that's what I think I know about column distillation in bourbon. If you have any additional questions (or corrections!) please let me know. In future posts, we'll look at other types of column stills and see how they work.

Related articles

A Visit to the Fernet-Branca Distillery in Buenos Aires, Argentina

July 31, 2013
A Visit to the Fernet-Branca Distillery in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Back in April I visited the Fernet-Branca distillery outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Some of you may remember me tweeting about it. Well, it's about time I gave it the formal write-up.

Fernet-Branca owns two distilleries: the main one in Milan, Italy, and this one in Buenos Aires. In past years there used to be many Branca distilleries in different countries (including the US), but as global shipping has become easier this model makes the most sense.

Production began in Argentina around 1905 or 1908 and has continued ever since. The current distillery was built in 2000 and it already at full capacity.

Surprisingly, the Fernet-Branca we drink in the US is made in Milan. The Fernet-Branca made in Buenos Aires is consumed mostly in Argentina but also South/Latin America.

I didn't directly ask if the Fernet-Branca made in Buenos Aires is made to the exact same recipe, but if you compare them side-by-side you can tell it is not. The stuff made for the local market is less sweet than the international version (makes sense given that they always drink it with Coke, never on its own), and some bitter elements seemed to be different in a way I can't describe. Also, the proof was different than the international version but I believe recently has changed to conform with the Italian one.

They do, however, willingly admit that they use only three different ingredients than in Italy: The base alcohol is a local 95% ABV sugar cane distillate, and the sugar cane is local as well. The water is also local, coming from an underground river in the area. Another local ingredient used is chamomile, but the same flower is exported from here to be used in the Italian production as well.

Unfortunately pictures were not allowed in the distillery, so below is the verbal tour. I should also note that this is not a distillery at all: the base alcohol is distilled elsewhere. This is the blending and aging facility, but to make it easy I'll just call it a distillery.

Herbs and Spices

The first room we passed had the smell of caramel, and in fact that's where they were making the carmel coloring for Fernet, which they appeared to be doing by heating and stirring sugar in big tubs.

Most of the work in making Fernet-Branca is doing tons of separate infusions and macerations to get the flavor from the herbs, barks, roots, and spices into the spirit. Thus, the rooms that we walked through were full of different types of stainless steel tanks of a wide variety of shapes and sizes.

Some were small simple tanks, some were huge vats, some had stirrers and filters on them; some were sideways roller tanks that slowly rotate. Our guide told us that some ingredients are infused into alcohol; others into water. Some infuse separately; other ingredients are combined.

The longest infusion of any ingredient in Fernet-Branca is for 90 days, but our guide couldn't say which ingredient that was. We saw piles of burlap bags of chamomile, zedoria, and other spices from India, Spain, Africa, and Iran stacked in different rooms. Other herbs are kept in a refrigerated room. They store 2 years' worth of ingredients just in case there are any supply chain problems down the road.

Aging Fernet

Beneath the factory is a huge basement that stores tanks for aging Fernet-Branca. There are six cellars, plus two additional climate-controlled warehouses. These are full of gigantic wooden vats (one of them holds 100,000 liters!) aging the liqueur. Two of the smallest vats at the distillery date back to around 1908 and were used at the Italian distillery before being sent to Argentina.

Each tank ages separately, but before bottling they pour the Fernet-Branca into one tank that is connected to a series of other tanks by tubes. They only draw the finished product out of the last tank, so this is a way to marry and blend a great quantity of the Branca for consistency.

Production

The factory is running at full capacity making 4 million cases every year, and presently and they are expanding to double that over the next few years.

They also make Branda Menta here, Punt E Mes, and they bottle Borghetti coffee liqueur.

Drinking Fernet-Branca, Argentinean-Style

Mix it with Coke. They never drink Fernet-Branca on its own; I'd hazard a guess to say that almost nobody has ever even tried it neat there.

It's funny that to us Fernet and Coke sounds repulsive (while to them drinking Fernet-Branca neat sounds like drinking radiator fluid), yet it's not actually that bad. They seem to treat it like an everyday cocktail like a Gin & Tonic, but I actually didn't mind it as a digestif after a meal.

June 14, 2013
Essential Oils and Cointreau’s Centrifuge

In 2011 I visited the Cointreau distillery in Angers, France. I wrote about that here. After I returned I realized I had a few more questions.

Luckily, Cointreau's Master Distiller Bernadette Langlais was in San Francisco last night so I had a chance to clarify some questions about the centrifuge part of the process.

To recap, Cointreau is made by steeping orange peels in high-proof neutral beet sugar alcohol and distilling it. This 'raw alcoholate' is reduced with water, centrifuged, then reduced with more water, more neutral alcohol, and sugar before filtration and bottling.

The centrifuge step was curious to me, so I asked Langlais for some clarification. She told me that this step removes some essential oils from the alcoholate.

But then why not just use less oranges in the first place to have less essential oils?

It turns out that they use the centrifuge (which is a continuous centrifuge, by the way, not a batch process) to remove only certain essential oils. Surprisingly, they are not removing heavy ones that would collect at the outside of the centrifuge (a centrifuge separates by weight), but the lightest, zesty oils.

Langlais said this was so that there is a proper balance between the 'juicy' flavors and zesty ones in Cointreau. If they left everything in, the liqueur would be overwhelmingly zesty.

Local Sugars

I also brought up the topic of Cointreau in Brazil and Argentina, where it is made with sugar cane alcohol and cane sugar, instead of beet sugar. This is due to local tax regulations that would make Cointreau prohibitively expensive if they used their regular beet sugar. I learned that they make the same 'raw alcoholate' (high-proof orange-infused alcohol) at the distillery in France and ship that to the local countries. There, they add more (cane) alcohol and (cane) sugar before bottling.

Langlais said that it tastes the same as regular Cointreau. She also said that the sugar from cane or beets tastes exactly the same, and the more important part of the equation is the alcohol, even though it is 96% alcohol and supposedly neutral in flavor.

November 14, 2012