Category: germany

A Visit to the Monkey 47 Distillery in Germany’s Black Forest
About a year and a half ago I visited the Monkey 47 gin distillery in Germany's Black Forest area. Today I'm finally writing about it.

The distillery is located in southwest Germany, with the closest city being Stuttgart. I pictured a distillery in the Black Forest to be a dark, densely forested area opening up to a house in the woods like Hansel and Gretel, but the distillery is really more of a farmhouse amongst fields. (It's a former dairy farm.) There is a bee house on the property and a small garden. It's very peaceful there.

According to our hosts, there are about 28,000 microdistilleries in the region.

Monkey 47 has 47 botanicals distilled into it. That's a lot. The base is a molasses-based alcohol from France.

Ingredient notes:
- They use fresh peeled grapefruits and lemons- no pith. They eat the grapefruits and some of the lemons are used to make biogas.
- The juniper comes from Croatia or Tuscany. It is ground up before macerating.
- Angelica seed is also ground up.
- A 'pepper mix' of cardamom, cubeb, and grains of paradise are mixed and grinded in a secret ratio.
- Ground botanicals are stored in plastic boxes until use.
- Other botanicals include lemongrass, corriander, angelica, orris root, spruce tips, raspberry leaves, acacia, and lots of lavender, which should be clear if you've tasted it.
For maceration, the neutral 96.4% ABV spirit is diluted down to 70%.

Lingonberries go into the maceration barrel first, as they can stay a long time in the spirit without over-extracting. The rest of the botanicals macerate for 36 hours before being distilled.

Each of the blue barrels makes 120, 500ml bottles of gin. Each barrel has about 25 liters of alcohol in the 60L bucket- they're not filled all the way.

After maceration, one bucket is dumped into a still and then water is added to fill it to 100 liters. The system is pretty efficient: one bucket to one still to one batch.

Additional botanicals are put in a botanical basket in the steam section of the still – fresh lavender and lemon peels, not sure if anything else.

You may have seen a picture of the stills before – it's a gorgeous custom-made set-up with four stills.

They can make 6 distillation runs per day per still, or 24 total distillation runs per day. It takes a little over an hour to distil. Each distillation run produces 25-30 liters of 88% ABV spirit. After distillation, only water is added, no additional neutral alcohol (making this a "single-shot" gin).

After distillation, they flush out the solids from the still. These solids are also used to produce biogas.

After being distilled, the spirit at full proof is rested for 90 days in these large urns before being diluted and bottled. The dilution process, which takes place at the bottling plant, is slow and takes place over 10 days. The product is bottled at 47% ABV, which is above the level that it would louche, so the gin is not chill-filtered.

In addition to the flagship gin, they produce annual Distiller's Cut bottlings with different botanicals added to the mix.

All told, I had this strange vision in my head that Monkey 47 was going to be this blend of Black Forest eau de vies made in wooden shack by a wizard, and that turns out not to be the case at all. The overall procedure is pretty standard for gin with some tweaks such as the fresh-peeled citrus and long maceration time before distillation. So what makes this gin unique is not so much its rustic location, but the recipe.

After the distillery visit, we spent the night in an amazing big Bavarian-style lodge nearby. Here are just a couple pics of that. I love this part of the world, but then again I haven't seen it in the winter.
February 21, 2019
Gamsei, A Hyperlocal Molecular Mixology Bar in Munich

I've been bursting waiting for the Saveur 100 issue to come out so I could write more about Gamsei, a bar I visited in Munich this fall and included in the January issue of the magazine.

The story is now online at Saveur.com, with a lot more info below.

Gamsei comes from Matt Bax, the founder/co-founder of Der Raum and Bar Americano in Melbourne and Tippling Club in Singapore.

From the write-ups of Gamsei, it sounded like a place with a lot of rules (you have to wear slippers inside, no sugar in the drinks, no photos allowed) but much of that was either incorrect or more like a general policy than a rule.

The seating in Gamsei is on bleacher-style steps on either side of the central "bar", which is more of a low counter like you'd find in a science lab. Those slippers are for people who sit on the upper levels, so their muddy/wet shoes won't drip on the people below them.

I had also heard all about the hyper-local vision of the bar but not about the high-tech aspect of it. I was expecting a simplistic Japanese take on in-season cocktails, so the rotovap and liquid nitrogen came as a pleasant surprise.

Really, what Bax has done is just taken the idea of preserving local bounty and given it an exciting update. The bartenders forage in the forests (he said he checks with a plant expert to make sure certain things aren't poison before using them) and buy stuff at farmers' markets in season and use them fresh or preserve them using old-world techniques like fermentation, syrup-making, kombuchas, drying, etc. as well as new-world techniques like running infusions through the Rotavap so that they never spoil and flash-freezing other ingredients with liquid nitrogen.

As mentioned in the story, my favorite drink was the Lindenbluten, a local "lime blossom" (not the citrus tree) leaf and flowers frozen into an ice cube, and that ice cube used to chill and flavor house-carbonated local vermouth. Simple, elegant, beautiful. (But a terrible picture, sorry.)

At service, you get a mix of simple-looking drinks as well as some of the tricks you might expect from Bax – liquid nitrogen, beer foam, a drink in a flask. I had one that came with a a puff of cotton candy ("candy floss" to our European friends) that you use to sweeten a cocktail made with caraway liqueur, brandy, and riesling.

That puffy thing is cotton candy that you add to the cocktail to sweeten it.

All-in-all, the philosophy isn't that complicated and the rules aren't that strict. It's a unique set-up for a cool bar concept. Absolutely worth a visit when you find yourself in Munich. (And Munich is pretty darn worth a visit on its own- I've gotta get back there soon.)

Here's the menu from that day:

The arrows direct you from lighter starter drinks to richer heavier ones.

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January 14, 2014
Berlin Cocktail Snake

I'm in Berlin, Germany blogging for the bar show Bar Convent Berlin. I had a few extra hours today, so I decided to see some of the city. I visited a remaining portion of the Berlin Wall, passed by some sausage stands, had a beer, and saw the sign for the famous cocktail snakes.

The cocktail snakes have a rich history dating back to Second Reich, but were largely unknown outside of the Eastern part of Berlin until after Reunification in 1957.

Today they are some of the most popular tourist destinations in all of Germany, with signs on many street corners directing enthusiasts to the nearest snake bar, known as Snackbarleichten. (American tourists are often confused by the name, expecting to find a snack bar but receiving a poisonous bite instead. Because of the resulting lawsuits, German parliament passed a resolution in 2003 requiring all snake bars to stock plenty of antidote and have nurses on staff.)

In the traditional Snackbarleichten, the snakes are kept in a glass aquarium with an open top at the same level as the bar counter. The bartender ("snackfrau") pours cocktails in oversized glasses; typically a blend of the local schnapps with sugar and a drop of fresh mouse blood. She puts the drink on the bar and then the wait begins.

Eventually one of the snakes will coil itself around the cocktail glass and reach its forked tongue in for a sip of the drink. The snake will take only a few slurps, becoming instantly intoxicated and passing out coiled around the stem of the glass. (Cold-blooded animals have no livers, so alcohol goes directly to the brain.) Only after the snake has fallen asleep do you get your turn to drink- with a straw so you don't wake the snake.

Recently some modern snake bars have opened to cater to the younger generation. These venues (called "ultrasnackbarleichten") house only specially-bred albino snakes that glow in the nightclub-style black light. There, the mouse blood is replaced with Red Bull and the snakes do not sleep, but jitter in a rhythmic motion to the industrial dance music piped in over loudspeakers.

Anyway, that's what I was imagining on my walk following the cocktail snake sign to see what could possibly be at the end of it. Turns out, it's a pharmacy.

I didn't ask if they carried anti-venom kits.

October 2, 2010