Recently I was speaking on a panel based around the era of David A. Embury's book The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, first published in 1948.
Then, they were coming out of Prohibition that ended in 1933 and World War II that ended in 1945.
He notes what coming out of an era of bad drinks into a good one is like:
Most of the present generation learned to drink and most of the present-day bartenders learned their profession during the past thirty-seven years. The first fourteen years of this period were devoted to the famous ‘experiment, noble in purpose,’ and the remaining years have not yet been sufficient to erase wholly the ignoble effects of that era.
During prohibition the overwhelming majority of available liquor consisted of bathtub gin and Scotch "just off the boat" (ferryboat from either Hoboken or Brooklyn).
So unutterably vile were these synthetic concoctions that the primary object in mixing a cocktail became the otherwise emollient and anti-emetic ingredients (cream, honey, Karo, canned fruit juices, etc.) to make it reasonably possible to swallow the resultant concoction and at the same time to retain a sufficient content of renatured alcohol to insure ultimate inebriety.
Just how much dilution of the "gin"-bottle content might be necessary to accomplish this supposedly salutary result depended largely on the intestinal fortitude and esophageal callosity of the particular individual involved.
During the talk, I mentioned how that was like drinking in 2001 or 2005 or so, when fresh ingredients were not the norm. That first fresh lime juice Margarita you had changed everything.
But also it's a lot like being a grown-up drinker as opposed to a college-aged one where you were trying to hide the taste of the liquor underneath brightly-colored sugary liqueurs.
At this year's Golden State of Cocktails in Los Angeles, I attended a seminar by Giuseppe Gallo called "The Truth About Vermouth."
I knew a few things having visited both Martini and Noilly Prat in the past (follow those links to my distillery visit posts), but learned a lot more about the history and legal categorization of vermouth during this talk.
Below are my notes. You can see most of this information on Giuseppe Gallo's Slideshare page as well.
The word "vermouth" is based on the word for wormwood.
Absinthe (also containing wormwood) is based on the Greek word for unpalatable, referring to wormwood's bitterness.
Wormwood-infused wines go way, way back.
The spice trade in the vermouth region was monopolized by Genova in Italy (bordering the Piedmont region in which Turin is located) and Marseille in France (across the bay from Noilly Prat's Marseillan)
Part of Piedmont and part of Southern France were both part of the Kingdom of Savoy at one time. Then the Chambery region (where Dolin was founded; interior of France, north of Marseille) was traded to France, and the capital of Savoy was moved to Turin (where Martini was founded). So both sweet and dry styles of vermouth can essentially be traced to one place.
The first commercial vermouth was Carpano, founded in 1786. Sweet-style vermouth. A legal decree made the official style of vermouth in Turin be the sweet "rosso" style.
Noilly Prat in Marseillan was a dry style of vermouth, founded in 1813. It helped make France the center of dry-style of vermouth.
The EU laws for vermouth (note all legal stuff below is based on the EU law, which is not the same as in the US) are here: EEC No 1601/91 and state
Must be at least 75% wine
Must use artemesia ( of which wormwood is a member) as the main bittering agent [edit: the actual language around it is "the characteristic taste of which is obtained by the use of appropriate derived substances, in particular of the Artemisia species, which must always be used"]
14.5% – 21% ABV
Must be fortified
Categories of Aromatized Wine (all have added alcohol and artemesia) are:
Vermouth – as above
Americano – with gentian as the main bittering agent, and orange peel
Bitter Wine – including Amer Picon. Gentian
Vino Chinato – quinine wine
Vino All'uovo – Marsala and wine-based egg liqueurs like Vuv
Geographical Indications for Vermouth Can Be:
Vermouth d Chambery
Vermouth di Torino (which uses wormwood from the Piedmont region, and produced and bottled within region)
Sugar quantities for vermouth are:
(a) 'extra-dry': in the case of products with a sugar content of less than 80 grams per litre;
(b) 'dry': in the case of products with a sugar content of less than 50 grams per litre;
(c) 'semi-dry': in the case of products with a sugar content of between 50 and 90 grams per litre;
(d) 'semi-sweet': in the case of products with a sugar content of between 90 and 130 grams per litre;
(e) 'sweet': in the case of products with a sugar content of more than 130 grams per litre.
Martini vermouth does all their infusions into neutral alcohol, not into the wine itself
Martini (sweet, I assume) vermouth lasts 28 months after bottling when closed, and up to 8 months in the refrigerator after being opened.
Last year while on a trip to Peru with Pisco Porton, we took a side trip to Las Islas Ballestas near the town of Paracas. The islands are important bird habitats, but more importantly they're covered in bird poop.
Peru is an exciting country for drink nerds like me, as it is the birthplace of the potato, pisco, and the cinchona tree that produces quinine for tonic water. I didn't realize until recently that it was also the birthplace of the international guano industry, perhaps the world's first exported industrial fertilizer.
Guano, the bird poop that covers these ocean islands, is high in nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium, according to this surprisingly rich guano history page on Wikipedia. It is such a good fertilizer that it was exported to Europe in an era of Peruvian history from the 1840s to the 1870s called The Guano Age.
(Much of the harvest of guano was performed by Chinese indentured servants, which is probably only interesting to me in that the same populations were dragged around the world to harvest sugar cane after slavery was abolished; another tie-in to the global booze business.)
Recently, DNA testing has revealed that the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52 may have been caused by new potato varieties imported along with Peruvian guano to Europe.
And the end of international potato blight was the development of even more agro-chemicals, this time synthetic ones designed to cure the potato of the disease.
History is amazing.
Here are some pictures from my visit to Las Islas Ballestas.
A few years back I wrote a long feature about the Blood and Sand cocktail, made with scotch, cherry brandy, orange juice, and vermouth.
It was written for the German magazine Mixology, but recently they have put the story online in the original English.
For the story I covered the origins of the drink as best as I could find them, and many variations of the drink. There is a large discussion of the best type of orange juice to use, alternates to sweet vermouth and Cherry Heering, and how to find out if your flamed orange peel is spitting wax and pesticides onto your drink.
There is a very common misconception that most or all vodka is made from potatoes. In reality it's a tiny fraction (I heard 1% at one point), while the rest is made mostly from grains (though some is from sugar byproducts, grapes, or even milk whey). I would love to know how this became the popular idea, but I don't think I'll be able to find out.
Interestingly, from my research the potato history books skim over the history of potatoes in vodka, and the vodka books do too. But I wanted to research when potatoes were used in vodka.
Potatoes didn't come to Europe from their native Peru until around the mid-1500s, yet the first printing of the word vodka is from 1405. Distillation preceded that by at least a couple centuries.
So the original vodka (which doesn't resemble today's crisp, clean version to be sure) was definitely not made from potatoes- grains and grapes had a big head start.
In Poland, "The late 18th century inaugurated the production of vodka from various unusual substances including even the carrot.[21]"
In Sweden, "Although initially a grain product, potatoes started to be used in the production in the late 18th century, and became dominant from the early 19th century.[28]"
According to the book Vodka: A Global History by Patricia Herlihy, "In the early nineteenth century, Poland introduced the plentiful potato as an alternative base ingredient…. Between 1843 and 1851 the European potato blight severely curtailed production."
According to Nicholas Faith and Ian Wisniewski in their 1997 book Classic Vodka, potatoes first came to Poland in 1683, it wasn't until after 1764 that they began transferred from the gardens of the rich to the food of the peasants.
According to the book The Vodka Companion: A Connoisseur's Guide by Desmond Begg, "Potatoes, a cheaper raw material than wheat at the time, were first used in distillation in the 1790s."
As we'll look at in closer detail in another post, Sweden and other Scandinavian countries underwent a long puritanical/temperance movement. As part of this, the government took control of all alcohol production. And it seems that because they thought of alcohol as evil (though sometimes a necessary one), they made it all with the then-lowest-quality ingredient they could find: potatoes.
According to Classic Vodka, "Potato vodka is still subject to a certain snobbery, as though it is a consolation spirit made in the bath-tub. This misconception can be traced back to a time when potatoes were the cheapest raw material for vodka, whereas today they are generally more expensive and labor-intensive than grain.
Karlsson's Note
The ideal potatoes for producing high quantities of raw alcohol would be large and have a high starch content, but Karlssson's vodka uses tiny heirloom varieties (seven of them) in their blend of Karlssson's Gold. These are less efficient, more expensive, and they certainly produce a flavorful spirit.
Though the potato arrived in Europe in the late 1500s, it didn't catch on so quick. Partly this was because of the difference in terroir between northern Europe where the temperature and sunlight varies a lot over the year, and their native equatorial Peru. So they were grown around Europe but they weren't as prodigious as the potatoes we know today.
It was on the Canary Islands- closer to Peru than to Ireland in climate- that farmers were able to breed varieties that would later be successful throughout Europe.
There were also publicity issues – though as mentioned in the previous post they were often called aphrodisiacs, they were also believed to be the cause of leprosy. You win some, you lose some.
Potatoes were a different sort of crop than Europe's grains- they were more labor-intensive to plant (one doesn't just scatter seeds) and harvest. It really wasn't until the 1700s that potatoes became a food crop.
By 1700 the potato was grown around the UK, though this seems to be largely in individual gardens rather than as a field crop initially. They may have first been grown commercially in Alsace, France.
One interesting reason for their success as a food/field crop was wars in Europe: armies trampling over the lands wouldn't see the obvious grains sticking out of the ground, and they could camp on the lands and potatoes would still be growing underneath.
"Parmentier Antoine 1737-1813". Licensed under Public domain via Wikipedia Commons
Throughout the 1700s potatoes were eaten not by choice but out of desperation- but it turns out that their a pretty darn good source of nutrients. Frederick The Great of Prussia was a believer, and required their planting across the Germany-Austria region. A French pharmacist named Parmentier (there is a Parisian metro station named after him) was captured during the Seven Years War with Prussia was fed exclusively on potatoes for three years, and brought back this knowledge to France.
He introduced them to the royal court and there there were all-potato themed dinners. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson may have attended these dinners and at one of them Jefferson is said to have delighted in French fries and brought the idea back to America.
Potatoes were more rapidly accepted in the UK, where wheat didn't grow all that well but the tubers did. And as grain was a big commodity market, potatoes benefited from not being subject to market and weather whims. John Reader writes:
As a crop that thrived where wheat would not grow, and survived in weather that ruined grain harvests, the potato was to be welcomed by governments and commodity markets alike. Not only because it was a cheap source of food for the poor; not just as a commodity to be bought and sold; nor simply as a cushion that would dampen the severity of fluctuations in grain supply. It was all of these things, but also promised to free up more grain for the markets. If people could be persuaded to grown and eat more potatoes there would be more grain to sell. Thus the potato nudged grain away from its primary signicance as a stable food of the people who grew it, towards a formative role in national and world trade.
In Norway, potatoes were grown by priests who were often farmers. They even had the nickname 'potato priests'. Potatoes came relatively late to Scandanavia. They were grown in aristocrats' gardens in Sweden and Denmark in the 1730s and became a field crop around 1800. Around the same year, they were cultivated in Russia and the Ukraine.
The Potato Blight
Later in the 1900s, anthropologists were able to show that wherever the potato was adopted, populations increased. It was a proven source of nutrition and allowed more people to share space on land. Of course this came with a downside.
In 1845, 90 percent Ireland's 8.5 million person population was dependent on the potato for food, as it grew so well there. And in 1845 and 1846 the potato blight hit and 88 percent of the potato crops failed. From those years and for the next few after, one million people died and another million emigrated.
The world's first celebrity chef, Alexis Soyer, designed and implemented a soup kitchen that fed 26,000 people a day in Dublin. He was also the creator of the first-known blue drink called Soyer's Nectar, but that came later.
We call it the Irish Potato Famine, but that's not at all accurate: the same crop failure happened all over the world. In 1843 it ravaged crops in North America and soon came to Europe, destroying crops everywhere. The cause was a parasitic fungus that grew on potatoes.
The solution to the problem came from a botanist named Millardet, who was also instrumental in helping circumnavigate phylloxera by grafting European grapevines onto American rootstock. He also promoted the solution to "downy mildew" which was a problem for grapes as well as potato leaves. The solution, copper sulphate mixed with lime that is sprayed on the leaves of plants, became known as the Bordeaux Mixture and it is still used on crops today. (It's discovery is credited with starting the agro-chemical industry.)
But as that solution was discovered 40 years after the great blight, how did they stop the disease? They didn't. It was the luck of the weather and of the varieties planted. There were regional outbreaks for years until the Bordeaux Mixture became common. Luckily, none approaching the severity of 1846-47.
The Potato in the US
Potatoes were grown in the USA since the 1600s, but not so much as food. The transition happened when Scotch-Irish people came to the US, as well as subsequent waves of potato-growing peoples from eastern Europe and Scandanavia.
Potatoes arrived in the Colonies in 1621 when the Governor of Bermuda, Nathaniel Butler, sent two large cedar chests containing potatoes and other vegetables to Governor Francis Wyatt of Virginia at Jamestown. The first permanent potato patches in North America were established in 1719, most likely near Londonderry (Derry), NH, by Scotch-Irish immigrants. From there, the crop spread across the country.
Idaho, the present-day largest producer of potatoes, actually did not begin growing potatoes until 1836, when missionaries moved west in an effort to teach the native tribes to grow crops instead of relying upon hunting and gathering methods. However, it wasn’t until 1872 when the Russet Burbank variety was developed, that the Idaho potato industry began to flourish.
The Russet Potato
I love single-origin stories. The potato generally comes from a single place in the world, the Andes of Peru, but all of the Russet potatoes in existence come from a single plant.
One way to avoid potato blight was to cross-breed potatoes to see what happened. In this process, a New York preacher was sent some seedlings from South America and these grew very well and were named the Garnet Chile Potato.
Then a Vermont farmer bred these into the Early Rose, which became very popular. These potatoes were generally seedless, but in in 1872 in Massachusetts an amateur botanist spotted a seed on an Early Rose. He collected and germinated the seeds and a single one of these new plants produced great big potatoes.
He sold the rights to this new potato (apparently that's doable) to a seed company. Then this potato mutated into the Russet-Burbank potato aka the Idaho potato.
And that's where your French fries come from.
Karlsson's Vodka Potato Facts
Those great big Russet potatoes would be a lot easier to use to make vodka, but Karlsson's insead uses tiny heirloom potato varieties. They have less starch than the big potatoes and thus they need to use more of them – about 17 pounds of potatoes for every bottle of Karlsson's.
Read about a visit to see how Karlsson's is made here.
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.
For the purposes of categorizing and tracking the American gin renaissance, I created this timeline of when different gin brands launched in the US, with a number of caveats:
As the goal is to closely look at what happened in 1980-2010ish, I didn't include most new brands launched after 2009ish.
The older brand dates may not reflect the real first import date into the US. They are indications that they were probably around a very long time.
If the brand reformulated in a meaningful way (ex. Plymouth) I used the re-release date.
I have tried to focus on the US, rather than international, release date.
For Type of Gin, I categorized things into Dry, Genever, and Old Tom. I'm not trying to define which are "New Western" or whatever we're now calling the lighter, modern style. Those are labelled as Dry.
I cited my sources and have made a strong attempt to be accurate. It is not my intention to misrepresent or disinclude any brand.
If you have something to add (missing or incorrect information for brands launched 2009 or before), you can leave a comment below or email me.
Sorry about the formatting!
Gin Brand
US Launch
Origin
Type of Gin
Notes
Source
Booths
1740
UK
Dry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth's_Gin
Gordon's Original London Dry
1769
Dry
first distillery in US 1934. Looks to have multiple distilleries
Wikipedia
Tanqueray London Dry
1830
UK
Dry
Wikipedia
Boodles
1845
UK
Dry
First bottled in the United States by Seagram's. In 2012, redesigned bottle and an alcoholic strength of 80 proof. The botanical recipe remains the same. Has always been made in the UK.
Wikipedia/PR contact
According to a former PR employee, "Boodles was invented by the Seagram Company in the 1960’s. I don’t know where the year 1845 came from, but it is nothing to do with any distillery or product launch."
Seagram's
1857
Canada
Dry
According to Regan, Seagram's gin wasn't introduced to the US until 1939.
Irish Whiskey was once one of the most popular spirits in the world and declined from thousands of distilleries down to just two by the late 1900s. Sales are once again skyrocketing on the back of Jameson's success, but things were pretty grim for a while.
I knew many of the causes of the decline in Irish whiskey, but learned a few more in conversation with Kilbeggan brand ambassador John Cashman. Here are reasons that he laid out.
2. The invention of the continuous/column Coffey Still, patented in 1830. Irish distillers were hugely reluctant to adopt the column still (despite Coffey being an Irishman) that they thought diluted the flavor of their whiskey. Before the invention of the column still, Irish whiskey was far lighter in flavor than scotch whiskey, and more popular because of it. However, the scots adopted the column still for making blended whisky and saw great leaps in sales because of it.
4. US Prohibition, which ran from 1920-1933. This killed the second largest market in America.
5. World War II, which ran from 1939-1945. Ireland was neutral in the war. American soldiers developed a taste for scotch, rather than Irish, whiskey. So that continued afterward.
In 1966, Irish Distillers was formed to stave off the continuing slump of the category by merging three big producers together. In 1972, Bushmills also joined the group so that there was only one company and two distilleries making all Irish whiskey.
When I was in Ireland recently I heard that there were 16 distilleries operating, being built, or in the planning stages. It's the dawn of a new era.
Recently I was speaking on a panel based around the era of David A. Embury's book The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, first published in 1948. 
