Category: trips

A Visit to MGP’s Lawrenceburg Distillery
As most of you nerds already know, most of the rye whiskey produced in the US is made at MGP Ingredients, aka Midwest Grain Products. They also make a ton of bourbon and neutral spirit used for vodka and gin. These products are fermented and distilled on site, aged on site or elsewhere, and bottled up as a zillion different brands on the marketplace.

Now in the past few years, MGP has begun to release a range of their own products. Interestingly they're not all under MGP as a brand name but under various names including George Remus bourbon, Till vodka, and Rossville Union rye whiskey. The press trip I took to the distillery was more about introducing these products to the world than the various client brands made here, but naturally that was of interest too.

History and Products

The distillery was officially founded in 1847 by George Ross as Rossville Distillery, though they've found evidence that there has been distilling on the site going back to at least 1808. In 1933 at the end of Prohibition, the distillery was purchased by Seagram and run by the company until 2001. The company was sold to Pernod-Ricard and owned by them until 2007, when it was purchased by MGP.

MGP itself is a company founded in 1941 to make high-test alcohol for torpedos to support the war effort. They actually own two distilleries though we only hear about this one.

At the Lawrenceburg distillery (outside Cincinnati but on the border of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana) they mostly produce the aged products – whiskies- though they also do some gin and neutral spirits. The other distillery, located in Atchison, Kansas (the site of the company headquarters where it was founded) distills neutral spirits and makes gin.

(The Lawrenceburg distillery, pics from MGP)

(The Atchison distillery that I did not visit. Pic from MGP.)

Of all the products (listed here), the most well-known and popular that they sell to various brands are the:
- 95% rye whiskey (a mashbill of 95% rye, 5% malted barley)
- 51% rye whiskey (51% rye, 45% corn, 4% malted barley)
- bourbon 36% rye (60% corn, 36% rye, 4% malted barley)
- bourbon 21% rye (75% corn, 21% rye, 4% malted barley)
So when you see those mashbills listed on products with various names (particular the 95% rye), there is a super good chance they were distilled at MGP.

Since they're dealing with lots and lots of grain, they also make grain products (list here), including raw ingredients for everything from pastries to pizza crust to imitation cheese.

I asked them how many mashbills they make in total. "We make a lot," came the definitive reply.

MGP Spirits

I was a bit worried that the MGP brands were just going to be the regular MGP products as all the various other brands with a different label and not have anything to say about them. Luckily there is a clear point of differentiation. When it comes to the vodka, theirs is made from wheat, when most of their clients' vodka is made from corn. But more importantly, the whiskies:

While nearly all their clients bottle whiskey that's of a single mashbill, MGP brand whiskies are all combinations of multiple mashbills. So George Remus Straight Bourbon Whiskey is a mix of the 21 and 36 percent high rye bourbons, and Rossville Union is a blend of the 95 and 51 percent rye mashbills.

This gives these products a point of differentiation from their many clients' products.

A Look Around the Distillery

The facility is a bunch of brick buildings located on one site, like a campus with no student lawns or a really big depressing orphanage. Different buildings house different parts of the operation – the grain store, fermentation room, distillery, grain dryer, barrel warehouses, etc.

The facility is not set up for tourists or photography, and basically we were able to see what we could see.

The water for the distillery comes from an aquifer, and it remains a constant 56 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. That's very convenient as in the hot summers the water is still cool to run through the condensers.

The fermentation room (there are 14, 27,000 gallon vats in this room; there is another room but I'm not sure if it's the same size). Fermentation takes about 3 days.

We were unable to take pictures in the distillery room, but as it passes through several floors of a building we could really only see one section of the column still and a part of the squareish gin stills anyway. In this facility there are three gin stills and two continuous column stills.

We visited one warehouse – there are seven on-site and I think 5 more elsewhere (though I'm not confident in those numbers).

This warehouse has six floors with six tiers per floor, with each floor separate from those above and below it acting as a "horizontal aging chamber." This is unlike the "vertical aging chamber" rickhouses in Kentucky where it's an open model (there's a frame on the outside but it acts as one big room) and the bottom level is cool while the top floor is super hot. The Kentucky rickhouses lose more water, as opposed to the humid ones here. They say that makes for a mellower whiskey.

Their standard barrel entry proof for whiskey is 120. We visited just the one warehouse that was racked. I inquired if their others might be palletized and the person I spoke to was evasive enough about answering that we can assume some are.

Product Specifics

So far, most of the line of MGP spirits is available in about 13 states. They're moving systematically rather than hitting the whole country at once.

Tanner's Creek whiskey, a blended bourbon, is only available in Indiana.

Eight & Sand blended whiskey is the newest product. It contains no GNS (grain neutral spirits), and no coloring. It's more than 51% bourbon bottled at 44% ABV. It's a blend of bourbon, rye, light whiskey, and corn whiskey.

"Eight and Sand" refers to a train going full-throttle (the eight) with added traction (sand on the tracks).

George Remus Bourbon is a blend of 21 and 36% rye bourbons, aged 5-6 years and bottled at 47%.

George Remus, the person, was a pharmacist turned attorney. He wrote prescriptions for medicinal whiskey during Prohibition and had his own brand of medicinal whiskey. Not only that, but he had his own medicinal whiskey trucks "hijacked" so that he could report the whiskey stolen and sell it illegally. He was known as "King of the Bootleggers" and may have been the inspiration for Jay Gatsby. He murdered his wife but was acquitted for 'temporary insanity.' More about his life here.

There is also a George Remus Reserve bottling and so far there have been two of these.

Rossville Union rye whiskey is a blend of their 51% and 95% rye whiskey mashbill whiskeys aged about 5-6 years. The standard bottling is 47% ABV.

They also sell a barrel-proof Rossville Union rye, and it's my favorite of their products. It's about the same age as their standard rye, but with a different ratio of rye mashbills. It has all that lovely pickle brine flavor but bottled at 56.3% ABV.
April 9, 2019
A Visit to the Worthy Park Distillery and Sugar Refinery on Jamaica

In 2016 I took a trip organized by WIRSPA (West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers' Association Inc.) and their quality marque system ACR for Authentic Caribbean Rum. As this was a few years ago, this blog post is somewhat of a photo-and-data dump for you to enjoy photos and for me to refer to as notes for the future.

I would start this write-up with "I visited a very special distillery in Jamaica" but I visited 6 of them and they were all very unique and amazing! At this one, however, there was a working sugar refinery.

You might know Worthy Park for their Rum Bar brand, probably the main competitor to the ever-present Wray and Nephew on the island.

Driving to Worthy Park is quite an experience – there are tons of hills and mountains in Jamaica, and you come over one of them and before you is a giant valley filled with growing sugar cane and the refinery in the middle.

The plantation was planted in 1670 and there used to be 5 sugar factories in the valley, while now there is only one. They have made rum on site since 1741, but not continuously. In 1960 they stopped distilling for a time, only to restart in 2005. They were exporting their rum in bulk until 2007 when they launched the 100% pot distilled Rum Bar brand.

At Worthy Park they're able to use all of their own molasses from their refinery, and sell some of it to other distilleries. Worthy Park is the mopst efficient cane farm in the country they claim. It takes 9 tons of cane to make 1 ton of sugar here, while less efficient facilities take 11 tons for the same amount. Their cane is harvested both by machine and manually.

Cane Sugar Production

Sugar cane is burned before hand-harvesting, but machine-harvested cane is not burnt first.

Sugar cane is washed, shredded and juiced in a 5-stage mill.

The bagasse (solid bits) leftover are used to heat the boilers on-site, right after juice extraction. The leftovers are piled up in huge pile to be used later.

The sugar cane juice is mixed with lime (assuming they meant calcium, not like.. limes) to assist with clarification.

It then goes to he evaporator to remove 75% of the water, with the resulting juice at about 62 brix.

The thick juice is then centrifuged to make crystallized sugar – there is a screen to which the crystals stick and the molasses passes through.

Rum Production

Over in the distillery, the molasses is pumped underground from the sugar plant.

The molasses is acid-adjusted before fermentation. They say their molasses has the least amount of residual sugar in it (on the island) because they're sugar production is so efficient.

Here they don't use dunder in the process at all (though they do add some cane juice in fermentation). The highest ester rum they make is 900 ppm (while Hampden Estate goes all the way up to 1600)

Fermentation takes 2-3 weeks for their highest ester rums. The resulting beer is 8.5 – 9% ABV for light pot still rum, lower for heavier rum. (We learned on this trip that after regular fermentation happens, the additional fermentation actually eats up alcohol and lowers the ABV. So there may be good flavor reasons for long fermentations, but it's bad for yield.)

It is distilled in a Forsyth still- they had just one at the time of my visit. They did not have a column still.

The distillation time is about 1.5 to 1.75 hours in the actual rum extraction, but the total distillation time is 5-6 hours. The rest of the time is making the high and low wines that get redistilled. The rum comes out of the pot stills at 85-87%.

The stillage at the end of the process is used as fertilizer for the cane fields.

Most of the barrels they age in are ex-Jack Daniel's. They have a 4-6% annual angel's share. The rum is diluted to 70% ABV before barrel aging.

The rum is bottled at the distillery. They do carbon and paper filtration depending on the product.

More Pictures, Just for Fun

Y'all know I can't resist a warning sign picture.

March 18, 2019
A Visit to the Hampden Estate Rum Distillery on Jamaica
In 2016 I took a trip organized by WIRSPA (West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers' Association Inc.) and their quality marque system ACR for Authentic Caribbean Rum. As this was a few years ago, this blog post is somewhat of a photo-and-data dump for you to enjoy photos and for me to refer to as notes for the future. If you'd like to read a detailed narrative write up from the visit, please check out CocktailWonk's blog post.

Here are some notes, and then some pretty pictures.
- Hampden Estate dates back to 1753.
- They've obviously been making rum the whole time, but have only been aging rum since 2010.
- They estimate 60% of the Jamaican rum purchased by Europe doesn't go into actual bottles of rum, but into cosmetics. tobacco, and confectionaries.
- The maximum allowed ester count from Jamaica is 1600 ppm by law. This was established in a law in 1934. (I don't know how they counted esters in 1934.) They say they could get up to about 1700-1800 ppm if they tried.
- There is a claim that the use of dunder may have begun at Hampden, and everyone copied their method.
- They have four pot stills on site.
- We learned that what we thought of as "dunder" is actually "muck." Dunder is stillage – waste from the still after distillation. Muck is a combination of cane juice, dunder, cane solids, molasses, and water. A bunch of muck is added to the just-fermented molasses of a new batch and distilled together to create the super-flavorful, high-ester rums.
- They add 11 parts fermented molasses to 7 parts dunder before distilling.
- They generally don't need to add yeast to their fermentation – there is a lot of it around the distillery.
- They ferment for about 2 weeks.
- Their highest ester mark is called D.O.K. that has 1500-1600 ppm esters
- Rum Fire, which is spreading around the US like… a rum fire, has about 500-570 ppm esters, where Hampden Estate Gold has 80-100.
The fermentation room we visited was the only time I've had to wear a hard hat at a distillery where I really felt happy to be wearing one: The room was full of wooden fermentation vats in a wooden room with wood floors, covered in spider webs, and smelling like a deep level of hell from the muck. I almost threw up it was so powerful (was actually looking for a place to vomit but barely managed to hold it in). It was amazing and the type of old-school rum-making that nobody gets to see.

They embrace the stank and that's what makes their rums so special. We weren't supposed to take any pictures in there but pictures wouldn't do it justice. You'd have had to smell it to believe it.
March 11, 2019
A Look at the Once-Closed Long Pond Distillery on Jamaica

In 2016 I took a trip organized by WIRSPA (West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers' Association Inc.) and their quality marque system ACR for Authentic Caribbean Rum.

At the time, the Long Pond distillery was closed, but our group was soooo nerdy and adorable we were able to convince the owners to let us sneak a peek. The best write-up on this visit comes from CocktailWonk.com, so I encourage you to visit that site for good details.

Since the time of our sneak peek, the distillery was partially acquired by Maison Ferrand, maker of Plantation Rums. (I'll skip the details of the sale as it would take me a lot of research to figure out the ownership structure.) The distillery caught fire in 2018. It was a big setback, according to the brand, but luckily not a total loss.

This post is just to show some pictures of a spooky amazing closed distillery. It had only been closed for about five years but with its super old technology and knobs and dials instead of computers, it looked like it had been sitting dormant since about 1964.

March 7, 2019
A Visit to the Monymusk Rum Distillery and the National Rums of Jamaica

In 2016 I took a trip organized by WIRSPA (West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers' Association Inc.) and their quality marque system ACR for Authentic Caribbean Rum. As this was a few years ago, this blog post is somewhat of a photo-and-data dump for you to enjoy photos and for me to refer to as notes for the future. (I end up searching my own website for information kind of a lot.)

Two of our stops in Jamaica were with the National Rums of Jamaica Limited. At the time they owned three rum distilleries, with only one of them operating, but since that visit Long Pond was sold. Our first stop was to the old Innswood Distillery, which stopped producing rum about 1993, after opening in 1959 initially.

At this Innswood location, they age rum in two warehouses but no longer distil. The distillery once belonged to Seagram's and then Diageo. There was an old abandoned still in one of the buildings we peeked into.

Clarendon

We then drove to the Clarendon Distillery, which is owned by the National Rums of Jamaica and where they produce the Monymusk brand. Monymusk has only been around since 2012. All Monymusk is a blend of pot and column distilled rum.

Our hosts told us they make more rum marques than most distilleries, about 5-6 column still marques and about 20 pot still marques.

They receive their molasses from the sugar refinery next door. When it is not in production, they receive it via tanker ships.

At one point, each sugar refinery had its own distillery. But with consolidation and sales of many sugar facilities to Chinese companies, the sugar producers and rum producers have separate entities. This seems to have great impacts on rum production: the rum distilleries rely on molasses from the sugar refineries (though they can purchase molasses from other countries if need be), and importantly the rum distilleries' waste products are treated and spread on sugar cane fields as fertilizer. So if a distillery doesn't have an active deal with a sugar cane farm, they have nowhere to dispose of their waste, and Jamaican laws seem pretty strict about not just dumping it into the ocean. The lack of waste treatment/management can and has closed distilleries.

To the molasses, water and nutrients are added to help with good fermentation. Fermentation for their light rums takes 30-36 hours. It's longer for their heavier rums, as that long fermentation allows flavors to build up. They can use the same fermented molasses (molasses beer) for their light marques distilled in pot and column stills, but use a different molasses beer for the heavy pot still rum. They have 24 open-top fermenters.

For the heavy pot still rum, fermentation takes place over 1 month: 2 weeks in wood (during which yeast are propagated) and 2 in stainless steel (with more molasses added).

The column stills here looked shiny and modern, installed in 2009. The four columns are the wash still, aldehyde and fusel oils, rectifiers (where cuts are made), and methanol column that is only used when they make neutral spirit. The pot stills here are older. They distill for 300 days per year, and have a capacity of 9 million liters of absolute alcohol per year from the column stills alone; another 3 million from their pot stills. Diageo at the time was purchasing 90% of the rum produced at Clarendon.

They age their rum at 70% barrel proof. They don't rechar barrels. At the time of my visit, they had recently started topping up barrels from the same batch.

The third distillery, Long Pond, was closed at the time of my visit- but we visited that anyway. See the next post.

March 4, 2019
A Revisit of the Appleton Rum Distillery in Jamaica
In 2016 I visited the Appleton rum distillery on Jamaica for the second time. It's possible some of the information in this blog post may have changed since then.

This trip was organized by WIRSPA (West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers' Association Inc.) and their quality marque system ACR for Authentic Caribbean Rum. The attendees on the trip were the hugest bunch of rum nerds, so it was great. We were headquartered in Kingston and drove to a different distillery each day, often 3-5 hours drive in each direction.

Much of this information is going to seem like random facts. First the facts that I found in my notes:

We first visited a viewpoint looking down into the valley where Appleton is made. Then we visited a water source. The water source they say is the origin of the Black River. It filters through limestone and tastes very sweet. THey say 85% of Jamaica is limestone and all the rum distilleries on the island are located in limestone areas. This water is used in fermentation, not in barrel proofing nor bottling.

Appleton does not irrigate their sugar cane. They grow more than 10 varieties of sugar cane, all of which are harvested together.

Fifteen percent of their cane is hand-harvested due to the terrain. All of it is burned before harvesting, but they're slowly transitioning to non-burning where possible.

Ten tons of sugar cane makes about 30 cases of rum.

Molasses, after sugar extraction, still contains about 60% sugar.

Appleton uses a cultured yeast and a 36 hour temperature-controlled fermentation of the molasses. At the end it's about 7% ABV before distillation.

They say the signature orange peel top note of Appleton comes from the shape of their still. They have five 5,000 gallon pot stills.

They age, blend, and bottle the product in Kingston, not here at the distillery. They have over 240,000 barrels aging. During aging, the rum loses ABV. Every three years, they combine the rum in a batch of barrels to minimize headspace and evaporation.

After blending, they let the rum marry for about 6 weeks before bottling it. They do dilution in stages.

Different marques of rum have different head and tails cuts.

They have 16 warehouses. All the barrels are palletized.

At Appleton's other distillery, New Yarmouth (the only distillery on the island we didn't see on this trip) they have smaller pot stills and column stills. Wray & Nephew is made there.

Molasses used in Jamaican rum can come from outside of Jamaica.

A second set of facts: We had a slideshow and tasting. I took pictures of some of the interesting slides and here are more random facts from slides:
- Appleton Estate accounts for 28* of all rum produced in Jamaica
- J. Wray & Nephew Ltd accounts for over 60% of all rum produced on Jamaica
- Sugarcane is harvested every 12 months (though it matures between 10 months and 2 years generally)
- 10 tons of sugar cane is equivalent to 1 ton of sugar, .4 tons of molasses, or 30 cases of rum
- Jamaican rum is used in blending around the world, and it is categorized and purchased in bulk according to the marques, which have names or codes and are associated ester counts – the amount of funk in the rum. The marques mentioned by Appleton are Common Clean (40-80 esters); Plummer (180 esters); Wedderburn (200 esters); Light continental (400-700 esters); Continental (900-1600 esters).
- Rum is barrel aged at 80% ABV here
- There is up to a 6% evaporation loss (angel's share)
February 28, 2019
A Visit to the Cocchi Vermouthery in Asti, Italy

Cocchi wines and vermouths are made in Asti, in the heart of Piedmont region of northwest Italy. I had a chance to visit the facilities this fall.

The company was founded in 1891 in Asti by Giulio Cocchi. He made flat, sparkling, and aromatized wines. Since 1978, the Cocchi company has been run by the Bava family. Our host was Roberto Bava, who is often seen around the global cocktail circuit at events like Tales of the Cocktail and Bar Convent Berlin.

Bava is currently the president of the Vermouth di Torino Institute and was part of the coalition of vermouth makers to get legal recognition for the Vermouth di Torino geographical indication (GI) in 2017. In order to qualify, the production and bottling must be in Piedmont, with alcohol between 16-22%, with Italian wine, artemisia absinthium and/or pontica also from Piedmont.

This is the entrance to the winery.

Cocchi previously produced products like fernets, annisetts, and rababaros that were discontinued in the 1980s, along with vermouths I believe. But with the cocktail renaissance the vermouths came back into necessity.

They only use macerated (rather than distilled) botanicals in their products. They do extractions in groups- a few botanicals at a time that can be used in various products. We visited the botanical room, where I would have stayed all day if I could have.

We then went upstairs to the visitor's center where we did a tasting and I took pictures of the botanical descriptions, which I put in this post on A Guide to Botanicals Used in Cocchi Aromatized Wines & Vermouths.

When I got home, I found I also had this printed document with more botanical information:

Visitor's Center:

Cocchi Products

Cocchi Americano is an aromatized wine with gentian, cinchona bark, bitter orange, and wormwood. It is used (and was probably designed) for drinking with ice and soda water.

Cocchi Rosa is made from a red wine base with the same extracts as the bianco, but with additional ginger and rose petals.

Cocchi Vermouth Di Torino is a sweet vermouth with wormwood, cinchona, bitter orange, and rhubarb.

They also make Dopoteatro Vermouth Amaro, an "evening vermouth" with wormwood, a double dose of cinchona, rhubarb, quassia, and chiretta (which is sometimes called Indian gentian and tastes very much like gentian).

Barolo Chinato Cocchi contains barolo wine and cinchona bark (as you'd guess from the name), rhubarb, gentian, and cardamom.

In addition to their still and sparkling wines, they also make grappa and made one batch of brandy.

February 26, 2019
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
A Visit to the Luxardo Distillery in Torreglia, Italy

This fall I visited the Luxardo distillery in Torreglia, Italy. Luxardo is of course famous for their maraschino liqueur and maraschino cherries, but they make a range of other products.

The company was founded in Zara in what is now Croatia but was then Austria. The flagship product was their maraschino liqueur then as it is now. It was exported to New Orleans by 1839, and as we know turned up in many of the "improved cocktail" recipes later that century.

In the early 1900s, they were the biggest distiller in Europe. Zara became a part of Italy after WWI, but the distillery was destroyed in WWII. In 1947 the company bought a distillery in Torreglia from the former owner of Cynar. That's where we visited.

Making Luxardo Maraschino

Cherries are harvested in late June. The variety of cherry is "Marasca Luxardo." They don't own the land where most of the cherry trees are grown (not at the location we visited). The do own a few trees on that property though. The lifespan of the trees is only 18-20 years, and they take 3-5 years to start producing useable cherries. Below are some newly planted cherry trees at the distillery.

The leaves, branches, and cherry solids (everything but the cherry juice) are macerated together with water and neutral beet alcohol (about 12% ABV) for up to three years.

The solids go into canvas bags. The liquids are distilled. The heads and tails from distillation go toward macerating the next batch. It's distilled up to 70% ABV in a single distillation.

Cherry solids after maceration.

The maceration tanks are emptied with a rake and then placed into canvas bags (below).

Several types of stills are used at the Luxardo distillery. I think this first one is used for the maraschino.

The distillate is then rested in wooden vats for up to 12 months. Then sugar and water are added and it's stored until bottling.

The juice of the cherries takes a different route: It is fermented with no added yeast. When it gets to 5% alcohol naturally, they fortify it to 40%. This becomes the base of the syrup for cherries, the Sangue Morlacco, and other products.

To make the maraschino cherries, they remove the stone/pit, add sugar and water, and soak them in the cherry syrup. They sell about 1.2 million 400g jars of cherries annually.

Thanks to Luxardo for our visit!

February 19, 2019
A Visit to the Rutte Gin Distillery in Dordrecht, the Netherlands
In the fall of 2017 I had the opportunity to visit the Rutte distillery in Dordrecht, The Netherlands, on my way to Bar Convent Berlin. In the US, Rutte sells their celery gin, dry gin, and Old Simon genever. It is sold in the Royal Dutch Distillers portfolio along with Cherry Heering, Mandarin Napoleon, and Italicus.

Dordrecht is connected by waterways to Rotterdam and the former center for genever production, Schiedam.

The Rutte Distillery is actually a distillery and shop, with former family housing upstairs. It is unlike any other distillery I've visited as it's more of a town shop rather than a industrial warehouse. The best analogy I've come up with is that it's like the town butcher or baker, where they do the work to prepare the food in-house and sell it from the counter in the front shop. At different times of the year, they have a different selection of offerings to sell.

The company dates back to 1749 in Rotterdam. In 1872, the fourth generation Rutte family member bought a cafe and distilled in the back. It was converted into a wine shop something like it is today after being renovated in the 1920s. The last Rutte family member sold the distillery in the 1990s while continuing to work there. He died in 2003.

The distiller since 2003 is Myriam Hendrickx, who comes from a food science background. She had only about a month of overlap between meeting the last Rutte distiller and his death. She kept some formulas like the Old Simon Genever true to the original (except they took out the tonka bean as it is prohibited in the US), while tweaking other recipes.

The malt wine, the malty, flavorful part of genever is purchased from Belgium (almost all malt wine is made there), and I believe all other the Rutte products are based on purchased neutral spirits. Hendrickx says that traditionally the Dutch are "botanical distillers," meaning they make flavored spirits like gin, ginever, and liqueurs, moreso than base spirits like whiskey and rum.

Random Rutte Facts
- They produce about 60 products in the small distillery.
- The celery in th celery gin comes from celery leaves and celery seeds, not the stalks.
- In general, they dilute the neutral spirit with the flavoring elements down to 50% ABV and distil it up to 80%; before bottling to proof.
- The current still is a pot-column hybrid still, but Hendrickx says they don't use the rectifying column much, only more like a filter than a distillation.
- The smaller products are bottled in-house, but the larger ones (we'll assume the gins) are bottled at DeKuyper.
- They make a "monastery liqueur" of similar complexity to Chartreuse, as well as an "Abbey gin" with the same distillate.
- They distil botanics that are used in multiple products together in groups, then combine them as needed.
- The gins are made as a concentrate that is diluted with more neutral spirit and water at the bottling facility. I asked her about the difference between "single-shot" gins where all the spirit goes through the still with the botanicals. She said, "I don't understand why anyone would do it that way" but sounded interested in hearing the other side of the story. That could make for a fun experiment or debate.
A Look at the Shop in the Front of the Distillery

Upstairs: Former Family Housing, Now a Tasting and Education Center

Down Into the Distillery in the Back

As you can tell, the place is tiny! There is only room for 40 small barrels of aging genever on site. The rest rests elsewhere.

So yes, a charming little place where they make some tasty gins.
February 14, 2019