Last year I visited 5 distilleries in Peru with Pisco Porton (read about that visit here and here): Vinas de Oro, Tres Generaciones, Lovera, Hotel El Carmello, and La Caravedo where Porton is made. This post is about my visit to Vinas de Oro in the region of Chincha, Peru.
Chincha is a pisco-producing town south of Lima, on the way to Ica where all the other Peruvian distilleries I visited are located.
Vinas de Oro opened in 1983. According to Porton's distiller Johnny Schuler, Vinas De Oro's distiller began with a 5-liter still and now is in charge of this big operation of 8 alembic-style stills. (Older distilleries tend to have falca stills.)
We visited the distillery near the end of the grape harvest. Workers were picking grapes off the vines in front of the distillery. According to the website, they grow, "seven types of Pisco grapes (aromatic: Italia, moscatel, torontel, albilla and non aromatic: quebranta, common black and mollar)."
After the grapes are harvested, they are de-stemmed (to avoid tannins that would get magnified during distillation), then pressed with a bladder press to release the must (juice). The must is given a rough filtration.
The juice is fermented for about 10 days (no yeast is added), so that it reaches around 10% ABV. The fermentation temperature is kept low (around 15 degrees Celsius) in order to retain aromatics from the grapes.
The wine is then distilled one time, as is the law. The pisco then rests for at least 10 months in stainless steel tanks.
The distillery bottles 6 puro piscos (individual grape varietals) and an acholado (blend). They also make mosto verde piscos, for which the grapes are not fully fermented before distillation to make the flavor fuller. They make mosto verde pisco out of three of their grape varietals.
In 2014 I visited La Caravedo, the distillery where they make Pisco Porton. In this distillery there are really two distilleries, the old one dating to 1684 with primitive falca stills, and the shiny new one with copper pot/alembic stills.
For Peruvian pisco (as opposed to Chilean – much Chilean pisco is column-distilled and and aged in wood), here are the laws of production:
It must be made from one or more of 8 approved grape varietals. Aromatic grapes are Torontel, Italia, Albilla and Moscatel. Nonaromatics are Quebranta, Negra Criolla, Uvina and Mollar.
These piscos made with the grapes can either be "puro," of all one variety; or "acholado," a blend of more than one.
They must be distilled a single-time in a falca or pot still.
Pisco must be distilled to a final proof of between 38 and 48 percent alcohol. Water is not allowed to be added to bring it down to final proof.
It must be stored in nonreactive vessels (no wood barrels).
"Mosto verde" pisco is made from grapes that are not fully fermented before distillation. This requires around 40 percent more grapes to produce. Mosto verde pisco can be made from any of the eight approved varietals or be a blend/acholado.
Porton Actually Has 3 Sets of Stills
Falcas, the old style stills at La Caravedo
Pot/Alembic stills at La Caravedo
Cognac-style pot stills at another of their vineyards
This means that for any one grape varietal, they could make 3 different distillates as each still will produce a slightly different spirit. And they do.
How Porton Is Blended
Pisco Porton is an acholado mosto verde, meaning it's a blend of mosto verde distillates. The 2014 bottling blend is:
Mosto Verde Quebranta distilled in falca stills at La Caravedo
Mosto Verde Quebranta distilled in alembic/pot stills at La Caravedo
Mosto Verde Quebranta distilled in cognac-style stills
Mosto Verde Italia distilled in cognac-style stills
Mosto Verde Abilla distilled in cognac-style stills
Mosto Verde Torontel distilled in falca stills at La Caravedo
The blend is:
70% Quebranta
1% Albilla
25% Torontel
4% Italia
Filtration:
After distillation, the spirit is rested. Then it is filtered before bottling.
First they chill the spirit to help precipitation naturally. No filter is used.
Then they use a cationic filter, which is a mix of resin and paper. This removes mineral and copper. (When we tasted un-blended piscos, a coppery note definitely showed through so it's clear this is needed.)
Component and Blend Tasting
While at the distillery, I was able to taste several single grape varietals, in puro or mosto verde puro form. It was fascinating how different the varietals of grapes tasted from each other, and how different the same varietal could taste when put through a different still.
(Reminder, my tasting notes aren't supposed to make sense to other people.)
Puro quebranta albembic-distilled 15 days ago (not mosto verde): Chex Mix, corn flakes, yeasty
Negra criolla (not sure which still or when distilled): Cantaloupe, wet wood finish
Albilla (not sure which still or when distilled): Fresh-picked blueberries, minerals, caramel
Moscatel mosto verde (not sure which still or when distilled): Dirt and violets.
Italia column-distilled (so not pisco): Green tea mochi
When I tasted the 2014 Pisco Porton blend, I could pick up so many of those individual grape varietal notes it all came together and I appreciate it so much more than I did in the past. It is complex with earthy minerals, musty, wet wood, deep structure, and grapey. I can't wait to taste it again.
Hacienda La Caravedo is the oldest working distillery in the Americas and the place where they make Pisco Porton. It's located in Ica, Peru, about a four hour drive south of Lima. I visited in the spring of 2014.
The distillery dates to 1684. Below is a picture of the document establishing the distillery.
The grounds hold the distillery, vineyards, and this huge house, which is newly-constructed.
You might recognize it from the bottle label. The house belongs to the owners of the brand. They were preparing for Easter when I visited so I didn't get to peep inside.
The vineyards are located between the house and the Andes mountains you can see in the background.
The Old Part of the Distillery
The distillery is an imaginative combination of the very old part dating to the 1600s and a very new part dating back a couple of years.
The original distillery was all run by gravity. A schematic from the Porton brand book is below. The process goes grapes to juice to resting to fermentation to distillation to resting again.
The grapes would come in from the winery and be carried up the stairs into a large circular pit with drains. That shallow (a few feet deep) pit is under the central round canopy in the picture below.
People would stomp on the grapes to release the juice, which would flow down to the next level for resting and fermentation.
Then in the part where the square canopy is, grapes would be further crushed using the old grape screw press.
The grape juice ran down into a set of vats. They would allow the juice to sit together with the grape skins for a day. Pisco Porton still does this step, which distiller Johnny Schuler says is unusual.
Then the juice is transferred to another adjacent vat and fermented. The below picture shows the maceration and fermentation vats in the old distillery.
From the fermentation vat, the wine flows through a channel over to the old stills. Somehow I didn't get a picture of the channel, but it's a small open cement trough that runs across the lawn at ground level.
The old style stills at La Caravedo and other distilleries are called falcas. The top of the stills are at ground level (where the wine runs in), and the bottom is a level down. These old-style stills don't have a bubble cap like a typical pot still; they're like big boxes with a pipe running out the side. On top they're just a big copper cap.
These particular copper falcas, built into the original distillery's footprint, are probably 150-200 years old.
The stills are wood-fired from below.
After the spirit comes off the still (from a pipe on the side rather than through a swan's neck like in a pot still) it passes into the next chamber, the condenser.
The condenser is just a big pool with a copper coil running through it. The vapor from the still condenses back into liquid as it travels around the coil deeper into the pool.
Here is a view from the top of the pool, which is at the same level as the top of the falca.
Then in the next chamber down at the bottom of the pit the spirit is received. From a full distillation of 1500 liters, they produce 450 liters of pisco puro or 250 liters of pisco mosto verde (more on that in another post).
Peruvian pisco is distilled a single time, not twice like almost every other spirit in the world.
In the olden days, pisco would then have been rested in botijas, the ceramic/clay vases seen in every pisco distillery (often just for decoration now that we have cement and stainless stell).
The New Part of the Distillery
The new part of the distillery is a tall building of cement and glass, located across a small courtyard from the grape press structure. This is a view of the new distillery from the top of the grape press.
The fountain in the picture isn't just an aesthetic touch. The water used to cool the condensing steam from distillation heats up and needs to be cooled. At La Caravedo, they shoot that hot water up the fountain to cool in the air, a trick I haven't seen used at any other distillery.
Inside the distillery are rows of huge stainless steel tanks. These hold the fermenting wine.
On either side of the distillery are gargantuan cement tanks for holding the distilled pisco. Pisco always rests after distillation. In the old days, it rested in the ceramic botijas jugs. These cement tanks, which are on the outsides of the distillery to catch the sun, are meant to mimic the resting in botijas.
The still room is enclosed by glass. The stills are traditional copper pot stills, with round caps on top. Thus these produce a different spirit than the old-style falcas.
So, now we know the two ways that pisco is distilled and rested at La Caravedo in the modern and ancient distilleries on the property. In the next post we'll look at how these technologies are combined to give us the mosto verde blend of Pisco Porton. [Here is the post.]
Below are some more pictures from the grounds and my awesome day at the distillery.
This July I visted the town of Saronno, Italy, and the blending and bottling house where they make Disaronno liqueur (formerly known as Disaronno Amaretto).
So The Legend Goes
Disaronno, as with many brands, is based on a legend involving a beautiful woman and a secret manuscript. We visited the chapel where the story begins.
In the 1400s, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Miracles was founded in Saronno. For a later addition to the chapel in 1525, a painter named Bernardino Luini found a model for the Virgin Mary in a local widowed innkeeper, and used her face in the paintings in the chapel.
As a reward for this honor, the innkeeper gave the painter a present of a flask of liqueur, which was what would become Disaronno. The brand claims that this was the first amaretto liqueur, “amaretto” meaning “a little bit bitter.”
In the 1600s, a member of the Reina family supposedly rediscovered the old recipe, and it was commercialized in the early 1900s. The Reina family still owns the company.
The Company Today
Today Disaronno is one brand from a big company named ILLVA. A big part of the company is a flavor company called Real Aromi. This part makes the flavors that go into the liqueurs. Other spirits made in the facility include Zucca, Tia Maria, and an amaro called 18.
How Disaronno Makes Bitter Almond Oil
Probably the most important ingredient in Disaronno is the essential oil made from bitter almonds.
Bitter almonds are illegal to sell as a food product in the US, because they contain a chemical that converts to the poison cyanide. Sweet almonds is what we crunch on. Neither type of almond is a true nut; they are pits of fruits.
As I understand it, there are many varieties of both sweet and bitter almonds, and both share the same botanical genus as the peach. While sweet almonds (as well as the tree) are just called almonds , bitter almonds can be either a particular almond tree/nut, or (as is the case at Disaronno) the pits of related stone fruits. The folks at Disaronno seemed to say that no matter if the pit comes from cherries, peaches, or apricots, it's still a bitter almond.
According to Wikipedia, "The fruits from Prunus dulcis var. amara are always bitter as are the kernels from other Prunus species like apricot, peach and cherry (to a lesser extent)."
For Disaronno they purchase 300 tons of bitter almonds (apricot pits) annually. They only use their oil for their product; they don’t sell it to other companies.
So, bitter almonds, which here are the kernels of apricots, are first crushed in a machine that grinds them into a flour. This flour is then soaked in hot water, which separates the flavor components from the sugars in the pits.
This is similar to making scotch whisky, in which ground malted barley is heated with hot water to separate the sugars from the solids. The sugary water is used and they leave the solids behind. For Disaronno, though, they don’t want the sugars and they do want the flavors.
The sugar and heated almond flour mix is then distilled under pressure (which allows you do to it a lower temperature), so that they don’t cook the bitter almonds. The run the still at a max of 50 degrees Celsius. Note that this is a water distillation, not an alcoholic one.
As is typical in distillation, the lighter components boil over and leave the heavy ones behind. This includes not only the almond solids (which are sold to make biscuits and other Italian treats), but also the poisonous arsenic that is contained in pits. (At ArtOfDrink, Darcy O’Neill studies the problem of cyanide in pits.)
The result of the distillation after condensation is oils and water. These are kept in a tank and left to naturally separate. They then pull off the bitter almond essential oil to use to make Disaronno, and save the water to use in the next distillation.
We smelled the raw essential oil – it has those high orange/cherry notes, sweet nuts, and marzipan notes typical of Disaronno, but also a bit of a marker smell that thankfully doesn't show in the final product. The essential oil is not bitter from the bitter almonds, as those aromas are heavier and don't pass through their distillation.
The Blending and Bottling Facility
The production and administrative offices for Disaronno, Real Aromi, and the ILLVA are in an industrial office park of sorts in Saronno. We were the first group of press ever allowed into the facility, but alas, no pictures were allowed of the production part.
While the office building is decked out in modern style with gray and white backgrounds with red accents and modern art on the walls, the rest of the facility seems to hold anonymous buildings in which all the magic happens. We visited a chemical analysis lab, the bottling room, blending room, and the areas where they make the almond essential oils and other flavors.
We started in the herb storage room, which was full of big sacks of things like Chinese rhubarb (which smells like smoky curry and I later tasted as a note in Campari), ginseng roots and vanilla beans, along with things like Glucinex, propylene glycol, and dextrose monohydrate.
The extraction room was filled with all different sorts of stainless steel vats and tubs, with a few older machines scattered about. (The flavoring part of the company only relocated to this spot a year ago – before that it was in southern Italy.)
Some of the vats were soaking vats, where water and/or alcohol is combined with a flavor to extract it. In front of one row of vats was a centrifuge that runs sideways, like the one I’d seen at Cointreau.
Other tubs rotate slowly sideways to keep liquids and solids mixing.
A set of cool-looking stills that basically hang from the ceiling perform distillation under pressure for the purpose of concentrating ingredients. So while in a typical alcohol distillation we distill over the parts we want and throw out what’s left in the bottom of the still, here they keep the reminders and discard or recycle what comes out of the still. They were making ginger and guarana concentrates when we were there.
Another room was filled with a single giant machine for making powdered flavors. The flavor components are combined with starches and the liquids are flicked around the inside of a big diamond shaped box. When the liquids hit the sides of the box (I think it is heated), the liquids evaporate and the starches and flavors remain together. The solids then fall to the bottom of the diamond and into a collection bag below.
Putting It all Together: How Disaronno Is Made
Bitter almond essential oil is one of the two main flavoring components of the liqueur. The other is vanilla. These flavors (and probably others, the recipe is a secret) are combined with water, sugar, alcohol, and coloring.
First water and sugar are combined to make a weak syrup. Alcohol and the flavorings are combined and added together. Then the coloring comes after the mixture has rested for 2 hours. The flavored oils are added with alcohol, as aroma molecules are soluble in alcohol (we learned more about this at that Mixing Star Lab), and with this method the water won't blow off the aromas.
Disaronno is then bottled. In most parts of the world it is bottled at 28% ABV but in Spain and Australia it is bottled at 20% (because apparently you can only advertise alcohols under a certain percent), and it is bottled at that same lower ABV for Ohio and Alaska due to bigger tax rates at higher strengths in those states.
The alcohol base is dervied from either sugar beets or sugar cane (they say it's the same once it's distilled up super high), and the sugar used to sweeten it comes from sugar beets.
Thanks to Disaronno for a peek inside the process.
Last week in Sicily I attended the Disaronno Mixing Star Lab. It was two long talks over the course of two days.
The first was called The Science of Flavour and it was given by food scientist Dr. Rachel Edwards-Stuart.
I took a lot of notes – and here they are:
By adding color to food (and drink) it changes our perception of its flavor. So a redder drink will appear sweeter. Green on a can of soda will make you think there is more lime in it.
Sugar and salt enhances flavor, so if you want to have something that you want to enhance the flavor you add that. So too does MSG and acidity.
Acidity as a flavor enhancer: If a food naturally has acidity in it, you can add more acid to boost flavor.
There was a study on mint gum – they found that the menthone stayed the same over time but as the sugar went away over time, you lose the perception of the mint. So you can dip mint gum in sugar and it will revive the mintyness.
pH shows sourness, but if sugar is present the perception of acidity will be lowered no matter what the pH meter says.
Malic acid brings out green apple ripeness in foods/drinks.
Tartaric acid you get in wine/grapes.
We did a tasting of pure taste solutions: sweet, salt, umami, acid, bitter. Then we all compared the intensity of them on a scale. It showed a huge range of perception of intensity of flavor. Also, it has been shown that people perceive intensity of taste differently on different days.
Lemons and limes – the difference in their flavor is due largely to their aromas.
Some countries in Asia have salty vanilla products, so they associate vanilla with salty rather than sweet.
We perceive aromas in the same part of the brain where we perceive memory.
With liquids, you don’t really get the aromas until you swallow. (That’s why wine tasters do that sucking thing.)
Trigeminal Stimulation – Everything that isn’t a taste or an aroma but is picked up in a chemical sensation in the mouth. Chile/spice, mint/cooling, carbonation.
Astringency is not technically a trigeminal stimulus (not in the same nerve/brain pathway), but we can categorize it similarly though it’s more of a mouthfeel. Tannins strip away proteins in your saliva.
Try ginger with a nose clip – it makes it taste way spicier as it enhances that trigeminal sensation.
Carbonation – bubbles bursting in the mouth activates mechanoreceptors. And CO2 turns into carbonic acid which activates pain receptors. It changes the balance of sweetness and acidity – that’s why flat Coke is so disgusting.
Research suggests CO2 increases bitter aftertaste and suppresses sweetness, but there is disagreement in the scientific literature.
Congruent flavors: sugar increases strawberry perception, but MSG for example doesn’t. So the color green + melon + mint are congruent. If you increase any of those elements it increases the overall perception of all of them. Incongruent flavors don’t enhance overall perception.
Potato chips are put in noisy packaging to increase the perception of crunch and freshness.
The color of the plate affects flavor perception. Strawberry mousse on a white plate tastes sweeter and more intense than on a black plate. Serving something in a heavy bowl increases perception of density, likeness, value, and fullness vs a light bowl.
Under blue lighting people liked a certain wine more, but also tasted fruitier and spicier. Under red lighting, it tasted sweeter.
Music- When they played German music in a supermarket, people bought more German wine, opposite with French music/wine.
People served same dish with different names perceived the flavor differently.
Flavour Chemistry in Mixology
All 5 tastes are water soluble. (Because water and tastes are both charged.) So sugar is soluble in water but olive oil is not. (Sugar is charged and oil is neutral).
Aromas are not charged – and are fat-soluble. So aromas are not soluble in water.
Alcohol will dissolve fat-soluble things as well as water-soluble things. So you get both taste and aromas trapped into alcohol. Makes it a great carrier of flavor.
The book ModernistCuisine has tables of ideal infusion time/temp/substance for many ingredients.
You can use a centrifuge to separate oils, liquids, solids. Then use the oils for fat-washing into spirits.
In nitrous infusion in a whipped cream charger, nitrous is a neutral gas. In CO2 you get carbonation, plus the carbonic acid affects flavor.
Saltiness suppresses perception of bitterness, as does sweetness.
White chocolate and caviar contain the same aroma chemical – triethlyamine (sp?). They make an interesting food pairing. Use FoodPairing.com to look up interesting pairings based on chemistry.
MSG is probably not the cause of migranes; it’s something in refried rice when not prepared properly.
The Main Flavors of Disaronno (according to a trained flavor panel)
This fall the new Bombay Sapphire distillery will open at the site of Laverstoke Mill in Hampshire, about 2 hours' drive from London.
While I was in town for the Most Imaginative Bartender competition we visited the site, still very much under construction (and thus, no pictures allowed). You can see a few more pictures on this Google image search though.
Laverstoke Mill is a former paper mill that used to make bank notes for the Church of England, though archivists have found that there has been a mill of one type or another on the site nearly-continuously since the year 903.
Eco-Forward
It is situated on a small river that runs right through the middle of it. The river turns a horizontal water wheel (now being repaired) that will help power the new distillery.
The water wheel is one of several sustainable design features. The distillery in general is powered by a biomass boiler. It is fueled with scrap wood chips, as well as the spent botanicals from distillation.
The heads and tails of distillation are sold off to be used for pharmaceutical and other purposes, as is quite standard.
They also plan for rainwater harvesting and to use photovoltaic cells for additional energy from the environment.
They cool water from the condensor (cool water washes through it and heats up) by piping it outside and running it through a radiator-type thing to release some heat into the air. Spare heat from the distillation is used to heat the two greenhouses.
About Those Green Houses
The distillery has an on-site horticulturalist overseeing the two swirly 14-meters-high greenhouses (or glass houses, as they call them) that were in the middle of construction while I was there. One will be kept at a Temperate climate; the other a Tropical one. With these two climate settings, they'll be able to grow all ten botanicals used in Bombay Sapphire: juniper berries, corriander, angelica, lemon peel, bitter almonds, orris root, cassia bark, licorice root, cubeb berries, and grains of paradise.
People will be able to walk through the greenhouses and the river runs around the outside, so it's as if they're seated in the river.
The Site
There are actually two sets of stills, a giant brand-new pair, and a pair dating back to the 1800s. Both will be operating.
On the grounds there are outdoor areas for seating or walking, a gift shop (but they assure us they'll only sell gin and bar supplies, not key rings and tchotchkes).
The small river has not only trout in it, but it's visited by otters and kingfishers. To lead themselves around the distillery, guests will have a map that with hidden ink that shows up in light, and a built-in RFID chip so that exhibits will speak to them in their chosen language.
The heritage building has a small event space bar and an open bar downstairs for visitors, so there are a lot of large and small spaces both for public and private events.
How Bombay Sapphire is Made
Like nearly all gins, the process starts with neutral grain spirits purchased from other distilleries – basically high-proof vodka. This is brought to Laverstoke in 30,000 liter trucks, which take an hour to offload. This amount of spirit lasts for about 3 days of making gin. The raw spirit comes in about 96.3% ABV but they water it down to 80% before distillation.
Bombay Sapphire is made with "vapor infusion." This means that unlike many gins, the botanicals do not soak with the neutral spirit in the still. Rather, dried botanicals sit on perforated trays in a column. The steam from the boiling alcohol passes through these trays and picks up the botanical notes. Then the steam passes into the condenser, where it is cooled back into liquid. Here is a blueprint-quality scale diagram of the stills I drew.
We had a look into the column where the vapor infusion takes place. The trays are large- let's guess 5 feet accross- and several of them are stacked atop each other. Each tray contains one or more botanicals, neatly arranged.
The heads cuts in distillation are done by nose – the distiller waits until a fresh citrus aroma comes off the stills during distillation. The cuts, however, are always done at 65% ABV (as long as it still has a good aroma at that point.)
Distillation lasts about 10 hours in total. Starting this month they'll run the stills 24 hours a day to keep up with demand.
After distillation, the gin is at 86% alcohol. It then leaves Laverstoke in trucks, where it is sent to a bottling facility in Warrington. There it is reduced to bottle strength and put in bottles (duh).
So that's what I know for now. I look forward to seeing it when it opens.
The winning cocktail of the 2014 Bombay Sapphire Most Imaginative Bartender competition was Remy Savage of Little Red Door in Paris. His drink, the Paper Anniversary, contained just three ingredients: gin, saline solution, and "paper syrup."
The homemade paper syrup specifically was meant to reference the government bank notes that were once printed at Laverstoke Mill that Savage had visited earlier in the week. That former mill is the future home of the Bombay Sapphire distillery. (We toured the site and I'll report on that in a later post.)
For his final drink, Savage was able to source actual bank notes printed at this mill and use them as a garnish.
As this was the World's Most Imaginative Bartender contest, the 14 international competing mixologists were encouraged to take inspiration from their visit to England and use it in their cocktail. Other contestants used the taste of British things we'd experienced like tea and jams, or they mimicked the vapor infusion process through which Bombay Sapphire is made.
Savage used the idea of the printing mill and the smell of books to inspire his paper syrup. He said, "I tried to think of what paper smells like. The challenge was to go from a smell to a taste."
His paper syrup contained a base of caster sugar and water, to which he added vanilla, fresh cut grass from outside the hotel, gentian root and (gentian-rich) Suze liqueur, and Laphroaig 10 year scotch for a touch of woody peat. I tried the drink and it was really quite close to paper – the sweet grassy vanilla on entry that quickly faded to a woody dryness from the gentian. Brilliant.
The dash of saline solution he says is a common touch they use at Little Red Door to kick up the flavor of cocktails. In this competition rather than a water or neutral spirit base, he used a base of Bombay Sapphire.
Paper Anniversary By Remy Savage of Little Red Door, Paris
45ml – Bombay Sapphire
15ml – Homemade paper syrup
1 dash – Salt solution
Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
Paper Syrup:
For 800ml of syrup:
550g caster sugar
500ml of delicious parisian water
2 vanilla pods
Cook gently until it the sugar is dissolved. When it has cooled, add:
60ml of Suze liqueur
30ml of Laphroaig 10-year scotch
3g of dried gentian root
15g of clean fresh cut grass
Let infuse for 24 hours and filter syrup.
I'll post more about the contest and the other drinks the bartender created as soon as I get hold of all the recipes. There was a terrific diversity of flavors and styles that came from this contest challenging bartenders to use their imaginations.
It's about how you can sometimes find interesting regional spirits on regional airlines. It was surprisingly hard to track these down and sometimes it was chasing a moving target as airlines changed from one spirit to another.
A while back I visited the Kilbeggan Distillery in the middle of Ireland. Kilbeggan is in partnership with the Cooley distillery, a much larger one (without a visitors' center) that was once independent but is now owned by Jim Beam. They make not only Kilbeggan Irish whiskey, but also Tyrconnell, Greenore, and Connemara.
The distillery dates back to 1757 and they claim it is the oldest licensed distillery in Ireland. You'll note that Bushmills claims they were founded in 1604 but Kilbeggan disputes that.
While today Kilbeggan is a working distillery, the stuff that is working is a tiny part of the overall distillery, and most of what you see on the visit is a somewhat-working display. That said, it's a really, really cool display.
Most of what one sees- the huge gears and equipment- dates back to the the 1860s to 1880s. It's all wonderfully steampunk.
The distillery is situated near a small stream where they pulled their water and powered the operations. The water powered the water wheel which powered the millstones that ground the grains that were used as the raw material for distillation. They also used the stream to cool liquids by running pipes through it.
Inside the distillery there is a 150 horsepower steam engine. This would have been used only a couple of times each year when the river was too low or two high to generate power. The engine still works and they turn it on a couple of times each year.
The old stills are nearly round in shape and though they're exposed to the elements now, they used to be indoors. They triple distilled the spirit here in the olden days, as is traditional for Irish whiskey. They also have original Coffey stills on display which were used to make column-distilled spirit.
According to my host John Cashman, Ireland stopped using peat when they could import coal by train, around the 1940s.
The strange bulbous building is an old warehouse that they now use primarily for dumping casks before transporting it to Cooley for bottling. In the warehouse they have a few special barrels including one that was laid down in honor of President Obama's election, and another one specifically for the band Mumford & Sons.
They are distilling at Kilbeggan, just in a small section with two tiny stills. They use a course grind of barley (because they use old wooden wash tubs that can't handle smaller grains) and ferment it for about 3 days until it reaches 6-8% ABV. They then distill it twice in tiny stills, first up to 20-22% then up to 68-70% ABV.
The still for the second distillation is actually the oldest working pot still in the world, according to Cashman. It comes from the old Tullamore distillery. (Part of the reason it has survived so long is that for a good while it was only used to distill water.)
During a tasting of the product range, Cashman made an interesting claim: "The smoothness of Irish whiskey is not due to triple distillation but it's due to our climate. It is the lack of extreme (temperature fluctuations) that allows Irish whiskey to age at a mild and mellow pace."
I got to try the range of whiskies made at Kilbeggan and/or Cooley:
Greenore Single Grain – an Eight year old grain (column distilled) whiskey
Kilbeggan – a blend of Cooley grain whiskey and malt whiskey distilled at Kilbeggan
Kilbeggan 18 Year, which has been discontinued
Kilbeggan Distillery Reserve Malt, which is aged 3-4 years ina quarter cask
Tyrconnel, apparently the biggest selling Irish whiskey in the US before Prohibition. It is a single malt that is finished in casks: Madeira, port, or sherry. All of them are 46% non chill filtered
Connemara, which is the peated Irish whiskey made at Cooley. It is 100% peated single-malt with no age statement. It's peated to just 14 ppm phenol but since the whiskey is so light the peat has a stronger effect. They use 4, 6, and 8 year old whiskies in the blend.
Connemara Turf Mor, which is a heavily peated (54 ppm) single malt aged 3 years and sold at cask strength
Connemara Bog Oak – a blend of 3 year Turf More and 18 year Connemara that are married in a barrel with "bog oak" cask ends
Kilbeggan is one of the coolest looking distilleries I've visited, somewhere in technology between the amazing wooden gristmill of George Washington's distillery at Mount Vernon and the rhum agricole distilleries of Martinique with their huge working gears. It's defnitely worth a visit if you're driving across Ireland.
A while back I enjoyed a brief visit to the Bushmills Irish Whiskey distillery, located at the northern tip of Northern Ireland.
Bushmills is located super close to the Giants' Causeway, a natural phenomenon that brings tons of tourists through town every day. Pretty much all the tours also stop at Bushmills, whether that's for a full distillery tour or just a meal in the visitors' center restaurant. 92,000 people visited the distillery in 2012.
Bushmills doesn't have column stills; all the whiskey made here is triple distilled from 100% malted barley. (Thus the same as single-malt scotch except that it's distilled an additional time.)
The barley for Bushmills is grown in Cork, down in the south of Ireland. It is malted and ground into a grist. The water for fermentation comes from a tributary of the Bush River nearby.
Like single-malt scotch, the malted barley has added hot water to it in a mash tun, and then its drained. This is to keep the fermentable sugars in the water but get rid of the solid bits that gum up the works. It is transferred to a wash back, where it is fermented with brewer's yeast for about 50 hours. The resulting beer is around 8% ABV.
The beer is then distilled. Bushmills has 10 pot stills (2 wash stills and 4 each feints and spirit stills) in a surprisingly small, crowded room. According to my guide, the whiskey is distilled up to 25-30% ABV on the first distillation, then 70% and 84% after the second and third distillations.
Like scotch whisky, they redistill the heads and tails in the next batch so there is no waste. The "pot ale" that is the leftover stuff from the first distillation is made into a syrup and sold for animal feed. The spent barley grain is also sold for animal feed, as it is at most grain distilleries.
The water used to dilute the whiskey to final bottle strength is reverse osmosis-filtered municipal water. They put whiskey into the barrel at 63% ABV.
Four different types of barrels are used to age Bushmills: ones that formerly held bourbon, oloroso sherry (from the Paez bodega), port, or Madeira. They said they reuse their ex-bourbon barrels 3 times before they're no longer useful.
While Irish whiskey by law must be aged a minimum of 3 years, the youngest Bushmills is aged for six, and Black Bush is aged for eight. Both the Original Bushmills and Black Bush are blended Irish whiskeys; made with a blend of triple distilled malt whiskey produced on-site and column distilled whiskey purchased from Midleton (but aged on-site here at Bushmills).
Original Bushmills is 55% single-malt and 45% grain whiskey.
Black Bush is about 80% single-malt and 20% grain whiskey. It is aged in around 70% ex-sherry casks and the rest in ex-bourbon.
The rest of the line are single-malts. The 10-year-old is about 90% ex-bourbon aged, with the rest sherry.
The 16 year old Bushmills is aged in bourbon and sherry casks in equal volumes. Then the whiskey is blended and finished in ex-oirt barrels fro 6-9 months.
The 21-year-old is also made up of whiskey aged in bourbon and sherry casks for 19 years, then finished in Madeira casks for 2 years.
All Bushmills is bottled at 40% ABV and chill-filtered. The only exception to that was the 1608 that is no longer available.
Bushmills sells around 880,000 cases annually, with the US its biggest market. They have 80 acres of land on which the barrels age. As it's such a small distillery, they distill 24/7 throughout the year with the exception of 2 maintenance periods.
No pictures were allowed inside the distillery, sorry for the lack of razzle-dazzle.
