Category: whisky

A Visit to the Yamazaki Distillery in Japan

Yesterday I wrote about visiting the Hakushu distillery in Japan. Today I'll write about Suntory's other single-malt distillery, Yamazaki. It is located between Kyoto and Osaka, at the convergence of several rivers. I believe they said the distillery welcomes 100,000 visitors each year.

(Mount Fuji as seen from the train to Kyoto.)

The Yamazaki distillery was built in 1923 and launched its first whisky, the White Label, in 1929. That whisky is still made today.

The distillery location was chosen because of its water (as are most distilleries), also sought out by Sen no Rikyo, the inventor of the Japanese tea ceremony. One of his tea houses from the 1500s still stands nearby.

Like at Hakushu they import malted barley from Scotland, then grind it, mash it, ferment it, distill it, and age it on site. At Yamazaki they use a combination of wooden and stainless steel washbacks (fermentation vessels). They use the same yeasts as at Hakushu, but sometimes in different proportions.

They have six differently-shaped pairs of stills to make whiskies with many different flavor characteristics, further enhanced by aging in five different types of barrels.

Hogsheads (reassembled ex-bourbon barrels at a larger size), puncheons (large barrels made of new American oak), and Mizunara (Japanese oak) barrels are made at the cooperage in Japan at their grain distillery.

Spanish oak sherry butts are made for them in Spain, and ex-bourbon barrels are what they are.

Mizunara oak grows in the north of Japan, and sometimes in Hokkaido. I used to describe its flavor as similar to sandalwood incense, but on this visit I was tasting it more as a combination of sticky pine tree and cedar. Either way, it's got spice.

They still have a cask from 1924 in the warehouse (though they've swapped out the whisky) and you can see the Cadiz sherry stamp beneath the Yamazaki one.

We tasted whiskies aged in three types of oak: Mizunara, Spanish ex-sherry, and new American oak puncheons.

From the Yamazaki website, "White oak adds vanilla and coconut flavours during the aging process. Tannins and other polyphenols contained in Spanish oak casks leach into the whisky, imbuing it with a deeper reddish hue compared with white oak casks. Whiskies aged in Spanish oak casks typically have fruity, chocolate notes. Over long periods of aging the Japanese oak casks add a distinctively Eastern touch to the whisky, endowing it with sweet fragrances reminiscent of incense with a hint of citrus. This unique flavour has been gaining the Yamazaki brand new adherents around the world."

At Yamazaki they have six different still shapes, use five types of barrels, and barley at two peating levels. This adds up to 6x5x2 = 60 different whiskies produced at this distillery to be used in single malt and in blends.

Speaking of blends, the Hibiki blend is assembled at this distillery as well. (I think the lower-end blended whiskies that we don't get in the States are put together here too.) The blends have aged grain, column-distilled whiskies along with the single malts from the Hakushu and Yamazaki distilleries.

At the distillery, there is a tasting room where you can try a variety of distillery-only products like 100% sherry cask Yamazaki the 1980s and white dog.

They also have a library of their whisky experiments.

And an advertising museum. I wish they'd bring back Uncle Torys.

Now that we've talking about how they make Hakushu, Yamazaki, and Hibiki, I'll get into where and how to drink them in Japan over the next few posts.

November 18, 2011
A Visit to the Hakushu Distillery in Japan

I visited the Hakushu distillery owned by Suntory, located in the Yamanashi prefecture, about two hours by train from Tokyo in Japan. There is a new Hakushu single malt whisky on the US market.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Hakushu was built in 1973 and is located at a high elevation – 700 meters above sea level. (Scotland's highest distilleries are Dalwhinnie and Braeval, both about 355 meters.) On the train ride there, your ears are continually clogging as you change elevation. The distillery is on a large site to protect its water source, and doubles as a bird sanctuary.

The Yamazaki distillery used to grow at least some of its own grain up until around 1970, but now they import all their barley. It is grown and malted in Scotland and shipped to Japan. Suntory buys malted barley at two different peating levels; basically unpeated and at highly peated at at 25 ppm phenol content.

They grind the malted barley on site, then put it in the mash tun with hot water to expose the fermentable sugars and transfer it to the wooden washbacks for fermentation. They ferment it using both brewers' and distillers' yeast.

They have six pairs of stills at Hakushu; two of them the same shape and one not currently used. Thus they have four active still shapes producing different whiskies. As there is another whisky boom, they're currently distilling 24/7.

As Hakushu is at a very high elevation, the whisky ages more slowly with less wood influence on the spirit. Though they use five types of barrels at the other single malt distillery Yamakazi, at Hakushu they focus on two: ex-bourbon and hogshead. (Hogshead barrels are reconstructed bourbon barrels made a little larger, holding 230 liters rather than 180.) They do, however, age ex-sherry butts (Spanish oak, 480 liters), and puncheons (new American white oak, 480 liter).

They rechar some barrels after using them to age whisky about four times, but after they rechar they only use them one more time. Distillery General Manager Mike Miyamoto says that the whisky aged in rechar barrels is more astringent than with regular ex-bourbon barrels.

The smell of a recharred barrel is amazing! It's like campfire wood and sugars, even marshmallowish.

At Hakushu they use only racked warehouses, in earthquake-safe metal racks that go about 13 levels high.

Here they use peated and unpeated barley, four still shapes, and five types of casks (though they focus on two.) They say that between them (2x4x5) they make 40 different types of whisky at Hakushu.

Regardless, to make up the Hakushu single malt they primarily include three whiskies distilled on-site: unpeated malt distillate aged in hogshead barrels, unpeated malt distillate aged in sherry butts, and peated malt distillate aged in ex-bourbon barrels.

We sampled each component separately and then the Hakushu 12 and 18 year old blends. With three widely different distillates, Hakushu is almost more of a blended malt (vatted malt) than a single malt.

November 17, 2011
Pickle Back in Los Angeles Times Magazine

I wrote up a short ditty on the Pickle Back (A shot of whiskey- usually Jameson- with a pickle juice chaser) for the Los Angeles Times Magazine's March issue.

Read it here.

(Photo by Brian Leatart)

March 10, 2011
Irish Coffee: It’s All in the Cream

In Ireland a few weeks ago, I had Irish Coffee three times in as many days. Irish Coffee was invented in Ireland and is credited to a bar at the Shannon airport. Then it was recreated in San Francisco at the Buena Vista. Its popularity in the US helped it travel back to Ireland where became popular around the country.

At the Chapter One restaurant in Dublin, they have the most elaborate preparation of the Irish Coffee in town. They add Jameson Irish Whiskey and 2 tablespoons brown sugar to a pan and caramelize it for 10 minutes and grate fresh nutmeg on top. They add half the amount of coffee, then light the pan on fire for just a second and blow it out. They add the other half the coffee then pour it into the glass.

Then they add the cream on top. Unlike the other Irish Coffees I've had, the cream was fairly warm as opposed to refrigerator-cold. Most of the fuss of an Irish Coffee seems to be about the cream. I address this in last week's post on FineCooking.com.

It turns out different countries have conflicting definitions for cream, and even in the US you have to know the difference between "whipped" and "whipping" cream to get it right.

The good news is, once you buy the right cream you don't have to whip it very much yourself- just don't stir the coffee first, and pour it over the back of a spoon. More info is in the post here.

March 9, 2011
Jameson Irish Whiskey Distillery Visit
In early February I visited the Jameson Irish Whiskey distillery – actually two of them.

The original Jameson distillery is in Dublin, but it is no longer made there. In 1971 it moved to the Midleton distillery in Cork. The reason is because in the late 1960's Irish Distillers was formed, a merger of Jameson, Powers, and Cork distilleries.

In Dublin there is a visitors' center and restaurant. We went there first. I've got to admit, they did a really good job making a non-working distillery look working, using dioramas and original distillery parts but with fake ingredients pumping through them.

The next day we went to the new distillery in Cork. But actually it's the new-new distillery, located next to the old one.

Here we skipped the typical tour in favor of an in-depth one.

Jameson Fun Facts
- Triple-distilled, as opposed to most scotch's twice-distilled
- The old pot still here is gargantuan, probably one of the largest in the world. That is no longer used in favor of two wash stills half the size- that are still pretty huge.
- All of the pot-still whisky made here is made on the same four stills: two wash stills, 1 feints still, and one spirit still
- There are also several column stills as Jameson is blended whiskey.
- Redbreast (available in US) and Green Spot (not) are all pot-still whiskeys.
- They also make Middleton, Powers, and Paddy here, plus a couple other brands
- They distill Tullamore Dew here under contract
- Most Jameson uses ex-bourbon and ex-sherry casks. Some (Rarest Reserve) uses ex-port barrels
- Sherry butts are prepared by putting oloroso sherry (that has already aged the minimum of three years to be called sherry) into new casks for two years to prepare them.
- Their pot-still spirit is a combination of malted and unmalted barley. If it's all pot-still whiskey, it is called "Irish pot still." Bushmills is "Irish malt" as it uses all malted barley.
- They don't make a big deal about yeast strains here – use a "standard distilling yeast"
- We nosed 100% malted distillate vs. malt/unmalt blend. The malted smelled more fruity and esthery than the blend
- Due to the weather, there isn't a great temperature variation in the barrel warehouses, and only 2% angel's share per year
- Jameson and Jameson 12 have opposite ratios of pot to column distilled spirit in them, though they don't say the ratios.
- Jameson 18 tastes like green caramel apples
- Jameson Rarest Vintage Reserve tastes like the inside of banana peels, coconut flakes, pineapple gum arabic. It is the yumz.
- Only before 1800 was Irish whisky peated, and much of that would have been poteen rather than whisky. Around 1800 large-scale production became legal in Ireland and everyone moved to using coal rather than peat. So really in modern Irish whisky making there is no tradition of peating.
February 18, 2011
High-Falutin’ Boozin’

Another magazine I write for that is not usually online is Caviar Affair, for which the tagline is, "Celebrating wordly indulgences and luxury living."

That's so *me*, right? Actually it really is, except that other people indulge me in the luxury to which I've become accustomed.

Anyhoo, they did put the new issue online. Unlike much of what I write for other publications, there is a definite emphasis in my stories for this magazine on stuff that you can buy, rather than, say, ruminations on flavor combinations and the deeper meaning of cocktail culture.

The whole issue online is here.

For this issue I wrote some stuff on vodka, some on rare scotch, a bit about my trip to Guatemala, and information about some new cocktail bars.

February 15, 2011
Bits and Pieces from Winter Drinking Guide in 7×7 Magazine
My San Francisco winter drinking guide in 7×7 Magazine is coming online in bits and pieces.

Here are some:
December 14, 2010
More Fun With Distillery Waste

I am a big fan of distillery waste. Not bathing in it, but learning about it.

In most cases where a grain is distilled into whiskey or vodka, the spent grain (after all the sugar has been removed to be fermented) is sold off as animal feed. In Cognac (at Hennessy anyway) the spent lees (grape parts) are taken to an industrial distiller to get more alcohol out of them, and the "heavy sediments" of the grape juice go for cattle feed and for use in pharmaceutical products. In tequila production, the spent fibers from the agave pinas are sometimes put back on the fields as fertilizer, sometimes mixed with the heads and tails of distillation.

(There is a lot of leftover vegetation in tequila production.)

Many sugar cane distillers (either at the sugar factory for rum or at the distillery for rhum agricole) burn the spent sugar cane stalks to heat the steam engine that powers the distillery.

(Spent sugar cane to be burned at Rhum Clement distillery on Martinique.)

(Huge steam-powered gears at Rhum Clement distillery on Martinique.)

The heads and tails are the waste products of distillation, made up of alcohol, water, and undesirable flavor compounds that distillers don't want in their final products. These are also recycled. In scotch whisky, these are put back into the still for the next batch of distillation. (Somehow they never build up and overwhelm the spirit- weird.) Many companies sell the heads and tails to industrial distillers who make pure spirit, cosmetics, and other products. Some use this alcohol as fuel to heat their distilleries in winter.

(The condenser at Fettercairn.)

Speaking of heat, many (if not most) distilleries are mainly powered by hot water; heated either by an oil burner or by burning waste materials like the sugar cane stalks mentioned above. The hot water heats the stills to convert the liquids into steam. Cold water is also needed in the condensers of the still to convert the alcohol in steam form back into liquid form. Typically this cool water comes from a nearby stream or river. After it is used in the condenser it is now hot water, which isn't usually suitable for dumping back into the water stream from whence it came until it is cool. In some distilleries such as the one for Blue Ice Vodka, this hot water is used to lightly heat a warehouse in the winters.

What About the Water in the Still?

On my recent trip to the Isle of Jura, The Dalmore, and Fettercairn distilleries I learned about more industrial waste. This made me very happy.

For some reason nobody talks about the leftover water from distillation. Distillation is really just separating alcohol from water in order to concentrate the alcohol. Concentrate alcohol in beer and you get (unaged) whisky or vodka. Concentrate it in wine and you get brandy. The heads and tails contain alcohol and this is valuable so it gets recycled, but there is still the water left in the still.

(Stills at Fettercairn.)

At Fettercairn, Jura's master distiller Willie Tait explained it: After the first distillation, the leftover water also contains yeast bodies from fermentation. This water/yeast mix is called "pot ale," and it can be boiled down into a high-protein syrup used as cattle feed or as fertilizer.

After the second distillation the leftovers are mostly water with a high copper content with some congeners. Tait said this mixture is called the "spent lees," which is confusing because in cognac this means something different. I also failed to write down how this water is recycled if it is at all, so I have more fun facts about distillery waste to learn!

June 23, 2010
Fettercairn Distillery Visit- Single Malt Scotch Whisky Distillery Tour

Last week I visited the Isle
of Jura, The Dalmore, and Fettercairn distilleries in Scotland. These
brands are all owned by White &
Mackay. This post is about visiting the Fettercairn distillery.

(Fettercairn marked with red pin. Map made with Google Maps)

From The Dalmore distillery we went on yet another gorgeous drive over two mountain ranges to reach Fettercairn, a distillery named after the town where it is located. As you can see on the map below, after you come down from the mountains where much of the vegetation is heather (brown at this time of year) like low scrub bushes, you hit the eastern farmlands with rich soils and plenty of water coming off the hills.

The Fettercairn distillery is about a five-minute walk from the center of Fettercairn with its one pub and stone arch commemorating a pit stop from Queen Victoria. It is surrounded by fields and there are cattle grazing across from the distillery.

The distillery is full of much original equipment from 1824 with a few technological improvements. They no longer do floor maltings (I think only five or six distilleries still do) but otherwise things look pretty old-fashioned here.

(Fettercairn Distillery. Cows in foreground.)

The mash tun is an old copper-topped one with mechanically-driven (see below) stirrers inside. The drainage at the bottom of these older mash tuns is different from newer models, so to compensate the barley must be ground to a courser level.

(Above: Copper-topped mash tun. Below: Inside the mash tun.)

The distillery also has wooden washbacks where fermentation happens. Most wooden washbacks I've seen are made from Doug Fir pine from Oregon.

(Wooden washback)

Unlike at The Dalmore distillery that uses the brown-colored peat-rich river water, Fettercairn uses water from an underground spring for mashing, fermentation, and reducing to barrel proof. It is crystal clear and rich with minerals- you can taste a sort of metallic-granite flavor and it is very drying in the mouth, almost a tannic feeling.

(Stills at Fettercairn)

Fettercairn has two pairs of stills and the still for the second distillation (the "spirit still") has a pretty unique feature.

On yesterday's post about The Dalmore I noted that the still has a reflux box (don't know the technical name for it) in which cold water runs around the top of the neck of the still to encourage only the heavy flavor molecules to cross over.

At Fettercairn they do this in a different way: during the part of the distillation when they're getting the heart of the spirit (the part that will actually be put in barrels rather than recycled), cold water runs down the outside of the neck of the still. I've never seen anything like this on a still before.

It's hard to capture in pictures, so I took this short video. I think this is supercool, but I'm a nerd.

After the whisky is distilled and put into barrels it is stored in traditional dunnage warehouses- old, earthen floor warehouses in which barrels are stacked no more than three-high. There are thick walls and in this case a slate roof. The walls are super moldy and reminded me a lot of the aging warehouses in Cognac.

In these dunnage warehouses (about 12 of them for Fettercairn, all local), there is not a great deal of temperature difference between the top and bottom row. This is quite different from a racked warehouse (think of the tall bourbon warehouses), in which casks are stacked several stories high and temperature, evaporation, and rate of aging vary greatly in different parts of the warehouse.

Now for the bad news: Fettercairn is not available in the US. Even in Scotland its pretty rare to find it as a single-malt. They released a new bottling called Fior that's really tasty and they can't keep it on the shelves. They also sell some 30-year-old and 40-year-old expressions but who can afford such things?

We tasted several barrel samples and they were really wild- a 2004 ex-bourbon had a salty finish and a bourbon grain taste. A 1997 sherry refill cask sample tasted fruity-savory with flavors of sundried tomato and cranberry. The 1974 and 1973 ex-American oak hogsheads were insane floral explosions of lilac, jasmine, rose, and other candied flower flavors.

I assume that most all Fettercairn goes into blends, as most whisky goes toward blends even if it is from a notable single-malt. I do wish they sold this single-malt in the states because:

1. It tastes good.

2. Unicorns!

June 17, 2010
The Dalmore Distillery Visit- A Single Malt Scotch Whisky Distillery Tour

Last week I visited the Isle of Jura, The Dalmore, and Fettercairn distilleries in Scotland. These brands are all owned by White & Mackay. This post is about visiting The Dalmore distillery.

(The Dalmore distillery indicated by red dot. Map from Google Maps.)

From Jura, we took a boat to the mainland and then drove diagonally northeast to reach The Dalmore. It was a long and gorgeous drive into the Highlands that took the better part of a day.

(The Dalmore distillery)

There are many things that make up the final flavor profile of a single-malt scotch, including the variety of barley, the peating levels of it, the water used in the mashing and fermentation, the size and shape of the stills, the size and type of barrels used to age it, where the barrels are aged, and of course the length of aging of the whisky.

The water for The Dalmore comes from Loch Morie, and inland lake. The water then runs through a river to the distillery that is located on another body of water, the Cromarty Firth. As the water travels through a whole lot of peat on the way, by the time it reaches the distillery it is brown in color. This water, not filtered, is used in the mashing and fermentation, and to dilute the whisky to barrel proof for aging.

You can see how it might add to the flavor of the whisky.

(Peat-filled brown water flowing into The Dalmore distillery.)

In the previous post I talked about Jura's tall stills that produce a light and fruity spirit full of high esther notes like pear. At The Dalmore the stills are quite differently shaped and this impacts the spirit.

Photography wasn't allowed in the still room so you'll have to make due with my artistic renderings below.

The stills for the first distillation almost look decapitated- they just stop with a flat top and the lynne arm is not a gentle curve from the top, but a tube sticking out from a foot or two below it.

(Artistic rendering of stills at The Dalmore. Not to scale.)

The still for the second distillation isn't quite as ugly, but it's even more interesting. I think this is the first time I've seen a water-filled reflux section on a still in Scotland. On the tubular pipe near the top of the still is a section that is rinsed with cool water inside.

This makes it difficult for light elements to reach the top of the still, leaving the more robust heavy molecules to cross over to the condenser. You get a spirit that's a lot less light and esthery, very much unlike Jura we'd visited the day before.

Thus The Dalmore comes off the still as a big bold heavy liquid before it goes into wood. It is then the job of the Master Blender, Richard Patterson in this case, to tame the spirit as it ages and shape it into the final product.

I thought that the role of the Master Blender was simply to take what was given to him- a bunch of scotch in barrels- and mix it together, but it is much more than that, at least at The Dalmore.

Patterson chooses the types of barrels (going to Jerez to pick out the sherry ones personally) in which the spirit will be aged, decides on the flavor profile he's seeking for a particular bottling, manages the aging process and checks up on the spirit to see how it is doing as it develops, and puts the blends together. It is product development, wood management, and blending.

Keep in mind that this is still just for a single-malt scotch whisky, a blend of whiskies from the same distillery. A vatted malt or a blend would involve whiskies from other distilleries and grain (column distilled) whisky also. Patterson does this for the Whyte & Mackay blended scotch whisky that is not available in the US.

On this trip I learned a great deal about the different roles of the master distiller and the master blender, and how some spirits need gentle nudging as they age to get them to the right final flavor profile, and others need an aggressive and more hands-on approach to bring them into line. Funny enough, the lighter, softer spirit is made on an island and the full-bodied bruiser comes from the Highlands.

June 16, 2010