This the how many are in one bottle of Karlsson's Vodka, that is. That is one 15-pound bag of Russet potatoes and two 1-pound bags of mini-potatoes, all stacked in my extra-large salad bowl. Perhaps I need to get a real hobby.
Karlsson's uses about 17 pounds of potatoes- nearly twice as much other potato vodka brands, because Karlsson's uses small heirloom potato varietals from southern Sweden. These potatoes are rich in flavor and protein but lower in carbohydrates than traditional Russet potatoes shown above. They are less efficient for distillation than fuel potatoes- but delicious to eat and drink.
To put it in perspective, I took the picture next to an empty Karlsson's bottle:
That's a lot of potatoes! They (well not these) will be fermented, distilled up to 96% ABV, then diluted back down to 40% for bottling strength.
This post is part of a little project on potatoes and Sweden I'm doing for Karlsson's Vodka. Karlsson's Gold is a blend of seven heirloom potato vodkas.
Read about my adventures to Sweden with Karlsson's and learn how it's made here.
There is a very common misconception that most or all vodka is made from potatoes. In reality it's a tiny fraction (I heard 1% at one point), while the rest is made mostly from grains (though some is from sugar byproducts, grapes, or even milk whey). I would love to know how this became the popular idea, but I don't think I'll be able to find out.
Interestingly, from my research the potato history books skim over the history of potatoes in vodka, and the vodka books do too. But I wanted to research when potatoes were used in vodka.
Potatoes didn't come to Europe from their native Peru until around the mid-1500s, yet the first printing of the word vodka is from 1405. Distillation preceded that by at least a couple centuries.
So the original vodka (which doesn't resemble today's crisp, clean version to be sure) was definitely not made from potatoes- grains and grapes had a big head start.
In Poland, "The late 18th century inaugurated the production of vodka from various unusual substances including even the carrot.[21]"
In Sweden, "Although initially a grain product, potatoes started to be used in the production in the late 18th century, and became dominant from the early 19th century.[28]"
According to the book Vodka: A Global History by Patricia Herlihy, "In the early nineteenth century, Poland introduced the plentiful potato as an alternative base ingredient…. Between 1843 and 1851 the European potato blight severely curtailed production."
According to Nicholas Faith and Ian Wisniewski in their 1997 book Classic Vodka, potatoes first came to Poland in 1683, it wasn't until after 1764 that they began transferred from the gardens of the rich to the food of the peasants.
According to the book The Vodka Companion: A Connoisseur's Guide by Desmond Begg, "Potatoes, a cheaper raw material than wheat at the time, were first used in distillation in the 1790s."
As we'll look at in closer detail in another post, Sweden and other Scandinavian countries underwent a long puritanical/temperance movement. As part of this, the government took control of all alcohol production. And it seems that because they thought of alcohol as evil (though sometimes a necessary one), they made it all with the then-lowest-quality ingredient they could find: potatoes.
According to Classic Vodka, "Potato vodka is still subject to a certain snobbery, as though it is a consolation spirit made in the bath-tub. This misconception can be traced back to a time when potatoes were the cheapest raw material for vodka, whereas today they are generally more expensive and labor-intensive than grain.
Karlsson's Note
The ideal potatoes for producing high quantities of raw alcohol would be large and have a high starch content, but Karlssson's vodka uses tiny heirloom varieties (seven of them) in their blend of Karlssson's Gold. These are less efficient, more expensive, and they certainly produce a flavorful spirit.
Though the potato arrived in Europe in the late 1500s, it didn't catch on so quick. Partly this was because of the difference in terroir between northern Europe where the temperature and sunlight varies a lot over the year, and their native equatorial Peru. So they were grown around Europe but they weren't as prodigious as the potatoes we know today.
It was on the Canary Islands- closer to Peru than to Ireland in climate- that farmers were able to breed varieties that would later be successful throughout Europe.
There were also publicity issues – though as mentioned in the previous post they were often called aphrodisiacs, they were also believed to be the cause of leprosy. You win some, you lose some.
Potatoes were a different sort of crop than Europe's grains- they were more labor-intensive to plant (one doesn't just scatter seeds) and harvest. It really wasn't until the 1700s that potatoes became a food crop.
By 1700 the potato was grown around the UK, though this seems to be largely in individual gardens rather than as a field crop initially. They may have first been grown commercially in Alsace, France.
One interesting reason for their success as a food/field crop was wars in Europe: armies trampling over the lands wouldn't see the obvious grains sticking out of the ground, and they could camp on the lands and potatoes would still be growing underneath.
"Parmentier Antoine 1737-1813". Licensed under Public domain via Wikipedia Commons
Throughout the 1700s potatoes were eaten not by choice but out of desperation- but it turns out that their a pretty darn good source of nutrients. Frederick The Great of Prussia was a believer, and required their planting across the Germany-Austria region. A French pharmacist named Parmentier (there is a Parisian metro station named after him) was captured during the Seven Years War with Prussia was fed exclusively on potatoes for three years, and brought back this knowledge to France.
He introduced them to the royal court and there there were all-potato themed dinners. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson may have attended these dinners and at one of them Jefferson is said to have delighted in French fries and brought the idea back to America.
Potatoes were more rapidly accepted in the UK, where wheat didn't grow all that well but the tubers did. And as grain was a big commodity market, potatoes benefited from not being subject to market and weather whims. John Reader writes:
As a crop that thrived where wheat would not grow, and survived in weather that ruined grain harvests, the potato was to be welcomed by governments and commodity markets alike. Not only because it was a cheap source of food for the poor; not just as a commodity to be bought and sold; nor simply as a cushion that would dampen the severity of fluctuations in grain supply. It was all of these things, but also promised to free up more grain for the markets. If people could be persuaded to grown and eat more potatoes there would be more grain to sell. Thus the potato nudged grain away from its primary signicance as a stable food of the people who grew it, towards a formative role in national and world trade.
In Norway, potatoes were grown by priests who were often farmers. They even had the nickname 'potato priests'. Potatoes came relatively late to Scandanavia. They were grown in aristocrats' gardens in Sweden and Denmark in the 1730s and became a field crop around 1800. Around the same year, they were cultivated in Russia and the Ukraine.
The Potato Blight
Later in the 1900s, anthropologists were able to show that wherever the potato was adopted, populations increased. It was a proven source of nutrition and allowed more people to share space on land. Of course this came with a downside.
In 1845, 90 percent Ireland's 8.5 million person population was dependent on the potato for food, as it grew so well there. And in 1845 and 1846 the potato blight hit and 88 percent of the potato crops failed. From those years and for the next few after, one million people died and another million emigrated.
The world's first celebrity chef, Alexis Soyer, designed and implemented a soup kitchen that fed 26,000 people a day in Dublin. He was also the creator of the first-known blue drink called Soyer's Nectar, but that came later.
We call it the Irish Potato Famine, but that's not at all accurate: the same crop failure happened all over the world. In 1843 it ravaged crops in North America and soon came to Europe, destroying crops everywhere. The cause was a parasitic fungus that grew on potatoes.
The solution to the problem came from a botanist named Millardet, who was also instrumental in helping circumnavigate phylloxera by grafting European grapevines onto American rootstock. He also promoted the solution to "downy mildew" which was a problem for grapes as well as potato leaves. The solution, copper sulphate mixed with lime that is sprayed on the leaves of plants, became known as the Bordeaux Mixture and it is still used on crops today. (It's discovery is credited with starting the agro-chemical industry.)
But as that solution was discovered 40 years after the great blight, how did they stop the disease? They didn't. It was the luck of the weather and of the varieties planted. There were regional outbreaks for years until the Bordeaux Mixture became common. Luckily, none approaching the severity of 1846-47.
The Potato in the US
Potatoes were grown in the USA since the 1600s, but not so much as food. The transition happened when Scotch-Irish people came to the US, as well as subsequent waves of potato-growing peoples from eastern Europe and Scandanavia.
Potatoes arrived in the Colonies in 1621 when the Governor of Bermuda, Nathaniel Butler, sent two large cedar chests containing potatoes and other vegetables to Governor Francis Wyatt of Virginia at Jamestown. The first permanent potato patches in North America were established in 1719, most likely near Londonderry (Derry), NH, by Scotch-Irish immigrants. From there, the crop spread across the country.
Idaho, the present-day largest producer of potatoes, actually did not begin growing potatoes until 1836, when missionaries moved west in an effort to teach the native tribes to grow crops instead of relying upon hunting and gathering methods. However, it wasn’t until 1872 when the Russet Burbank variety was developed, that the Idaho potato industry began to flourish.
The Russet Potato
I love single-origin stories. The potato generally comes from a single place in the world, the Andes of Peru, but all of the Russet potatoes in existence come from a single plant.
One way to avoid potato blight was to cross-breed potatoes to see what happened. In this process, a New York preacher was sent some seedlings from South America and these grew very well and were named the Garnet Chile Potato.
Then a Vermont farmer bred these into the Early Rose, which became very popular. These potatoes were generally seedless, but in in 1872 in Massachusetts an amateur botanist spotted a seed on an Early Rose. He collected and germinated the seeds and a single one of these new plants produced great big potatoes.
He sold the rights to this new potato (apparently that's doable) to a seed company. Then this potato mutated into the Russet-Burbank potato aka the Idaho potato.
And that's where your French fries come from.
Karlsson's Vodka Potato Facts
Those great big Russet potatoes would be a lot easier to use to make vodka, but Karlsson's insead uses tiny heirloom potato varieties. They have less starch than the big potatoes and thus they need to use more of them – about 17 pounds of potatoes for every bottle of Karlsson's.
Read about a visit to see how Karlsson's is made here.
The potatoes for this vodka all come from Cape Bjare in Sweden.To get there, we drove from Copenhagen, over the relatively new bridge that connects Denmark to Sweden with Malmo on the other side, then turned North to the Cape. The town we stayed in is called Torekov.
The nearby potato farms grow little heirloom potatoes called virgin potatoes whose skin has not yet developed. For these potatoes, smaller is better, and they're served seasonally as virgin/new/fresh potatoes, which they pronounce like "freshpotatoes" so it's easy to know what they are. They are in season from May through August. I ate approximately 700 pounds of them while on the trip.
Karlsson's doesn't necessarily distill the smallest ones, but instead the larger ones that are less desirable for eating. They're still relatively tiny compared to the giant American Russets. Virgin potatoes don't have a ton of starch in them (which will be converted to sugar, which can then be distilled into vodka) but they have a lot of flavor. It takes several times more of these potatoes to make vodka it does the American kind.
In a truly unusual move for vodka, the potato farmers who contribute to the blend are all minor shareholders in Karlsson's vodka.
The Blend
In the development of the blend that would become Karlsson's Gold, they initially distilled 20 different types of potatoes. The current blend of Karlsson's Gold uses seven. At the moment Karlsson's doesn't have their own distillery but uses a few others. All of them are single column stills.
They specify the distillation parameters (there is a minimum distillation proof to be considered vodka) and then get the liquid at the end.
While most brands of vodka emphasize their distillation and filtration technology, Karlsson's focuses on the blend. They recognize that ever year's distillation is different so they worry about it afterward.
We tasted several distillations of individual varietals including Solist and Old Swedish Red (Gammel Svensk Röd). We even tried several different years of Solist potatoes (the main component in the blend) from 2004, 2005, and 2006.
These vintages tasted very different from one another, from bitter and tangy to sweet and honeyed. It's hard to say if the potatoes vary that much year-to-year, or if they were just getting better at distilling them with passing years. The Old Swedish Red potato distillate is insane- it smells like the sea and reminded me of washed potato skins.
Karlsson's is a blend of 7 potato varietals and to me tastes of chocolate, caramel, and dusty chocolate-pecan, with a scent texture (my made-up term) is the dustiness of Red Vines when you first open the package.
Making Vodka
To get from potatoes to vodka, they first mush up the potatoes. They don't even need to add water. They bring them up to 95 degrees Celsius, then add enzymes to break the starch into dextrins. It is then cooled to 65 degrees then another enzyme is added. Then they're ready for fermentation.
The yeast used to convert the fermentable sugars into alcohol is the same strain as an old yeast used for potato vodka production years ago. They maintain cool temperatures during the fermentation process, as this produces less methanol than it would otherwise.
They use the sour mash method of yeast propagation/fermentation. This is when you add a splash of yeast from the previous batch of fermentation to the next one. This ensures consistency between batches and probably saves raw materials as well. After fermentation, the mash is only about six percent alcohol.
A couple days later on a boat on a cruise around the Stockholm, we met Karlsson's Master Blender Börje Karlsson, who also developed Absolut vodka. He's kind of a big deal.
When blender Karlsson created Absolut, it was developed as an export product only, to get around Sweden's ban against producing vodka from anything but potatoes. It's funny that he's now bucking the trend; making potato vodka despite the trend in the other direction.
(Karlsson's served with crushed black pepper)
For a technically flavorless vodka, Karlsson's has a ton of flavor. I had some last night in a 2:1 Martini with Imbue vermouth and a dash of Angostura Orange bitters- my first vodka martini in eons.
Many vodka companies today are putting out very refined, smooth, subtle and supple products for vodka drinkers. Karlsson's is almost the opposite of that, an in-your-face, meaty vodka for people who normally dismiss the category as catering to people who don't like the taste of alcohol. There's no missing the flavor in Karlsson's.
Earlier this month I visited Cape Bjare, Sweden to learn about Karlsson's Vodka. Karlsson's is made from a blend of seven heiroom "virgin new" potatoes. This means that the skin hasn't fully developed into the brown stuff we recognize here in the States.
In Sweden, restaurants serve these little tiny potatoes as a delicacy (I ate my weight in them while I was there) and Karlsson's uses the slightly larger ones to make their vodka.
But they wouldn't let us drink it until we helped make it, so off we were to the fields to pick potatoes.
Potatoes grow in clumps, and are planted in raised mounds of dirt for easier harvest. Virgin potatoes must be harvested when the plants are still flowering. The harvest is done mostly mechanically, but hand-sorting is required.
We piled into potato trucks and took on the task of sorting potatoes. The machine pulls up the clumps of potatoes, chops off the vegetation, and puts all the round things onto a conveyer belt. Our job was to pull out the undesirable round things: rocks and potatoes with brown skin.
After our job was done, the potatoes were off to the cleaning plant. They are washed and buffed and sorted according to size.
And in the case of Karlsson's, they're fermented and distilled and blended. More on that part later.
For a live action shot of potato sorting in the truck, watch the video below.
