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First Distillation at Colin Keegan's Santa Fe Distillery - Congratulations!
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Downtown Lockport will get a taste of island life
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Homer Glen couple Toby and Jillian Beall plan to open a microdistillery at 1026 State St. in downtown Lockport where they'll create batches of handcrafted spiced rum and tequila spirits.
By Cindy Wojdyla Cain [email protected]
Jan 21, 2011
LOCKPORT - Toby and Jillian Beall want to bring some spice to downtown Lockport. The Homer Glen couple plans to open a microdistillery at 1026 State St. where they'll cook up batches of handcrafted spiced rum and tequila spirits. A change in state law paved the way for the endeavor. The new law, adopted in July, allows microdistillers to make and sell hard liquor on site. Toby, 30, is a pilot for a private airline and Jillian, 29, who is pregnant with twins, is a teacher in the Plainfield School District. The two believe with the help of family and with a little bit of luck, area residents will soon be sipping homemade spirits at the downtown storefront. Toby, a 1998 Lockport High School graduate, said he first got introduced to home brewing by a friend in Arizona who made his own beer. "I like beer, but rum is where my passion is," Toby said. " ... With rum, there's always that lively atmosphere around it. You get a feeling of the islands." Unlike whiskey, "it's more of an upbeat drink," added Jillian, a 1999 Plainfield Central High School graduate. The Bealls took distilling classes in Chicago before they launched their business plan. In the fall, they hope to be busy cooking up batches to make pumpkin spice rum; banana rum will be a staple. "It's really good," Toby said. There will be gold rum, which is aged, and silver rum, which isn't. The couple decided to make tequila, too, because it "fits into that island lifestyle." "We like the vacation feeling, that upbeat flavoring," Jillian said. Rum will be made from sugar cane and molasses. The tequila will be made from the nectar of blue agave plants. Toby said he samples as many types of rum as possible when he flies planes to the Caribbean for work. Each island has secrets that he hopes to incorporate into his own Tailwinds Distilling Co. brand. In addition to on-site tastings, the handmade alcohol will be marketed to restaurants, bars and at special events. Jillian said the closest microdistillery is on the north side of Chicago, so there should be a good market in Lockport for the unique beverages. Landlord Vince Martinez, a Lockport real estate agent, is doing a preliminary buildout of the Tailwinds location. The Bealls will install a still and interior finishing touches before opening in August or September. Martinez said he and other Lockport business owners and officials are excited about the new ingredient coming to the downtown mix because it's something new. Toby and Jillian said they want to help make downtown Lockport a destination spot and a place where customers can get a taste of the island life. For more information, go to www.tailwindsdistilling.com. http://heraldnews.suntimes.com/news/3373294-418/rum-lockport-toby-jillian-downtown.html |
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Moonshine's profile rises in Los Angeles bars
| Once a homemade concoction in the backwoods, the clear whiskey is moving into the hippest bars in town.
Source: Los Angeles Times
By Jessica Gelt
January 13, 2011
Moonshine is having its day in the sun.
Once a back-road country cousin, it is taking on a new life as a city slicker. And now that it's out of the barn and into the bar, mixologists at tony drinking dens are experimenting with moonshine, and spirit enthusiasts - always on the prowl for the newest kick - are responding with alacrity.
Think of it as whiskey light. Made from grains such as corn, wheat, rye or barley, moonshine never rests inside a wooden barrel, which is why it remains clear, rough and ready. Wood is what gives straight bourbon its rich dark color and most of its caramel-vanilla flavor.
That's why moonshine is special, say craft distillers. Unkissed by wood, moonshine retains the purity of its nature and drinkers get the chance to experience whiskey in its raw form - to taste its rough-hewn, chewy-grain edges.
Plus, it's pretty. "L.A. is very look-driven and people are extremely conscious of what they're drinking - what they're holding in their hand," says Shannon Beattie, the beverage director at Cecconi's, a ritzy Italian restaurant in West Hollywood that serves a wide variety of moonshine cocktails alongside its menu of goat cheese and summer truffle pizza and Dungeness crab ravioli. "And this really sells because it gets people talking. It looks unique - how the light shines through the glass, and you can see the cherry in a white Manhattan."
Others appreciate it because it's a bit of the frontier in a bottle and to drink it is to drink in the history of American whiskey.
"During the Colonial period, aging was circumstantial, it wasn't purposeful," says Frank Coleman, senior vice president of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. "If you happened to leave a spirit in a barrel, aging occurred." When settlers shipped goods up the Mississippi River to the Ohio Valley, barrels were valuable commodities, so if a barrel held a ripe item like salted cod, the inside of the barrel would be scorched to get rid of the fish flavor. If whiskey, which was clear at the time, was put in such a barrel and left there long enough, it aged and picked up both dark color and caramel flavor. Eventually it became required by law that bourbon had to age in wood for a certain period of time.
Traditionally, moonshine was called moonshine because it was illegal - made under shadowy circumstances by the light of the moon, and thus untaxed. This new legal breed of clear whiskey, also called "white dog" (the one that's being eaten with truffle pizza inside genteel restaurants) is more like sunshine. And if outlaw Appalachian moonshine met dapper sunshine in a dark alley, there is no question about which one would be down for the count. The country cousin is much harsher than the city slicker.
Still, the final product that many of today's licensed distilleries are producing is made using much the same process that the bootleggers of the Prohibition era employed. For example, the Original Moonshine - a clear corn whiskey made by Stillhouse distillery in Culpeper, Va. - owes its earthy, corn-laden bite to the skills of a third-generation distiller named Chuck Miller, who uses a similar recipe and vintage copper pot stills that his grandfather used to make illicit moonshine in the 1930s.
"He had 11 kids, and the only job he ever had was making whiskey," says Miller, adding that there was a trapdoor in the floor of the family farmhouse that led to a basement filled with moonshine. His grandmother kept her rocking chair over it. "Whenever they came to raid she would run to that rocking chair and crochet."
Stillhouse is one of the spirit's most visible distillers. It has bottles in more than 70 bars and restaurants around L.A., including Cecconi's, Hungry Cat, Roger Room, Hemingway's and Copa d'Oro. And in a particularly sunshiny marketing move, the brand was launched by chief executive and co-founder Brad Beckerman during New York Fashion Week at the 10th anniversary party of designer John Varvatos. No, this isn't the moonshine the dueling banjo players were drinking in the backwoods of the film "Deliverance."
With its freshly minted designer reputation, this new wave of clear whiskey owes its popularity to the proliferation of small, craft distilleries in recent years. In February 2010 the Distilled Spirits Council created a craft distiller affiliate membership, in recognition of the growing number nationwide. They estimate there are more than 200 distilleries now in operation, up from about 24 in 2001.
"Spirits have been on the rise over the last decade," explains the council's Coleman. "More people are drinking spirits - and better spirits."
And thanks in part to the recession, many states have loosened their restrictions on licensing in order to gain revenue quickly. More distilleries mean more tax dollars straight into state coffers.
In addition, the distillers themselves - often small business people with hefty loans - also need to make money quickly, which is why they tend to put out a clear whiskey right off the bat. Whereas traditional American whiskeys can take four to eight years to be fully mature, moonshine can be turned around fairly quickly.
"It's kind of a chicken before the egg thing," says Gable Erenzo, the distiller for Tuthilltown Spirits, which makes Hudson New York Corn Whiskey, one of the more respected brands on the market. "When you first start making whiskey you put out a white whiskey while you're aging your other whiskey."
This gives you an immediate cash flow to really get things going at your distillery, says Brian Ellison, the president of Death's Door Spirits in Wisconsin, which produces Death's Door White Whiskey made from grains that include wheat and barley.
But there's another advantage, Ellison says. Making clear whiskey gives craft distillers the opportunity to showcase what they do best - create unique, highly flavorful spirits that you won't find anywhere else.
"It's kind of like seeing distillers in their underpants," he says. "You can taste what's going on with that distillate before it hits the oak and changes character." He adds that there are people who drink whiskey and then there are whiskey drinkers. People who drink whiskey tend to dabble and aren't hard-core spirits fans. So they are usually just looking for a traditional brown liquor. Whiskey drinkers are spirits aficionados and obsess about all aspects of the liquor-making process. In fact, they will often go to their favorite distilleries to get a taste of the raw product. So Death's Door is taking the thing that the "geeky little group" of whiskey drinkers likes and bottling it to be shared with a larger group.
In Los Angeles, that larger group is tasting it at bars with respected mixology programs such as Hemingway's in Hollywood, where bartender Alex Straus uses Original Moonshine for a drink called Lazy Day, mixing it with lemon, maple syrup and St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram Liqueur, as well as in a drink called Blue Man - a flirty play on a Prohibition cocktail called the Blue Lady. Made with lemon juice and Pages Parfait Amour Cr�me de Violette liqueur, the drink, Straus jokes, tastes a bit like a Sour Patch Kids candy, which it does, but a really nutty delightful one that gets you buzzed.
"With the moonshine I'd say you want to treat it like gin," he says, explaining the ingredient choices in his drinks. To his mind the spirit is nothing like vodka - clear but fairly flavorless. And he doesn't feel that it lends itself particularly well to typical whiskey creations like Manhattans and Old Fashioneds, because it doesn't have the usual oakiness of whiskey. Like gin, moonshine is clear but full of raucous flavor.
At Copa d'Oro in Santa Monica, star bartender Vincenzo Marianella says that he uses moonshine primarily to make sour cocktails like whiskey sours and margaritas. "It's not aged, so it's pretty aggressive," he says, which is why sour ingredients both complement and tame it.
"But it's cool that it's still available. It's what they were drinking in the '20s and '30s, and it's made for the direction that the country's cocktail scene has been going in. People are bringing back old spirits and looking at their history." |
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The Science of Beer
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Gary Spedding at the Brewing and Distilling Analytical Services laboratory. photo by: Roscoe Weber
Click here to read the article: http://www.smileypete.com/Articles-c-2011-01-19-96777.113117-The-Science-of-Beer.html
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A former banker transforms honey into award-winning gin and vodka.
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By Jessie Cacciola, Photographs by Max Flatow
Thirty minutes north of Manhattan, the commuter town of Port Chester is home to a new-ish Batali-Bastianich outpost offering city-style pizza and pasta to the suburban masses. But last summer, when Stillthe-One became the first legal distillery in Westchester since Prohibition, the little village began exporting some excellent flavors of its own: vodka and gin made from honey. In a reverse commute to that taken by the Italian eatery, sleek bottles of Comb Vodka and Comb 9 Gin-"comb" as in honeycomb, of course, and nine for the number of botanicals-are in hot demand right here in Manhattan. Given the quality of Ed Tiedge's spirits, you'd think he'd been perfecting his craft over a lifetime, but until 2008 he was a hedge-fund portfolio manager with no plans to transition to the booze biz. Tiedge says he was emotionally over the work well before the economic implosion. While navigating the abyss of career change in a recession, he landed on the simple idea of making something people enjoy. Tiedge had a penchant for homemade wine (which we'll neither confirm nor deny was made in his basement) but says he never would have gone pro if it weren't for the fact that the state had just dropped the annual license fee for small distillers from $50,000 way down to $1,500. "Wow, this can be a business," he remembers thinking. (He's not the only one. The slashed fees-coupled with a recession-induced buyer's market for warehouse real estate-has prompted many a oneman operation to dabble in artisanal, small-batch distilling, spawning something of a local spirits renaissance.) But Tiedge has a brain for business, and knew that to sell well, his spirits would have to be unique. His wife, Laura, pointed out that anyone can make liquor but not everyone can make good liquor. (The business would eventually be named for her since, after 26 years of marriage, she is "still the one.") After a 10-day course with the American Distillery Institute in California, Tiedge proved to his wife he could indeed develop something good, but rather than lay down their life savings to fund his new venture, she suggested he sell his Porsche. "By then, I hated it anyway," he concedes. "It was all ego." Little did he know that liquidating the car was a more direct path to liquor success than he could have dreamed, because a Swiss buyer who inquired about it possessed just the distillation education Tiedge needed. Under Porsche enthusiast Markus Matuschka de Greiffenclau's e-mail signature appeared the URL cognac-cognac.com. A few clicks later, Ed learned that the inquirer's family had been in the wine business for more than 800 years-and was branching into brandy. Soon enough, the car was sold and Tiedge found himself standing in a distillery in Cognac, France, communicating courtesy of a translation iPhone app. For the next month, he joined the crew as they got the stills running each morning, broke for lunch and then checked in on the product in the afternoon. Tiedge filled any empty hours with trips to neighboring distilleries to literally sniff out the competition. The variation astounded him: "They all use the same type of grapes...they all use the same type of stills...their vineyards are right next to each other, yet their cognac all tasted different," he recently marveled. The experience impressed upon him the importance of minutiae like yeast-strain selection or precise temperature, and reinforced what he'd learned at the Distillery Institute: that what goes into a still is more important than the still itself. Back in Port Chester, Tiedge set up two makeshift pot stills. Eventually he engineered a larger, more conventional copper pot still with a friend, a combination he says works far better than the more-expensive-but-now-idle column-pot hybrid that mainstream distilling made him think he had to have. (At least he bought the small one, he says of the unnecessary equipment.) From the start, he put his money on honey. A company in Vermont was making spirits out of maple syrup but nothing on the market distilled sweets from bees-plus, he was excited about the floral notes pollen would add to the recipe. But his products aren't simple solutions of honey-imbued spirits. The secret to Tiedge's success, basement-brewers, is the mighty fine mead, or honey wine, made right on the premises. He starts with vats of Florida orange-blossom honey-chosen for the distinct flavor that comes from the flower-which he dilutes with water and impregnates with yeast, fermenting the solution in three steel fermentation tanks for about two weeks before transferring it to the stills a few steps away. Swirled into a glass from the base of one of the tanks, Tiedge's mead is barely honey-hued, with just a hint of sweetness and a crisp, dry zing reminiscent of a good riesling. But that libation, enjoyable all on its own, is just the beginning; next he makes it into a rough brandy to be re-distilled for an 80-proof vodka and distilled once more with a pouch of herbs to make gin, like a big batch of steeped tea with a buzz. Despite their sweet beginnings, the finished sprits are very much classifiably dry. They're clean and sharp-the vodka has only a floral note of sweet-orange blossom; the gin is herbaceous and earthy, thanks to a nine-part medley that includes juniper, licorice, coriander, rose petals and galangal, the Indonesian root that tastes like citrus and cinnamon and looks like ginger. (And, yes, as celiacs might be wondering, with wheat swapped for honey, these spirits are gluten-free.) The results quickly garnered high praise: Tiedge's very first batch walked away with the gold medal for unflavored vodka at the International Review of Spirits in Chicago last fall, where it was hailed as "a remarkably clever and deliciously flavorful vodka that will transform cocktails." City bartenders-a notoriously hard-toplease bunch-quickly embraced both the vodka and the gin. Xan Garcia, general manager of Stag's Head, a dark-wooded lodge-style beer bar and gastropub specializing in exclusively American-made beer and spirits-and homey dishes braised in said beer-along Midtown East, is always looking for quality local tipples to join her queue of quaffs, and Tiedge's gin was an easy addition. She says it brings out the subtle sugar in drinks like the bar's aptly named Bee's Knees: lemon juice, honey, mint and Comb 9 Gin. "You get a sweetness on the back end of the taste. The honey (in the gin) adds sweetness without making it cloying," explains Garcia, emphasizing "it's still a gin; it's not like gin with a little honey mixed in." The esteemed spirits sellers at third-generation Park Avenue Liquor Shop in Midtown say Comb spurred a rare fervor in the store when it was first released. Tiedge had come in by himself, telling his story and offering a taste. Eric Goldstein, who owns the shop with his father and two brothers, says, "It was just one of those moments, like, 'You gotta taste this.'" But perhaps the ultimate accolades came from the very first place to try Tiedge's nascent spirits: Blue Hill at Stone Barns. General manager Philippe Gouze and sommelier Thomas Carter were so impressed that they placed orders for both the gin and the vodka. "We immediately recognized it as a great spirit-and made friends with him at the same time," says Gouze, noting that the encounter reminded him of his discovery of Tuthilltown, back when the Hudson Valley whiskey made its debut. While visiting Tiedge's tiny distillery, Gouze was inspired by the botanicals that enhance the gin. "We started thinking about the herbs and honey available to us from Stone Barns," says Gouze of the working farm the restaurant calls home, and proposed they collaborate on a signature spirit. Just before fall's first frost, Gouze provided Tiedge with sassafras, basil, green coriander seeds, honeysuckle, cardamom leaves and, of course, honey from the Stone Barns hives; within a few weeks it will be on offer at both the farm-based restaurant and its city sister. "We're waiting... impatiently," laughs Gouze. www.combvodka.com
http://www.ediblemanhattan.com/20110110/creating-a-buzz/
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New Holland Artisan Spirits: Artisan Distillery launches "Brewers' Whiskey"
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For Immediate Release: ecember 8, 2010 Contact: Rich Blair
[email protected] Artisan Distillery launches "Brewers' Whiskey" Drawing on New Holland Brewing Company's brewing expertise, the team at New Holland Artisan Spirits has launched "Brewers' Whiskey", a series of small-barrel whiskeys twice distilled from a "beer wash" and laid down in small casks with a heavy char. Fermented from 100% 2-row malted barley, Double Down Barley is first in the series and is available now. Double Down Barley is described as a bright spirit with a caramel nose, balanced with hues of cocoa & coffee before a spicy, clove finish. The limited release of less than 500 375ml bottles, each hand-signed by head-distiller Dennis Downing, will be followed by other whiskey styles in the series. Aging whiskey in small barrels is an innovative technique that increases the whiskey to wood contact, enhancing and accentuating the flavors drawn from the oak barrel. For New Holland, this has created opportunities for several Brewers' Whiskey releases in addition to the distillery's flagship whiskey, Zeppelin Bend, which spends more than three years in full size barrels and releases twice a year. New Holland Artisan Spirits expects to release at least four new Brewers' Whiskeys in 2011, each coaxing unique and interesting flavors from an artfully brewed "beer wash."
New Holland Artisan Spirits
66 E. 8th Street
Holland, MI 49423
616.355.NHBC
Newhollandbrew.com
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Distillery is Loudoun Co.'s first since Prohibition
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Catoctin Creek Distilling Company has been open for more than a year. (Neal Augenstein/WTOP Photo)
Neal Augenstein, wtop.com
PURCELLVILLE, Va. - You can smell it before both feet are inside the distillery door: The yeasty smell of fermentation.
Catoctin Creek Distilling Company is the first legal distillery in Loudoun County since the prohibition era.
"Predominantly, we make rye whiskey. We make both an aged and an unaged dry whiskey. We also make a gin from our rye mash, and then we do brandies," says Scott Harris, who owns and operates the distillery with his wife, Becky.
In operation for more than a year, the distillery's main investment is an expensive German still. With mash boiling inside, tubes and piping separate steam from the solids.
The spirits trickle into a plastic measuring beaker. The Harrises periodically dip a pinky into the stream, to ensure the liquor tastes as it should. Periodically, the clear liquid is transferred to a sparkling metal kettle, before it is transferred into new oak barrels.
"We put a hundred gallons of mash in. We ferment it to 10 percent, so through the course of the day we only expect to get 10 gallons of spirit. It's a very low yield business," Harris says. "It takes time, so we can get just the flavors we want."
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=25&sid=2234711
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Wedensday, April 5th at the Conference ...
|  Sensory Analysis, the Professional "Nose" with Julia Nourney, Journalist |
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American Distilling Institute
