Adventures in yeast

I am not a successful home fermenter. I've tried several times over the years to make hard cider, and only in the last month managed to achieve "drinkable." That was by going to Maryland Homebrew and buying apple cider yeast (which, on reflection, seems like a sensible first step). A couple of weeks in a half-gallon jug with an air lock, then off to a flip-top bottle with a little added sugar.

The top two categories are largely theoretical.

When I say "drinkable," I don't mean "good." I mean your eyes don't water and you aren't mostly wondering whether you're poisoning yourself. This last batch of drinkable cider, for example, was a bit sour and a bit sweet but mostly flavorless. And yes, that does make it the best hard cider I've ever made. (If you don't count when the sweet cider gets fizzy after a week in the fridge.)

But mostly flavorless isn't flavorless, and if you need to concentrate flavor what better [legal] way than fractional freezing? So I froze a mason jar of the cider, let half of it thaw, and removed the remaining ice. (Yes, there are better and more careful ways of fractional freezing; like I said, I am not a successful home fermenter.)

With half a mason jar of homemade applejack, I reached for some rye and had a drink. It was okay, but of course the applejack is a lot closer to water than it is to whiskey, so it was more like a highball, or maybe an olde tyme sling (equal parts spirit and water). What's wanted is a hot applejack-and-rye toddy with perhaps a splash of ginger syrup.
.

With a cask proof rye, this is approaching servable.

Hot Stockade (Applejack-Rye-Ginger Toddy)

• 3 oz. applejack (jacked hard cider, not Laird's)
• 1.5 oz. rye whiskey
• 0.25 oz ginger syrup

To make the ginger syrup, simmer diced candied ginger in water for 20 minutes, then add an equal volume of sugar, stir to dissolve sugar, filter out the ginger (use the re-candied ginger in your next cup of tea). Keep in the refrigerator until it's used up or moldy.

To make the toddy, warm the applejack in the microwave in a small, microwave-safe mug. Add the rye and syrup, stir. Serve with a cinnamon stick.

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After I racked off the cider, I had an empty half-gallon jug and an air lock. What to do but try some small beer?

Why small beer? I wasn't prepared to try to make regular beer again (I'm not even prepared to talk about the times I've tried to make regular beer). I'd read about small beer and spruce beer and whatever-you-got-around-your-farmhouse beer in Forgotten Drinks of Colonial New England, and I didn't have the patience to wait till I found some sassafras root to try making hard root beer. (Spruce beer, like gin, falls under the law, "Pine trees aren't people food.")

According to the Internet, George Washington is the only person in the world who ever wrote down a recipe for small beer, so I adapted his by steeping molasses, hops, and oat bran in simmering water, then pitching some of the remaining apple cider yeast (not a successful home fermenter) and setting it to ferment. I checked it after several days, reckoned it a failure, and planned to chuck it when I had a few minutes unobserved. I then left it (or "forgot it"; that works in this sentence too) for another two weeks, much longer than the week Washington ordered (not a successful home fermenter).

Taste, schmaste. Admire the color.

When I finally got around to pouring it down the drain, I figured I'd give it a quick sip, and... well, it was drinkable. Imagine my surprise. I poured off a quart or so into an old Four Roses bottle I had lying around, careful not to get the oat bran sediment that had settled to the bottom of the fermenting jug (due to the...imprecision with which I removed the steeping bag from the wort).

The explanation, I think, is that the hops (bought at MD Homebrew with the yeast) make the thing smell, and even sort of taste, like beer. Maybe sort of in the way if you drank vegetable oil you might think of french fries. As a small beer (with, if I had to guess, too little yeast to begin with), it's weak stuff; it's also bitter and cloudy, so... Flip Time!

Small Beer Flip

• 8 oz small beer (since you don't have small beer, use a porter, which will taste better anyway; just make sure there's no carbonation left before you start flipping it)
• 2 oz. rum (I'm using my barrel aged rum, but any kind will do)
• 1 egg
• 1 tbs sugar

Warm up the beer until it's steaming but not boiling. Mix egg and sugar in a mixing glass, then add rum and stir. Pour hot beer into mixing glass, then pour back and forth between that glass and another several times until well mixed and smooth. If you want to get fancy, heat a (clean) poker in a fire, then douse it in the flip after you've poured it into a tankard. I heat a small cast iron pot in the oven, then pour the flip into it just before pouring into a mug. Properly made, a flip will have a nice "flannel" foam on top.

Barrel Experiment #2: Corn Whiskey

Having used a couple of bottles of what was probably some nice malt spirit to soak a lot of nasty ashtray flavors out of my 2 liter barrel, I decided to keep things moving along with some corn whiskey (or, as we call it in my family, "liquid bachelor party"). (Well, I call it "liquid bachelor party." The rest of the family doesn't talk about it at all, and my sister-in-law still gives me dirty looks.)

In any case, three jars of Georgia Moon corn whiskey ("Less than 30 days old") would fill the barrel with half a jar left over for a before-and-after tasting.

Before.

I gave it about four months, and it came out looking something like whiskey.

After.

I went through the motions, but this was one tasting that really needed a blindfold to be completely objective.

A blind tasting.

Tasting notes:

A. Not much on the nose; hint of oak. Palate: oak & char, a little sweet. After some minutes, a hint of the wet cardboard. Not much finish, some light charred oak.

B. Nose: damp cardboard, spoiled corn. Palate has a little hint of sweetness, but mostly nothing; fairly smooth drinking, with no real finish. After some air, it became too foul to finish.

Cheese stick didn't help, didn't hurt.

Sample A was the corn whiskey aged in the barrel (can it still be labeled "corn whiskey" if aged in a charred refill?), Sample B was the corn whiskey aged in the half empty jar.

Don't age corn whiskey in a half empty jar.

(For the record, Georgia Moon straight out of a newly opened jar is a little sweet, plenty smooth, and easy if uninteresting to drink.)

Epilogue: The tasting happened in June 2014. I just re-tried a little of the barrel-aged stuff in December 2014, and it's still okay (maybe less char) if you drink it down and don't think too much about it.

Barrel Experiment #3: Barrel-Aged Manhattans

Having turned a couple of fifths of new make malt into a little more than a fifth of campfire ash water -- and not the good kind -- and having turned some unaged corn whiskey into aged corn whiskey -- which might actually be usable for mixing -- I figured 6 months of aging spirits had tamed my 2-liter barrel enough to try a barrel-aged Manhattans.

Not, you know, ultra-premium barrel-aged Manhattans. More of a barrel-aged Lower East Side, with my cheap rye of choice, Pikesville Supreme.

Two fifths of Pikesville Supreme, about 250 ml of Martini Rosso vermouth, and a couple dozen dashes of Fee Brothers old-fashioned aromatic bitters were put to rest in the barrel.

Just filled.

After 40 days, I had a little taste and figured it was time to dump.Having never had a barrel-aged Manhattan, I didn't (and still don't) really know what to look for that means "done," but the taste was tasty and my major concern with this barrel is over-aging.

So, out came the Manhattan.

Anybody have a grapefruit-sized cherry?

Some cheesecloth to filter out the floaty char bits, and I had just enough left over from refilling the two rye bottles for a celebratory drink. (At around 72 proof for only 40 days, the angels didn't get much of a share.)

Barrel-Aged Manhattan on the Rock.

There is definitely a tang of oak in the result, which wasn't added with the rye, and I could convince myself there's also a touch of the corn whiskey that sat in the barrel for four months previously. If I were to do this again, I might make a control sample that goes straight into the bottle, to find out what the barrel adds that simple time marrying doesn't.

Another variable is the bitters. I didn't use Angostura because my bottle didn't have twelve Manhattans worth of dashes left in it. The Fee Brothers bitters, which I don't think I've used before, has quite a different flavor than Angostura. There's a lot of cinnamon, in particular, that would make a spicier and sweeter Manhattan than I'm used to.

Heck, while I'm at it, why insist on low-proof rye? I could do a [bourbon/rye] X [80 proof/high proof] X [Fee Brothers/Angostura] X [Fresh Made/Bottle Married/Barrel Aged] = 24-way taste test. Not all in one day, but maybe between Christmas and New Years or something.

As for the barrel, I've refilled it with 1.75 l of Castillo Silver rum, mostly to keep the barrel from drying out while I do something with the 4 liters of liquor I've already aged in it. I'm more interested in what the rum will do for the barrel than what the barrel will do for the rum, but maybe both will still be usable when I'm done.

Mini-Barrel Experiment, Step 1

My everloving, everpatient wife got me a whiskey barrel for Christmas. It wasn't a 53 gallon barrel, and it was empty, but it was still a thoughtful gift.

DIRECTIONS: 1. Put the wet stuff inside the round thing. 2. Wait.

I now had a 2 liter barrel and 1.5 liters of Wasmund's single malt spirit.

I also had a fair amount of warning, from real life and on-line, that this wasn't going to work. I was led to expect that most of it would evaporate and what was left would taste like an oak log. But I knew when I signed up that Science isn't for wimps, so I boldly filled the barrel (from Thousand Oaks) with water and waited a few days for it to stop leaking.

Then I funneled both bottles of 124 proof spirit into the barrel, and put it in the laundry room downstairs (not an Islay-like environment, but it is the warmest room on the coldest floor of my house, which is sort of like having a climate).

Time flew, and snow fell, and my son asked me the other day whether my whiskey was finished. I was at a loss. Had I finished all my whiskey? Even the bottles I hadn't yet told my everloving, everpatient wife I'd bought?

But no, he of course meant the stuff in the charming little barrel downstairs. I frankly admitted that I did not know whether it was finished, and thanked him for suggesting I check.

The whiskey (my apologies to non-Americans who might read this, but in my country it became whiskey as soon as it hit the inside of the barrel) was reluctant to come out -- maybe there's a wedge of charcoal blocking the stopcock -- but I eventually wrangled a small sample into a glass.

The Copper Fox Distillery disavows any knowledge of this liquid.

If I didn't know better, and if it didn't have little bits of char floating in it, I'd say it looked like the actual kind of real whiskey you can buy for dollars at the store. I was impressed, impressed enough to want to stop there and call it a success, but Science!

The nose of this whiskey -- which, six weeks earlier, was malt spirit being poured into a tiny, charred oak barrel -- was a combination of malt spirit and charred oak. And when I say "combination," don't think "blend" or "marriage" or "synthesis." Think a puddle of malt spirit soaked up with a scoop of ash. If this stuff were a buddy movie, they'd still be arguing over who gets to drive.

As for the taste, it was like something offered you by a neighbor who'd taken a correspondence course on the rectifying techniques of the 1860s, and only gotten as far as Lesson Three.

Still, I feel I learned a lot from that tiny sample. I learned how awful cattle drives must have been, if cowboys would walk into the nearest saloon and ask for a shot of whatever they had behind the bar. I think I understand, in a way I didn't before, the impulse toward government regulation of the distilling industry. And I grew tremendously in sympathy for the Temperance Movement, with the idea that perhaps there really was something to save the drinkers of the time from.

Which leaves me where? It's certainly too young to drink, and yet it may also be too late to save. (By "save" I mean "get to a point where I'd offer a taste to a friend or relation." I will never forget the expression on my dad's face when I offered him a sip of some hard cider I hadn't quite gotten right, and I don't want to do that to another human being ever again. But me, I can drink pretty much anything if there's enough lemons in the house.)

Long term, I'm thinking I'll try a few more experiments. Maybe not aging from new make, but a few weeks' marriage of different whiskies? Maybe get a solera barrel of miscellanies going (and stock up on lemons)? I hope to try an aged Manhattan before I do something that ruins the barrel for life (which, for example, could be aging a Manhattan in it). And maybe, just maybe, someday make something people would enjoy drinking for its own sake.

The Height Charge

I have been experimenting over the past several months with concentrating beer and wine through fractional freezing. Sometimes I let the whole batch freeze solid, then collect the first half (by volume) that melts as the concentrate. Other times I let it freeze to a slush, then strain out the ice. And sometimes slush is as frozen as it ever gets in my kitchen freezer (since there's plenty of stuff in there other than water and alcohol, not freezing solid doesn't necessarily mean a particularly high proof).

I blogged a few months ago about the concentrated sangria I made. Just the other day, I strained out the last bit of ice from some concentrated Flying Dog Double Dog double pale ale.

Starting with 24 ounces.

The result is a beer concentrate of sorts, almost syrupy and with a bitterness that isn't pleasant to drink as is. But if you were to add a drop to a dram of whiskey, you'd have a sort of inverse depth charge -- a height charge, if you will, that might be enjoyed in front of a nice fire.

Playing crackle.wav on loop.



To be honest, the extra jolt of hoppy maltiness didn't do much for the Wild Turkey. But a half teaspoon in a dram of Powers Gold Label (for an Irish Car Dud?) gives it a touch more richness in flavor and body. Kind of like shifting the balance between malt and grain whiskies in the blend, if it were your first day in the blending room.

R: Beerjack on top, beerjacked Powers on bottom.

I count a result of "not bad" as a success in such experiments. (As a bonus, a splash of this stuff even gives ginger ale something of a kick, as a sort of inverted gaffshandy.)

I'm not sure what I'll do with the remaining 3 or so ounces of beerjack; at half a tsp per drink, I won't run out any time soon.

The Famous Brose

I think there are two ways to look at something like this:



One is that, if someone with no direct or historical ties to Scotland starts making whisky punch with oatmeal in it, he's a little too fond of whisky.

The other is that, if someone with no direct or historical ties to Scotland starts making whisky punch with oatmeal in it, he has a much deeper problem than fondness for whisky.

Whichever way you look at it: My name is Tom, and I've started making whisky punch with oatmeal in it.

More precisely, I've made one small batch of Atholl Brose, a Scottish drink made from oatmeal and whisky. One traditional recipe, the one I followed, is simply:

• 7 parts oatmeal brose (liquid from soaking oatmeal in water)
• 7 parts whisky
• 5 parts cream
• 1 part honey

Now, having no personal or historical ties to Scotland, I wasn't overly concerned with authenticity. I used instant oatmeal for the brose, I used store brand clover honey instead of good quality heather honey. And I used a cocktail shaker instead of a silver spoon to mix the drink.

The Famous Grouse, though: of that, at least, a Scottish grandmother might approve.

A small bottle is in the fridge, marrying for a couple of days. (Since I didn't get a chance to make haggis dumplings, this seems to be the best way to bring oatmeal and whisky together on Burns Night.) What didn't fit in the bottle went into a glass (with some ice, and you're right, sorry, there shouldn't be any ice involved).

Having tasted it, I'll say this: It takes a lot more than oatmeal to ruin whisky, cream, and honey.

No, actually I kind of like the oat flavor the brose brings to the mix. It adds a nuttiness and body that helps balance the richness of the cream and the sweetness of the honey. Atholl Brose is sometimes compared to Irish cream, and I did use my Bailey's glass to taste it, though my batch at least is creamier and less sweet. Some people say it's sort of like egg nog; that's too far a stretch for me, but then I've had a lot of different drinks with cream in them (and I don't put Scotch in my egg nog).

The next time I make Atholl Brose -- and I expect there will be a next time, though it probably won't be later this week -- I'll try it with steel cut oatmeal and take more care to squeeze out all the liquid, to make sure I'm getting the right proportion of oatmeal. I may spring for some Scottish honey.

And, who knows, I may even feel Scottish enough -- which is to say, brave enough -- to offer some to my wife.

But tell me whisky's name in Greek
I'll tell the reason.

Pumpkin Pie Spiced Bourbon

Thanksgiving is coming up, and I thought I'd try celebrating with some spice-infused bourbon.

In a 375 ml bottle, I put:

• 1 stick of cinnamon
• 1 nutmeg seed, cracked (wrap it in a paper towel and whack it with a tenderizer or hammer)
• 1 tbs or so of fresh ginger, peeled and cut into strips
• 10 allspice berries
• 10 oz or so bourbon

I used Wild Turkey 101, which seems a fitting choice for this holiday. I'll give it an occasional shake (don't think it needs it, it's just fun to tinker), and taste it in three or four days to see how things are coming along and if the seasonings need to be adjusted.

I'm not sure what I'll do with it come Thanksgiving. I expect it would improve store-bought egg nog, and it might get worked into whipped cream. If I'm really lucky, it will even taste good neat.