bostonapothecary

a friend is using one at work that was inherited from the previous tenant who was basically using it in an alcoholic but non craft context. they had some hiccups in the beginning and thought the machine might be broken and couldn't find an instruction manual then found one. if I bought one I'd want to know spare parts were available and that someone around was willing to service it. now this bar's is up and running but I'm not sure they've optimized it. their main recipe is a pimms cup. I'm sure sugar content and alcohol content are necessary for optimizing the quality of the slush, but because it agitates constantly it is probably so much more forgiving than trying to make an alcoholic sorbet or granita that ultimately separates. I suspect if a recipe book for genuine new orleans slushies can be turned up, craft versions can be extrapolated.

Hops go so well with so much. There are a few cocktails at the end of my Distiller's Workbook exercise on hopped gin that might inspire and show the versatility. I imagine a dash of the bitters can quickly synthesize a lot of the character of hopped gin. I enjoyed hops in absolutely any citrus scenario and found that it can echo and alliterate so much of the qualities within grapefruit. Hops and grains naturally go so well together so any tart cocktails with lighter less aged whiskey's I imagine there will be a done of success. Hopped gin also was really enjoyable with Campari and Aperol so I imagine they'd easily sing with nearly any of the non-dark amaros. One thing about hops is that the aroma is not stable. No one really acknowledges it but hopped gins break down and might even be sensitive to light just like beers so who knows what the shelf life of hopped bitters is. I'd use them quickly and randomly and report back!

I just visited the producer of the stuff, Industry City Distilling, the other day and it was pretty amazing. They are basically a maker space with a print studio and giant machine shop that set up a distillery to help subsidize the costs. Its not exactly a normal distillery but could be seen as a concept distillery and its staggeringly brilliant. Their team built pretty much all their equipment themselves. Part of the concept is that its a model for what other people can achieve around the world. It is small foot print, low energy consuming, does not consume a lot of water, and does not produce a lot of hard to dispose of waste. Because they are on the sixth floor in an urban environment they use sorghum instead of grain (easier to dispose of and can be worked with in smaller foot prints). They built an UV sterilizer for the sorghum. They ferment the most exotic way I've ever encountered which involves growing their own yeasts and encapsulating them in alginate beads. I think the objective with the exotic ferment is to produce a very low congener content so less has to be stripped away later. They probably have the smallest continuous still in the world. Its a pretty darn exemplary business. People should go and study what they are doing and I think a photographer really needs to get in their and document it because its just not the norm. Industry City only makes vodka and this high proof spirit which has never really been my thing, but once you visit, it ends up being an amazing, unprecidented work of art. The amount of disciplines these guys mastered to build everything keeps blowing my mind. The product is great and speaks for itself, but keep in mind when you consider buying it that you're supporting one of the coolest groups of inventors I've ever come across.

1.5 oz. tanqueray old tom .5 oz. chestnut flower mead 1 oz. punt y mes bar spoon algharvinha Portuguese almond liqueur this was particularly wonderful and is an elaboration of a drink from last week with a different mead. the almond liqueur here, just makes the aromas glow electrically. the Portuguese color their almond liqueurs differently and its very pale relative to the dark coloring of Italian amarettoes and in the drink, positively influences the perception of the aromas. this usage of mead is a little ahead of its time, but soon enough you will read all sorts of really fluffy articles about it citing drinks from restaurants with high paid well connected PR departments. don't be dissuaded, mead, when applied correctly to cocktails can be extraordinary. as a carrier of flavour, mead is a mechanism by which one can cement memories.

Umami is also often referred to as the fatty acid taste so it relates to esters which are fatty acids bonded to alcohols. In spirits I often refer to it as olfactory-umami because whatever creates the sensation is volatile. if fatty acids can stimulate gustatory-umami and esters derived from them are co-experienced together in the course of normal eating the mind eventually links the two similar to synaesthesia. it isn't so straight forward and there are countless exceptions. I liked that rum. its crazy that they are so expensive now. you used to get all that character for $30 but I guess its becoming rarer and rarer.

A publisher asked to see my text on cocktail centric home distillation, but it eventually got shot down. I think the verdict was too much science! so sad.

I haven't made a drink in a long time. 1.5 oz. tanqueray old tom gin .5 oz. sap house meadery vanilla bean mead (co-fermented with vanilla beans) 1 oz. punt y mes barspoon yellow chartreuse the tanqueray old tom wasn't anything too remarkable, but it will be easy enough to make disappear. the mead is something very special and I've really fallen in love with the eccentric offerings from sap house. sometimes I'm vanilla averse but here it adds just the right inflection and depth. the yellow chartreuse echos and alliterates qualities in the mead or vice versa depending on which direction you read the poem.

I would save that apple eau de vie for the future. if you get deep enough into spirits and cocktails you will realize you have something astoundingly special and eventually you will be ready to drink it. there will be quite a few beautiful uses for it.

an idea to throw out there, which I just read about in a wine makers catalog, is to add glass marbles to your container to displace what was poured out. I guess some winemakers do this with experimental ferments when there is no stock to top it up with, and they don't want to/can't put down a gas blanket into a large void. I'm not sure if the trick will come in handy for anyone's preservation ritual or small scale projects but there it is.

at work we just got a new menu from a new chef that I can't say I'm into. he is a mature chef from Sicily but he is into this strange grandeur I can't really get into and flouts a lot of the rules of Italy I really expected to see from someone of his generation who might try and teach us the old ways. we are a cash only neighborhood place and some of the dishes just don't seem to fit. especially the $40 special he tried to do. everything pretty much reminds me of the cocktail scene which doesn't understand quality for purpose or the word I think is so key, modesty. all my bartender friends keep making these really grand drinks that have to be like $12 and come with creepy kick backs that get them trips to TOTC. there just isn't much modesty or even ingenuity for that matter in some of these spots and the clientele doesn't care, its all tech bubble money and my first cocktail bar to them. I keep looking for modesty, and when some bars have it, it goes unsung. the Green Street is Boston is probably the best example and easily among my favorite bars. its strange to think about because probably 8 years ago people freaked and commented when you put single malt scotch in a cocktail. it was sacrilege and the beginning of endless idiotic conversations then years later trends. but it wasn't about modesty. it wasn't like no cheese on seafood. it had nothing to do with quality for purpose. can cocktails at certain tier establishments have a no cheese on seafood rule or is that just stupid or maybe exactly the kind of stupid cocktail people love to debate? anyhow. .75 oz bourbon .75 oz linie aquavit .75 oz. lime juice .5 oz. simple syrup .25 oz. cape verdean cinnamon liqueur ($12.99 retail) dash angostura this was delicious but is it modest for a mutli component creative drink? I made it once for a friend then the next day someone wanted a lions tale but I didn't have any pimento dram so I made it again, then again for me. .75 oz bermudez Don Armando 10 year ($23 / L) .75 oz kalembu mamajuana (13.99) .75 oz brandy mel (limao edition, $13.99) .75 oz lime this was a really tasty collage. the Don Armonda is tasty and from "the most prestigious distillery in the Dominican Republic". Kalembu is cool and their label is really interesting: "Since we have made all efforts to keep the tradition untouched, we have been awarded the Spiced Rum with Natural Flavors label approval." and "best before Dec/15". I'm getting a no cheese on seafood tattoo.

extract is a tricky thing and among classic congener categories I think it might have the most meanings. extract typically means everything minus water and ethanol which can be a large number if it includes a lot of sugars. but then there is dry extract which subtracts the sugar and probably gets you closer to that 3 g/L number. but then you can slowly subtract out tannins and acids. its from really old school crude analysis before the spectroscopy / chromotography era. in a whiskey like bourbon, which sees no additives, all that dissolved stuff can obscure the % alcohol by as much as 0.2 percentage points which is something the IRS wants to know about. I'm working on a project right now where you can isolate the extract or basically dissolved aroma of an orange liqueur so you can figure out how much dissolved orange aroma is in a bottle. this will allow me to make small scale versions that have say the same alcohol content, sugar content, and dissolved aroma content as a major brand like Cointreau but their own tonality. no guess work, no tasting panels, just paint by numbers. If I can get the hang of it on something as simple as an orange liqueur, I can scale it up to more complex stuff like standardizing a gin when the oil yield of each botanical changes, or standardizing more multi component things like amaros and bitters. its pretty much like 3rd world analysis. all the big guys have moved way past it with their high tech toys, so all the techniques and what you can do with it have been pretty much lost and pretty much no small distilleries are exploring the laboratory.

I definitely don't know the science of the browning inside and out, I took all the information from the one credit course on maraschino cherry making at Oregon State University. I think they lower the pH to limit any microbial growth and still have browning problems. their process is pretty darn involved and I suspect they have systematically tried everything.

the liquid needs to match the sugar content of the cherries, too much and they will shrivel, too little and they will swell. narly maraschino cherries have sugar contents far higher than the cherries begin with and they walk it up in 30 g/L increments so everything can come to equilibrium with out damaging cells. with my first experiments I just googled the known sugar content of the cherry type I was using instead of using a refractometer and it worked well. you will find that you don't have uniform ripeness and some cherries will float to the top and the exposed sides will brown. you can separate those into their own small jar with a little less sugar so they don't float, or you can slowly walk the sugar content up to try and make them absorb it and become uniform. for a while I was using canning jars vacuumed with the canning jar attachment.

for a bottle of wine with a glass poured out, if you don't vacuum the head space, the liquid starts to absorb enough oxygen form the head space within maybe six hours to fully oxidize the wine. that is just some trivia I remember from reading The Technology of Winemaking. the problem with focusing on head space, even if you get to it immediately, is that it isn't really very significant. the amount of oxygen taken up by the liquid just through the act of sloshing and pouring is pretty significant. with a beverage its hard to believe it happens, but with the plastic & rubber parts I make for the Champagne Bottle Manifold its staggering how just stirring and pouring a viscous liquid entraps huge amounts of air. you can pull a serious vacuum then pressurize it and you still get small amounts of bubbles. Goode & Harrop's book, Authentic Wine, has a small section on bag in the box technology, but they comment that the current materials diffuse pretty significant amounts of oxygen and have limited store shelf lives. European bag in the box wine are actually bottled stateside to combat this. Vermouth which doesn't move from shelves as fast an Franzia would probably need some alt bag technology. but remember, Vermouth is pumped full of anti oxidants from all the botanicals in it, so the oxidation worries that people have are probably far over blown.

maraschino liqueur is basically kirschwasser + sugar with a little extra almond aroma. the hiram walker product is definitely more affordable than luxardo maraschino and allows you to control your own sugar content so you fruit does not shrivel. luxardo maraschino probably has twice the sugar content you have a looking for. I'd love some feed back on my recipe because I don't think anybody has actually attempted it. its pretty elaborate but you can cut lots of corners if you want to.

it is harder than you would think to de-gas a liquid with a vacuum. to actually get rid of the oxygen you would end up boiling the liquid and then you would damage the aroma. pressure de-aeration works much better to force out certain gases and is a lot cheaper that vacuum on the home scale. you can more or less do it with a tap-cap or my champagne bottle manifold.

The 14th exercise in my Distiller's Workbook covers making maraschino cherries and also contrasts alcoholic versions with non-alcoholic versions. The exercise covers a lot of variables but you can really skip many of them if you want to keep it simple. The base spirit in the recipe is Hiram Walker Kirschwasser and not maraschino liqueur. also if you go the alcoholic route you don't want to pit because without sulfites and chloride bleach brines you will end up with unsightly enzymatic browning.

For those of you interested Jamaican rums I found a few new texts from the early 20th century and wrote up a little post about it. "Muck hole" not "Dunder pit". I would love some comments either here or there. The sources give pretty amazing portraits about the rum industry in Jamaica in the early 20th century and it would be interesting to see how these tellings differ from what we are taught in source less popular culinary these days. I would also love to know if these fairly recently digitized texts were previously known to anybody out there in the popular culinary / spirits world. Now to find a sip of Jamaican rum.

I don't know if this will help anyone: http://www.culinaryanthropologist.org/recipe%20pdfs/Nocino.pdf A great mini tutorial on making nocino with some good rules of thumb

the gustatory latch idea tries to explain the rules & patterns of enjoying spirits at room temp. so the latch of a martini made only with vodka or gin is that they are served stingingly cold. I've pulled so many of them off tables over the years where people didn't drink the last return to room temp ounce. the martini above has the acidity of the vermouth as a latch, but problem is its not the imbiber's favorite latch, rather it is still a distant acquired taste. I don't think a change in dry vermouth brand will greatly change the enjoyment of the drink. it will just likely be pronounced as more or less ordinary as opposed to extraordinary. martinis have such a unique structure, you have to be a complete weirdo or stress case to enjoy them on the first go. I'd keep drinking them especially when you have a really bad day and you will eventually come to appreciate and enjoy them in all their various skewed forms.

I don't think this is a fair assessment of all of Jamaica's rum production. Jamaica is known to employ a spectrum of techniques. a thorough early description exists in Chemistry and Technology of Wine and Liqueurs by Herstein & Gregory (1935, but there is a recent reprint). one thing that Jamaica does, because it produces a spectrum of rums, is segment molasses by quality. the lowest quality molasses (lowest in noble aroma precursors) likely goes into products like W&N over proof. it is probably also column distilled due to costs of extending the time under heat. it is meant to be economy drinking for a fairly poor island. W&N is also probably fairly high in higher alcohols relative to other spirits and this may be responsible for the aggressive taste rather than a high ester content. conventional spirits wisdom says no one is supposed to enjoy W&N because it is shit on a chemical level, yet so many of us do therefore it raises lots of questions about what is "good" (whatever that means) and why exactly we enjoy drinking what we drink.

the Islay's might not have enough of a latch which is why people often drink them on the rocks or even with soda more often than other types of scotches. the gustatory latch idea is only for enjoying things at room temperature. being cold or being carbonated are other types of latches. I've seen papers that compare Scotch pH to Bourbon but I cannot quote any though I suspect that the extra aging single malts get relative to other spirits drops the pH despite the barrels not being first fill. umami is an interesting concept and some unaged spirits are far easier to enjoy at room temp than others, particularly tequila and the rhum agricoles. these spirits can be seen as dominated by olfactory-umami aromas and we might be able to say they get perceptual privileges due to nutritional reward hinted at in their aromas. the hyphenated olfactory-umami term categorizes one sense in terms of another like warm & cool colors and is grounded in co-experience. umami is often also called the fatty-acid taste and esters may elicit umami sensations.

sheisty, adulterated, impure or not, this rum sounds like fun. one reason I think they color some of these rums is because otherwise they are cloudy due to congener solubility issues and a lack of new enough barrels to provide any color. aroma perception, we must remember, is dependent on a lot of recollection, and thus has to be primed which is why color is so important. if the producer does not properly color his spirit, one way or the other, then he is not honoring all those finely crafted aroma compounds. I suspect this producer turns the wood into some sort of sponge for sherry. it is pretty much the same thing as simply pouring sherry in the rum which I suspect would be illegal. the reason I don't complain about that is there is a limit on how much sherry gets in there due to the round about technique. he can't get sheisty and create "grape drink" like if it were legal to simply dump in the sherry and overload the spirit. but I am just speculating on how it gets so dark. I don't fear added sugar anymore because of a concept I've dubbed the "gustatory latch". for spirits to be harmonic at room temperature, they need some significant gustatory feature for us to latch onto. acidity, prominent to fairly new oaked spirits like Bourbon, could be considered the most noble latch but its not the only way to skin the cat as seen in Cognac which adds sugar. if the wood adds no significant acidity you have to fall back on sugar. other spirits categories pretty much end up using only one type of latch while rum being the broadest category explores every option. so again producers must honor & flatter those crafted aroma compounds so they don't get stuck paired with a flabby experience where your only option is to chill the spirit. in some cultures there isn't wide access to ice and cold drinks are even dissonant so those imbibers prefer warm beer. and of course the sugar latch can be abused to produce grape drink. I've really enjoyed some of the fruit adulterated rums like the Blackwell Jamaican rum. to me they are not worth a lot of money but I enjoy drinking them. the fruit often provides the acidity needed to enjoy sipping at room temp. in the early 20th century survey of rum from the IRS, it is noted that lots of rums had small percentages of fruit juice and subtle spices like bay leaf. these early rum tactics are profound and show serious intuitive knowledge of sensory science long before anyone could articulate it. none of these products should be ousted from the market rather they just shouldn't be worth that much money. a big hole in our understanding of rum is what the high ester concentrates are really like. I suspect some are undrinkable because they contain above recognition threshold values of certain congeners and they are probably also cloudy. blend them down and they are beautiful but no academic papers really explain the specifics of what they are like. I don't think dunder pits have to be too old. I bet they could even get too old and spoil but no research papers explore all the whatifs to my knowledge. people used to give Kentucky all this exclusivity for making Bourbon but it turns out upstate New York can do a pretty good job as well. one thing that is cool to see in this spirit as mentioned by Rafa is an auto-didactic team on a journey of discovery. they are pretty much rehashing old experiments that supposedly aren't worth repeating but that's not true I've always wanted to drink those experiments! hell, the thing I'm most curious about now is whiskey aged in plywood barrels by the IRS in the 1950's. there is a reason plywood didn't catch on but I still would shell out $50 in a heart beat for shitty rum aged like that.

I don't know if sour orange is available to you but I've really enjoyed making a bronx with borolo chinato in the past. I've also been so taken by it as a pairing for deserts that I haven't had much left for cocktails.

I haven't posted anything in a while, but I thought I'd post a recipe today to help celebrate the life and work of Steven Shaw who created an amazing community here that I always found very inspiring. I never actually met Steven Shaw but I've met many people from the egullet community in person, which always has been a great experience, and one egulleter and his wife went on to become among my very best friends whom I see nearly every week to share a drink or a meal. I probably would be stuck working as an economist if Steven Shaw's egullet community didn't get me deeper into the culinary arts and really expand my mind. 1.5 oz. wire works gin .75 oz. brillet pineau des charents .75 oz. lemon juice bar spoon of Judith's Seville orange marmalade (the gift of a beloved bar regular) this was pretty darn tasty. without egullet would anybody really be drinking such lovely stuff as Pineau des Charentes? would the cocktail renaissance have grown so big I can drink a pretty good gin made in south Boston? I really owe a lot to Steven Shaw and everyone that makes up the egullet community. thank you all.