For my way of thinking this is the beautiful thing about the making of aged spirits, wine and food, in so much that sometimes a massive amount of effort yields little to nothing but mostly the good stuff is better than great…
In asking a question about the “angels share” I feel I’ve come a little closer to understanding of why whiskey is called a spirit.
Ah, heh. Well, that goes back to Middle Eastern Alchemy. Distilling was used to make medicine and makeup (al’ kohl is an Arabic word that referred to a black powder used like eye shadow or eye liner). The vapor that wisped away from the liquid being distilled was called a “spirit” of the original liquid.
thank you
much appreciate the long rabbit hole of discovering the origins of the ‘word’ of my biggest sin!
Sincerely cheers!
This is standard and why I talked about yield. If you are making vodka or clear run you sell the full 10 gallons (or more actually since the product will be watered for packaging).
This is one of the tricks I was talking about. Trying to get up over shortages, and younger distilleries trying to aged product to market faster so they have something to sell have turned to smaller barrels.
It doesn’t neccisarily work all that well since more oak flavor extracted is not neccisarily good, nor is extraction the whole of aging.
That said smaller barrels, and different barrel sizes have a long history in spirit making in general for exactly that reason. Different barrels produce different flavors on different time scales. The results getting blended to a particular profile.
What’s happening is producers (mostly American ones) are attempting to push overall barrel size down, to produce aged spirit faster. But there are diminishing returns on that. So many of them end up tasting both over oaked and weirdly young and raw.
All good points. Very cool. When I work with new craft distilleries I recommend making gin and vodka for the first few years while their bourbon ages. If they turn out crappy bourbon early on their reputation will likely never recover.
Gin seems to be the way it’s going. White dog never really caught on as anything other than a novelty.
In particular there is a massive gin boom in Ireland with a lot of the younger distilleries that have been opening and a lot of the new brands launching craft gins to provide a baseline while they wait for whiskey.
Apparently gin bars have become a big thing over there, growing out the bigger interest in craft beer, free pubs and what have.
Vodka is becoming a push in the US (looking at it as a wholesaler and former bar manager). It’s a crowded market, with little product distinction. The vodka boom is well in the past, and it has little play in the craft cocktail scene which is the driver these days.
But it’s cheap and simple to make with a high margin. So it probably still looks good from the production side.
Rum seems to be the big grower recently for the US. The tiki revival brought it a lot of attention. And while most of the attention is on aged product and derivative liqueurs and what have. Clear rum is a lot easier to sell than clear whiskey, and the aging times and added steps are a lot shorter than for whiskey. So it gives you product now, as well as quicker product stack moving forward. Seen a lot more craft rums take off the past couple of years.
I’d be pushing rum on these people.
Rum, and flavored rum are especially popular. You can mask a lot of crappy process issues by injecting some flavor. That’s why I suppose flavored vodka was doing so well for a while.
Copper and Kings in Louisville, KY, was making great brandy, and had a cool “bring a growler” thing going with brandy casks in the distillery you could fill from. I thought brandy might get popular, because they sold a lot of it, and their distillers were pretty well known. But they sold to a corporation and so now, according to the cognoscenti, their product is crap. lol.
I’ve had that brandy, crops up in some of the better craft cocktail spots in the NY Metro. Good stuff.
We see a lot of that with the wineries out here. It’s apparently fairly easy to add a distilling license to a winery license in NY. Brandy and grappa make a good baseline product, abd they already have the base going.
How does one know at year 0 that your spirit at year 10 will be like?
In that regard I’d love to taste the same spirit that has had a portion of the production packaged annually for 10 years. The transformation must be more rapid in the early years.
You can taste the features in grain, yeast, cleanness fresh off the still if you know what to look for. Then the aging process is actually pretty controlled and well understood. As is blending.
But if you compromise on the aging too much to meet volume or get product out earlier you kinda sand bag it. Whiskey that’s too young or over oaked like I said.
You could have top grade white dog, but if you decide to put out a less good product for practicalities sake you’ll spoil your reputation.
A bunch of well regarded distilleries did exactly that when trying to get up over the shortages a few years back while speeding things up.
Hudson Whiskey’s quality tapered off in serious way, and Bruichladdich over in Scotland too. Took the age statements off many of their products and started shipping younger whiskey. Both took big hits to their reputation just as their popularity was growing fastest.
I used to love the 'Laddie. Man that was some good stuff.
I recall me mam bringing back to London some of the divine spirit from our yearly family holiday to Ireland - must have been late '70s, I was about 10.
It was in a glass Coca Cola bottle, and carefully labelled ‘holy water’ 
Gin is a massive boom over in the UK as well, with a huge number of new distilleries opening over the last ten years, and a feverish growth in the availability of mixers and tonic water as well. It helps that the process is so easy- get a still set up to produce some neutral grain spirit, lower in a basket of various botanicals, and bottle away.
Rum is a little way behind, with popularity ticking up over the last few years, but it is amazing how far both of these spirits have come in a short time. Gin used to be dominated by maybe two brands, and has gone from a relatively unfashionable niche to take over a swathe of the market. The rise of Rum is less dramatic, but probably even more surprising, going from something that was stereotypically drunk by sailors (dark) or tacky 1980s throwbacks (light) to being a niche, top-end product is a startling turn-around in image.
Yeah the Rum thing in the US is almost entirely driven by the Tiki revival that swept through the craft cocktail scene starting a few years ago.
Which is fun for me. Since I had my first bar job 20 years ago, nearly every talented geeky bartender I ran into was looking to bootstrap respectable old school Tiki drinks back into it.
As much as that might seem like an off kilter fad, that was a dedicated, deliberate push from practically every worker with a horse in the race. It just took a younger set of drinkers and a really big need for some escapism for it to catch on.
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