Last week my dad and I went to WhiskeyFest Chicago. There are two aspects to WhiskeyFest: first, there's the big room where lots of distilleries have booths at which you can sample their wares, including often rare and expensive spirits that might be impossible to find in bars and prohibitively expensive to gamble on buying a bottle of. Over the years I've kind of figured out what I like and there were largely the usual suspects present (the show this year was smaller than it had been in the past) but I still found some pretty cool stuff I hadn't tried before (Aberfeldy 21-year-old single malt Scotch, for instance) and some interesting new expressions of old favorites (Highland Park15-year-old Scotch, or Pappy Van Winkle 20 year old bourbon). The whiskey world is not really that big, and after a while one gets to recognize a number of usual suspects. The other aspect of WhiskeyFest is the speakers. This, to me, is the real attraction. Various figures of the whiskey world talk about what they're doing or aspects of whiskey production.
Dad and I caught two of them: first, we heard Craig Beam, master distiller from Heaven Hill (and part of the same family that gives Jim Beam its name) talk about extremely old bourbon. Whiskey goes through a process as it ages whereby for some period of time it gets better, but eventually it reaches a "tipping point" from which it goes downhill. Many ancient Scotches are "ooh-ed" and "aah-ed" over, at ages of 30, 40, 50 years, but conditions differ between Scotland and Kentucky, and whiskey ages a lot faster in Kentucky, resulting in it getting "too old" sooner. So bourbon distilleries don't generally plan on keeping whiskey for that long, but with dozens of rickhouses and hundreds of thousands of barrels aging, sometimes some can get "lost". Recently Heaven Hill found some barrels that had been aging away for 27 years or more.
Craig said he would not have expected the whiskey inside to be drinkable, but they tapped them and, lo and behold, it was not bad! Actually it was pretty good. So they released a limited-edition 27-year-old whiskey, which we got to sample. We compared it to Heaven Hill's regular production Elijah Craig 18-year-old bourbon---and it was good, but I don't know that it was better enough to justify paying a LOT more than the 18-year-old, which is a bargain if you like Heaven Hill's house style. But in any event, one of the points to be made was that it makes a big difference where in the warehouse the whiskey is aging. Heaven Hill's whiskey warehouses are seven stories high, and the aging effects on the upper floors are a lot more pronounced than on the lower floors---temperature swings tend to be more extreme, and the lower floors tend to be damper. The 27-year-old whiskey came from a lower floor of the warehouse. But to demonstrate the difference most dramatically, we were provided with two samples of whiskey, both aged 30 years, but one from a lower floor and one from the top floor. The sample from the lower floor was pretty good, but the sample from the top floor was undrinkable! It was easily the worst whiskey I have ever tasted. And, the most interesting factoid from that presentation was that after 30 years, evaporation will have claimed almost all the liquid in that cask---out of a 60-gallon barrel they only get a gallon or so of whiskey, and it was concentrated to something like 170 proof! Fortunately, it's so horrible that nobody would want it, so it's scarcity is hardly a problem.
So, the lesson of that presentation: older does NOT always mean better when it comes to whiskey.
The next presentation we hit was a panel discussion by a group of craft distillers. When I first got interested in whiskey about six years ago, these guys did not exist. Being a lawyer naturally I looked into the laws and regulations about distilling, and I couldn't see any reason why you couldn't run a small-scale distillery making small batches, but people told me it couldn't be done; you couldn't get licensed. It's probably just as well I didn't have the wherewithal to pursue that aspect of the hobby, but the intervening years have shown that hey, you can indeed do small-scale distilling, and a number of people are doing it. Given the need to turn work into cash quickly in a start-up business like that, most of them are making unaged spirits: vodka, gin, brandy. But some are making whiskey, and we heard from several of them on the panel.
A brief digression into the history of whiskey: up until prohibition, whiskey-making was a cottage industry in lots of rural areas in the south and east. It was technically illegal, but not vigorously opposed when it was done on a small scale. Prohibition turned what had been a craft and hobby into a deadly serious business and brought the wrath of the government down on moonshiners in a whole new way, and pretty much destroyed that tradition of whiskey-making. Prohibition meant that illicit distilling was about making as much as cheaply as possible and that is whence came the popular conception of moonshine as horrible head-splitting fire-water.
But there was a time when people made and drank young whiskey because they liked it, because it was good. A lot of the character of the whiskey you find in the stores today comes from being aged in oak barrels, but it is possible to make a very good spirit without aging. It's not the same as vodka because vodka is distilled to a very very high proof multiple times to remove as much of the flavoring elements as possible, where whiskey---even unaged whiskey---is distilled out at a lower proof, leaving more of the things that give it flavor in there. A few years ago at another WhiskeyFest, Fred Noe from Jim Beam had a bottle of "white dog", which is bourbon distillate straight out of the still, with no aging, and I got to have a taste. It was amazing! Although Bourbon is made from mostly corn, it doesn't really taste like corn. But this white dog did. It was like liquid, highly-alcoholic corn on the cob. It had a kick to it, but not in a bad way.
So I thought, as a craft distiller, I would make a young whiskey that was designed and produced to taste really good in that form. It's a legitimate form of American whiskey that's not really made today, and it would get around that pay-for-it-now-but-can't-sell-it-for-several-years conundrum that faces a startup distillery that wants to make, say, bourbon. (There are of course commercial corn whiskeys, which are unaged, but for a long time the only one readily available was Georgia Moon, which comes in a canning jar and is, I think, intended to be an "ordeal" drink---you give it to your friends and laugh at the faces they make when they drink it. I have a jar, and you can get used to it, but the point behind Georgia Moon is not to make a great-tasting corn whiskey. The same distillery takes the same stuff, ages if for a while, and sells it as Mellow Corn, which is purportedly a much better whiskey, but that's not available in stores around here. Just today I saw another corn whiskey, Virginia Lightning, in a store, which is intriguing but I have not tasted it.)
So anyway, you can imagine my pleasure when several of the craft distillers brought young whiskeys for us to taste. A couple of them, from Stranahan's in Colorado and Templeton Rye in Iowa, were not commercial products, but, a distillery in Wisconsin called Death's Door is making and marketing a product they call White Whiskey, which was quite tasty. I'm hoping I can find a bottle of it here. (The name comes from the name of the channel between the Door County peninsula and Washington Island, from whence comes the organic wheat the Death's Door guys use in their spirits. The actual distillery is in Madison, which has caused consternation to tourists who get all the way to Washington Island---which is way past the middle of nowhere---looking for the distillery.)
One of the other things I would do if I were a craft distiller is experiment with non-traditional mash bills. The world of spirits is driven by traditions which are nigh-inviolable. Whiskey can be made (theoretically) from any grain or combination of grains, but until a couple years ago there were only a few variants. Among American whiskeys, bourbon is mostly corn, with a smaller percentage of either rye or wheat and a little malted barley. Rye is mostly rye (duh) with a generous percentage of corn and the malted barley. Corn whiskey is basically a high-corn bourbon mashbill that is not aged in new oak barrels, and anyway it's so uncommon as to hardly count. There have been only two exceptions to the rules that I know of at least since prohibition: Anchor Distilling in San Fransisco made (and as far as I know still makes) whiskey usng malted rye, which has a very different flavor from unmalted rye. And a few years ago, Heaven Hill introduced Bernheim Straight Wheat Whiskey, which was made from mostly wheat with a generous percentage of corn.
So I was excited to learn that the Death's Door White Whiskey is made from almost entirely wheat---no corn at all. That's amazing, if you geek out on those kinds of things like I do. And I believe some of the wheat is malted, which would contribute a flavor to the whiskey that no other whiskey on earth (that I've heard about, anyway) has.
I go back and forth on whether WhiskeyFest is worth the money---it was nearly $100, although if you bought shots of all the whiskeys you can taste there in a bar, you would probably spend more than that, since some of those old and rare whiskeys can be pretty steep, so I suppose if you want to try a bunch of different whiskeys, it's a good way to do it. But this year I really enjoyed the presentations, and thinking back, I've seen some pretty cool presentations other years too. I'll probably go back.
Dad and I caught two of them: first, we heard Craig Beam, master distiller from Heaven Hill (and part of the same family that gives Jim Beam its name) talk about extremely old bourbon. Whiskey goes through a process as it ages whereby for some period of time it gets better, but eventually it reaches a "tipping point" from which it goes downhill. Many ancient Scotches are "ooh-ed" and "aah-ed" over, at ages of 30, 40, 50 years, but conditions differ between Scotland and Kentucky, and whiskey ages a lot faster in Kentucky, resulting in it getting "too old" sooner. So bourbon distilleries don't generally plan on keeping whiskey for that long, but with dozens of rickhouses and hundreds of thousands of barrels aging, sometimes some can get "lost". Recently Heaven Hill found some barrels that had been aging away for 27 years or more.
Craig said he would not have expected the whiskey inside to be drinkable, but they tapped them and, lo and behold, it was not bad! Actually it was pretty good. So they released a limited-edition 27-year-old whiskey, which we got to sample. We compared it to Heaven Hill's regular production Elijah Craig 18-year-old bourbon---and it was good, but I don't know that it was better enough to justify paying a LOT more than the 18-year-old, which is a bargain if you like Heaven Hill's house style. But in any event, one of the points to be made was that it makes a big difference where in the warehouse the whiskey is aging. Heaven Hill's whiskey warehouses are seven stories high, and the aging effects on the upper floors are a lot more pronounced than on the lower floors---temperature swings tend to be more extreme, and the lower floors tend to be damper. The 27-year-old whiskey came from a lower floor of the warehouse. But to demonstrate the difference most dramatically, we were provided with two samples of whiskey, both aged 30 years, but one from a lower floor and one from the top floor. The sample from the lower floor was pretty good, but the sample from the top floor was undrinkable! It was easily the worst whiskey I have ever tasted. And, the most interesting factoid from that presentation was that after 30 years, evaporation will have claimed almost all the liquid in that cask---out of a 60-gallon barrel they only get a gallon or so of whiskey, and it was concentrated to something like 170 proof! Fortunately, it's so horrible that nobody would want it, so it's scarcity is hardly a problem.
So, the lesson of that presentation: older does NOT always mean better when it comes to whiskey.
The next presentation we hit was a panel discussion by a group of craft distillers. When I first got interested in whiskey about six years ago, these guys did not exist. Being a lawyer naturally I looked into the laws and regulations about distilling, and I couldn't see any reason why you couldn't run a small-scale distillery making small batches, but people told me it couldn't be done; you couldn't get licensed. It's probably just as well I didn't have the wherewithal to pursue that aspect of the hobby, but the intervening years have shown that hey, you can indeed do small-scale distilling, and a number of people are doing it. Given the need to turn work into cash quickly in a start-up business like that, most of them are making unaged spirits: vodka, gin, brandy. But some are making whiskey, and we heard from several of them on the panel.
A brief digression into the history of whiskey: up until prohibition, whiskey-making was a cottage industry in lots of rural areas in the south and east. It was technically illegal, but not vigorously opposed when it was done on a small scale. Prohibition turned what had been a craft and hobby into a deadly serious business and brought the wrath of the government down on moonshiners in a whole new way, and pretty much destroyed that tradition of whiskey-making. Prohibition meant that illicit distilling was about making as much as cheaply as possible and that is whence came the popular conception of moonshine as horrible head-splitting fire-water.
But there was a time when people made and drank young whiskey because they liked it, because it was good. A lot of the character of the whiskey you find in the stores today comes from being aged in oak barrels, but it is possible to make a very good spirit without aging. It's not the same as vodka because vodka is distilled to a very very high proof multiple times to remove as much of the flavoring elements as possible, where whiskey---even unaged whiskey---is distilled out at a lower proof, leaving more of the things that give it flavor in there. A few years ago at another WhiskeyFest, Fred Noe from Jim Beam had a bottle of "white dog", which is bourbon distillate straight out of the still, with no aging, and I got to have a taste. It was amazing! Although Bourbon is made from mostly corn, it doesn't really taste like corn. But this white dog did. It was like liquid, highly-alcoholic corn on the cob. It had a kick to it, but not in a bad way.
So I thought, as a craft distiller, I would make a young whiskey that was designed and produced to taste really good in that form. It's a legitimate form of American whiskey that's not really made today, and it would get around that pay-for-it-now-but-can't-sell-it-for-several-years conundrum that faces a startup distillery that wants to make, say, bourbon. (There are of course commercial corn whiskeys, which are unaged, but for a long time the only one readily available was Georgia Moon, which comes in a canning jar and is, I think, intended to be an "ordeal" drink---you give it to your friends and laugh at the faces they make when they drink it. I have a jar, and you can get used to it, but the point behind Georgia Moon is not to make a great-tasting corn whiskey. The same distillery takes the same stuff, ages if for a while, and sells it as Mellow Corn, which is purportedly a much better whiskey, but that's not available in stores around here. Just today I saw another corn whiskey, Virginia Lightning, in a store, which is intriguing but I have not tasted it.)
So anyway, you can imagine my pleasure when several of the craft distillers brought young whiskeys for us to taste. A couple of them, from Stranahan's in Colorado and Templeton Rye in Iowa, were not commercial products, but, a distillery in Wisconsin called Death's Door is making and marketing a product they call White Whiskey, which was quite tasty. I'm hoping I can find a bottle of it here. (The name comes from the name of the channel between the Door County peninsula and Washington Island, from whence comes the organic wheat the Death's Door guys use in their spirits. The actual distillery is in Madison, which has caused consternation to tourists who get all the way to Washington Island---which is way past the middle of nowhere---looking for the distillery.)
One of the other things I would do if I were a craft distiller is experiment with non-traditional mash bills. The world of spirits is driven by traditions which are nigh-inviolable. Whiskey can be made (theoretically) from any grain or combination of grains, but until a couple years ago there were only a few variants. Among American whiskeys, bourbon is mostly corn, with a smaller percentage of either rye or wheat and a little malted barley. Rye is mostly rye (duh) with a generous percentage of corn and the malted barley. Corn whiskey is basically a high-corn bourbon mashbill that is not aged in new oak barrels, and anyway it's so uncommon as to hardly count. There have been only two exceptions to the rules that I know of at least since prohibition: Anchor Distilling in San Fransisco made (and as far as I know still makes) whiskey usng malted rye, which has a very different flavor from unmalted rye. And a few years ago, Heaven Hill introduced Bernheim Straight Wheat Whiskey, which was made from mostly wheat with a generous percentage of corn.
So I was excited to learn that the Death's Door White Whiskey is made from almost entirely wheat---no corn at all. That's amazing, if you geek out on those kinds of things like I do. And I believe some of the wheat is malted, which would contribute a flavor to the whiskey that no other whiskey on earth (that I've heard about, anyway) has.
I go back and forth on whether WhiskeyFest is worth the money---it was nearly $100, although if you bought shots of all the whiskeys you can taste there in a bar, you would probably spend more than that, since some of those old and rare whiskeys can be pretty steep, so I suppose if you want to try a bunch of different whiskeys, it's a good way to do it. But this year I really enjoyed the presentations, and thinking back, I've seen some pretty cool presentations other years too. I'll probably go back.
