Artisan Series Brandies & Smoke

I just had an interesting cocktail making session at home this evening, and thought I should throw up a quick post about it.

I've been working on some new cocktails for the Pear Brandy, the Kirsch, and the Grappa. This has been a bit challenging because the brandies have a wonderful nose and a delicate flavor that I don't want to bury with too many other ingredients. In addition I've been working on some cocktails for a couple of cocktail paired dinners in the near future. One of the flavors I've been working with is smoke. You can incorporate smoke into cocktails a number of different ways. You can use peaty Scotch like Laphroig, add smoked ingredients, or as I tried this evening smoke your glass. To smoke a glass basically light some wood, herbs, or spices on fire in a metal dish, and cover with your glass you will serve your cocktail in. As your ingredient smolders it's smoke coats the inside of your glass.


This is not a new technique, but one that is used very infrequently and I think should be explored more thouroughly. So, after a number of trials here are the two that stuck for me.

Smoky the Pear
2 oz Great Lakes Distillery Pear Brandy
1/2 oz Honey Syrup (3 parts honey to 1 part water)
1 Bay Leaf
- In a heat proof dish light a dried bay leaf on fire. Let it burn momentarily and slowly cover with the glass you will pour you drink into. While the glass is smoking combine pear brandy and honey syrup in a shaker with ice. Shake well and strain into the smoked glass. Enjoy.

Smoldering Grappa
2 oz Great Lakes Distillery Grappa
1/2 oz Agave Nectar (found in most health food stores)
1 tsp wormwood
- In a heat proof dish light a wormwood on fire. Let it burn momentarily and slowly cover with the glass you will pour you drink into. While the glass is smoking combine grappa and agave nectar in a shaker with ice. Shake well and strain into the smoked glass. Enjoy.

These are way too much fun. Just enough smoke and sweetness to enhance the brandies, but not so much flavor that the subtlties of the spirits are lost. Although these drinks are probably not for everyday drinking the technique is a lot of fun and the cocktails are delicious.

Bonus:
While digging through my collection of herbs, spices and whatnot looking for things to light on fire for my smoke experiments, I found some dried chamomile. So I made a chamomile syrup (1 cup water, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup chamomile - dissolve sugar simmer for 20 min, strain). This is awsome with gin, in fact I am finishing my second Chamomile Sour as I write this.

Chamomile Sour
2 oz Rehorst Gin
3/4 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 oz chamomile syrup
1/2 of an egg white
dash of my homemade ginger ginseng bitters, or orange bitters will do
-Shake all ingredients with ice extra hard for 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Enjoy.

Cheers.

Pumpkin Seasonal Spirit distilled...

I just finished distilling this year’s batch of Pumpkin Seasonal Spirit. For those of you not familiar with it, let me explain. We take Lakefront Brewery’s Pumpkin Spice Lager and distill it, then age it in used bourbon barrels for the summer and bottle it for release in fall. This is not some sort of sickly sweet pumpkin liquer. The best way to describe it is a lightly flavored, young malt whiskey. The actual name for this product is bierschnaaps. It’s an old German tradition to distill leftover beer before it spoils. Unfortunately, our federal government feels the term bierschnaaps is misleading to the consumer. So, after trying several attempts at other names for the product, the best we could settle on was “Pumpkin Seasonal Spirit”.

This year’s batch will be even better than last. After meeting with Russ Klisch (Lakefront Brewery founder and president), we made some alterations to the recipe. Actually, all they did was leave out the hops. Hops are what give beer its bitterness, and even though this beer is lightly hopped to begin with, I thought we could get a better result without it. The bitterness of the hops is magnified during distillation, so this forced me to distill last year’s batch to a higher proof to strip away some of this flavor. Along with stripping away the hops flavor, some of the essential flavors were taken away as well. I was able to take more of a whiskey type approach to distilling this year’s batch. This allowed more of the pumpkin, spice and malt flavors to come through.

I suggest you to try this as an alternative to whiskey in your favorite cocktails. It makes a great old-fashioned as well as just neat or on the rocks. Check out the website for some of the recipes Jason has come up with or try some of our local establishment’s signature cocktails and martinis. Thanks again to Russ, Luther and everyone at Lakefront for this year’s effort. I can’t wait for September!

A quick note about the bottom photo: Jeremy Zuleger is one of our favorite sales reps from 102.9 The Hog. He showed up just in time to man the hose for loading the still with Pumpkin Lager. Sales people beware; you may be put to work when you show up here!

About the Brandies

In my last post I mentioned the three brandies that were about to be released. Now that they’re available, I thought I would explain them in a bit more detail.

Let’s start with the grappa. Grappa has its origins in Italy and seems to have a reputation as harsh, fire-water type of beverage that old Italian men drink as some sort of right of passage. This can be true, but there are many wonderful grappa’s out there. Unfortunately, I think most of them stay in Italy and they export the fire-water here to the States.

Grappa is distilled from fermented pomace, which are the solid remains from the winemaking process. The freshest possible pomace makes the best grappa. We were lucky enough to receive ours from the winery within days. Our grappa comes from Wisconsin grown Millot and Marechal Foch grapes, which are hearty, red-varietals whose vines can withstand harsh Wisconsin winters. It has a fresh and lively bouquet with a nice grape finish.

Grappa is typically drunk neat as an aperitif. However, it can be an ingredient in cocktails such as a grappa gimlet (grappa, gin and lime juice). It is common in Italy to add a shot of grappa to coffee. This is known as a café correcto or “corrected coffee”. I love this way of thinking.

Kirschwasser is a traditional Swiss-German un-aged brandy distilled from cherries. The first reaction that most people have when they smell and taste Kirsch for the first time is: “that’s not cherry”. I think this is because we’ve now been trained that cherry is the artificial flavor of a Maraschino. Let’s be honest, cherry flavored vodka, cherry candy, cherry soda and definitely Maraschinos smell and taste like no cherry from a tree, but that’s now what we associate as “cherry”.

Kirsch has a smooth, subtle aroma and flavor. Like grappa, it is typically enjoyed neat as an aperitif. It’s also traditionally drunk with some sugar or simple syrup and bitters (sort of a cherry old fashioned). Personally, I can’t wait to see what kind of cocktails Jason starts using this in.

Pears are some of the best fruit for distilling. The aroma and flavor of the pear eau de vie (French for “water of life”) is distinctly fresh Bartlett pears. I would suggest that anyone who’s a fan of pear flavored vodka to try this. It’ll amaze you at how much better real pear is compared to the artificial flavors that they use in most vodkas. Again, it is best drunk neat, but I’m sure it will find its way into some incredible cocktails or martinis.

The Kirsch and pear were done in collaboration with Charles McGonegal of AeppelTreow Winery in Burlington. He supplied the wines that these were distilled from. We have done some contract distilling for him in the past for spirits that he uses to make fortified apple, cherry and pear wines with. The results were so positive that we teamed up to make these excellent brandies. Along with some fine fruit wines, Charles produces a superb line of hard ciders. His winery is located adjacent to the Brightonwoods Orchard near the Bong Recreational Area. It’s definitely worth a trip down on a spring or summer day to have a tour and tasting.