Bourbon Whiskey
Page 5
On September 11, 1791 a newly appointed tax collector by the name of Robert Johnson was tarred and feathered in protest in Washington County, Pennsylvania. Shortly after that, a man was sent to Washington County by government officials to serve warrants to those who attacked Robert Johnson, and that government man was whipped, tarred, and feathered as a result. In the frontier Kentucky territory of Virginia, no one would volunteer to take the job of collecting the tax, and all the other states in the Appalachian region followed suit. .
In August 1792 a convention was held in Pittsburgh to discuss resistance to the whiskey tax. A militant group known as the Mingo Creek Association took over the convention and issued radical demands. Washington and Hamilton were embarrassed by this insurrection, since the nation’s capitol was located in Pennsylvania at that time. Washington signed a presidential proclamation drafted by Hamilton himself on September 15, 1792, and it was published in every newspaper and plastered in every town. Resistance continued until 1794, when a militia was called up from New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and eastern Pennsylvania. A force of 12,950 men was gathered, which was larger than the forces involved in the Revolutionary War. The sheer size of the militia helped to squash the insurrection, and there were few casualties. Later Washington pardoned many of the rebels, since he had made his point. He had successfully shown that the new national government had the willingness and ability to suppress violent opposition to its policies. Interestingly, the Washington administration’s actions met widespread approval among most citizens. Ironically, George Washington became the nation’s largest distiller of rye whiskey in 1797 and 1798 until his death in 1799.
After the Whiskey Rebellion was over, farmers like Jacob Beam and others from Pennsylvania and Maryland moved as far west as they could to get away from the government control. They moved to Kentucky, which had just become a state (actually a commonwealth) in 1792. At the time, new settlers were given a free parcel of land if they built a cabin on it and grew the native crop, corn. This was part of the Corn Patch and Cabin Rights established in 1776 by the Virginia Assembly to encourage western development.
The settlers brought their rye and barley with them to Kentucky and planted that in addition to their corn. As everyone was growing corn to get their free land, there was a lot of surplus lying around in corn cribs at the time. So settlers started distilling it into their whiskey as well. After all, you could more easily transport a bushel of grain in liquid form than in its natural form. The settlers found that they could make more money from a gallon of corn liquor than from an equal amount of grain.
It was soon true that corn became the main grain in whiskey recipes, and they found that it “softened up” the whiskey. Keep in mind, this was clear, like moonshine, and not the “red whiskey” that we associate with whiskies today. But still, it was sweeter than the rye and barley whiskies they were making before in the East and in Europe. This sweeter corn was the foundation that separated what would become bourbon from the barley-based Scottish and Irish whiskies and from the rye whiskies from the northeastern United States. The corn-based whiskey was so popular that some farms used all of their crop to make whiskey – you’ve probably heard the songs about how people drank their corn from a jar.
DISTILLATION
Let’s take a look at just what distillation is. I’m not going to cover every holding tank, pipe and temperature…I’m basically going to distill down the distillation process. I am not going to mention how many gallons a cooker or fermenter holds, or what temperatures are set, etc. This can get a little confusing, plus it’s slightly different from distillery to distillery. I’m just going to talk about distilling overall. I don’t want to get too technical, and trust me, folks, I can’t, since I was publically educated in Kentucky!
Pot stills at Laphroaig Distillery “The Magnificent 7” (Laphroaig is a registered trademark of Beam Global UK Limited and is used with permission.)
The word distill literally means “to strip away.” So the higher proof you bring the whiskey off the still, the more congeners, flavors and character you strip away. The more times you distill something, the more you strip away. The highest you can bring anything off the still is around 190 proof.
With single-malt scotch, distillers must use copper pot stills by law. A copper pot still is kind of like an old-fashioned tea kettle. Each time a distiller makes a new batch of whiskey, he puts the fermented beer in, gets the temperatures up, and the whole time the proofs are going up and down erratically. That’s where they split off the heads and tails and just keep the heart. They make their distillates in batches. Then when they finish distilling that batch, they clean out the still and start a new batch.
A column still (photo courtesy of Heaven Hill Distilleries, Inc.)
Most bourbon distilleries, however, use a column still. All but one of the 10 distillers in Kentucky use column stills. With a column still, once the steam under the column still gets to the correct temperature, you can pump in the fermented distiller’s beer 24 hours a day at a constant level proof. Temperatures and proofs are more constant in a column still, so it’s very efficient and does extremely well. It doesn’t mean scotch or pot stilling is inferior, it just means there are different ways to do it.
So here’s how the process works: Let’s say you’re making vodka (God forbid). With vodka, your goal is an odorless, colorless, and tasteless spirit. (Damn, I can’t wait to taste that vodka.) You might not just double distill, but triple distill, quintuple, or continuously distill. Each distillation strips away most of the character, and you end up with a very clean, crisp, tasteless spirit. (I know I’m selling vodka pretty aggressively here, but that really is the definition of vodka.) Distilling to that high proof over and over again has stripped away most of all the characteristics of whatever you fermented.
The lower proof we bring a distillate off the still, the more characteristics we leave in the distillate. With bourbon, we want the flavors from the grains we have fermented. So we only use two distillations to achieve more flavors from these grains. The laws of bourbon state that it must be distilled under 160 proof. In practice, most bourbons are brought off the still at under 140 proof.
The whole process begins with the grains. The grains are sent to a grinding mill. Mill grinds are set to get maximum breakdown of the starches so they convert better. Each grain is milled separately, weighed according to the percentage of the recipe of that mash bill, and added to a cooker. In that cooker the grain is mixed with pure limestone-filtered water and a thin slop, known as the sour mash process. All are cooked until proper pH conversion and flavor consistency are achieved. Sour mash is the liquid that is left over from the previous distillation minus the alcohol. When the mash is first put into the fermenter it is sweet since all the starches and sugars are present. After fermentation, the yeast eats all the sugars, and at the end it actually tastes sour. The corn and the rye are where we will be getting body and flavor, and the enzymes in the malt turn the starches into sugars. Are you with me so far? To summarize, we’ve just added the ground-up grains to water and thin slop.
Grains before milling (photo courtesy of the Louisville Convention and Visitors Bureau)
So now that we have grains and liquid in a large vessel, we heat it up and cook it. This helps to release the grain starches into fermentable sugars. After cooking, we take all this liquid and grain and put it into a fermenting tank where the liquid jug yeast is added along with more thin slop for the sour mash process for consistency of flavor. Each distillery has its own proprietary yeast strain. Yeast is very important congener-wise. You can take the same grain bill, but if you add two different yeast strains in two different fermenters, you would end up with two totally different-tasting bourbons at the end of it all. Yeast is a living enzyme that feeds on the sugars. As the yeast feeds, they produce three things:
(1) carbon dioxide
(2) alcohol
(3) heat/temperature
Cooker at Jim Beam (Jim Beam is a registered
trademark of Jim Beam Brands Co., and is used with permission.)
Jug yeast and fermenter at Maker’s Mark (Maker’s Mark is a registered trademark of Maker’s Mark Distillery, Inc. and is used with permission)
Greg Davis (black shirt) explains to Gary Crunkleton (The Crunkleton, Chapel Hill, NC) and his staff about fermentation. (photo courtesy of the author.)
We’re not so interested in the carbon dioxide and heat, but we are interested in that low-proof alcohol. The fermenters produce a 17.5-proof beer or 8.75% alcohol (this differs from distillery to distillery) which actually does taste like a stale beer. Well, that’s probably because—minus the hops—it is beer! We call it distiller’s beer.
Now we take this distiller’s beer, and we pump it continuously into our column still. This will be the first distillation. We pump the beer and grains into the still about 2/3 of the way up. Imagine a tall cylindrical column with steam heat underneath it. In this column are a series of plates/trays with tiny holes and weirs (troughs) in the bottom of each plate, kind of like a thick pizza tray with smaller holes.
As the liquids and solids fall down from plate to plate from top to bottom, the heat from the steam works its way from bottom to top. Water turns to vapor at 212 degrees. Alcohol turns to vapor at a lower temperature. So the alcohol vapors rise through the perforated trays to the top of the still, and the beer stair-steps down from tray to tray to the bottom of the still.
Fred Noe asked his dad, Booker, the legendary distiller and grandson of Jim Beam, why the new bourbon whiskey was called white dog. Booker said, “Well, Dumbass…”
Fred claims he thought that his real name was Dumbass until he was 20.
“Well, dumbass, it’s called white dog because it’s clear (white), and if you drink enough of it, it’ll bite you in the ass like a dog!”
The leftover solids (grains) are taken and spun in a centrifuge and further dried by heat and steam and sold as high- quality feed grain for livestock. The liquid is used for the sour mash process; that is the thin slop that is added to the next cook and fermenters so the flavor of the next batch is consistent with the previous batch (kind of like a starter loaf in a friendship bread).
The vapors that escape from the top are then surrounded by tubes of cold water, and this condenses that vapor back into a liquid. This is called low wine, and the proof of the alcohol has been raised from 17.5% to 125 proof. This differs from distillery to distillery. I’m using the example of Jim Beam. This low wine is clear like water or vodka. We’ve taken out most of the congeners and fusel oils (the stuff that gives you a headache) in this first distillation. But we need to distill it one more time to get the proof up slightly and to eliminate the rest of the undesired fusel oils and congeners.
We send this low wine down to what we call the doubler. The doubler is not a column still; it is a hybrid between a column still and a pot still. We don’t have any grains in this liquid, so we just pump the low wine in over steam coils underneath, and that alcohol is turned to a vapor and escapes out the top. Once again the pipe for the vapor is surrounded with tubes of cool water, and it condenses it back in to a liquid. Viola! We have high wine, or what is called new bourbon whiskey. It is at 135 proof now. It tastes cleaner and not as oily as the first distillation, because we have taken out more of those fusel oils. Out of around 44,000 gallons of fermented distiller’s beer, we only yield around 6,000 gallons of new bourbon whiskey. New bourbon whiskey is also called white dog.
Now we need to put that new bourbon whiskey into a brand new charred-oak barrel and put it up in the rack houses to let it age. But according to law, we cannot store that distillate at more than 125 proof. So we add enough de-mineralized water to get that new bourbon whiskey down to just under 125 proof, and then we put it into the barrel for aging.
The laws of making bourbon are very strict. So if we put that white dog directly into the barrel at 135 proof, even if we put it in a new charred-oak barrel, the resulting product could not be labeled bourbon. It could only be labeled as whiskey. So we have to add more of the limestone-filtered water to get that down to 125 proof before it enters the barrel. Also, if you distill to 150 or 160 proof, you’ll have to add even more water to get it down to the 125 in the barrel, resulting in a lighter end product.
How barrels age inside a traditional rackhouse.
Buffalo Trace Barrels in rackhouse (photo courtesy of Buffalo Trace Distillery)
The reason for barreling at 125 proof or less is because, as the whiskey ages, we lose approximately 4% a year to evaporation, also known as the angels’ share. It’s what the angels drink. The old boys say that if the angels don’t take their share, it’s not worth drinkin’. The barrels that age on the higher floors where it is very hot and dry will rise from 125 proof to 145 proof after evaporation. If we put the 160-proof whiskey in the barrel, it could rise all the way up to 180 proof or so. And if you add water after aging to get that bourbon down to 80 or 100 proof in the bottle, you’ve just watered down everything you worked so hard for, and you don’t get the flavors you need at the end. So bourbon can’t enter the barrel at anything more than 125 proof.
BOURBON AND MOONSHINE
You’ll find that some bourbons now have flavorings added to them as a shout-out to the tradition of adding a flavor to moonshine. Wild Turkey and Evan Williams make a honey and cherry flavor, and Jim Beam’s Red Stag is black cherry flavored. There are some folks that scoff at this or say distillers shouldn’t add flavors, but I’d argue moonshiners have been doing it longer than we’ve been aging in barrels.
The Jim Beam Rackhouse
For small-batch bourbons or single-barrel bourbons, the proofs of the low wine and high wine are typically lower, leaving in more flavors and characteristics from the grains. The process of making all bourbon is the same, so if you do want to make a more flavorful, or “premium” product, you can really only change the grain bill, yeast strains, or bring it off the still at different/lower proofs or bottle it at higher proofs. Are you getting the hang of just how regulated bourbon is?
After distilling, we go into the aging process. Aging is just as important to the final flavor of the bourbon as the distillation. You can take the same recipe, put it in two barrels at the same proof, and then bottle one after four years and the other after six years, and you will get two very different bourbons. This is where it really starts to become interesting.
HOW THE AGING PROCESS WORKS
If you’ve ever had moonshine (and you should once in your life), you’ll remember it being served in a mason jar with something else in it. There’s often fruit in it, like strawberries, cherries or a peach. The fruit softens up the taste of the harsh moonshine and adds some sugar and flavor to it. The barrel serves a similar purpose. It just takes a lot longer to do it.
Barrels charring at Independent Stave Cooperage (Jim Beam is a registered trademark of Jim Beam Brands Co., and is used with permission.)
Aging sounds pretty simple. You take your whiskey off the still, put it in a “brand new charred-oak container” as the law specifies, and then store it until you decide to bottle it, right? Sounds simple. But there is way more to it than that. How long do you store it? Where do you store it? Do you move the barrels around or just let them rest? From where do you pull the barrels after aging?
First of all, let’s put to rest the myth that bourbon has to be aged for two years in the barrel. This is not true. The Standards of Identity only say that bourbon should be “stored” in a brand new charred-oak container. As Jimmy Russell from Wild Turkey says, with bourbon you can use the “Fifteen/Fifteen” rule: As long as you put the new under-125-proof bourbon whiskey in the new charred-oak bucket for 15 seconds or carry if for 15 feet, you’ve got bourbon. It wouldn’t be very tasty, but by law it would be bourbon. The designation of “straight” bourbon means that you have followed all the laws of bourbon and have stored (aged) the whiskey for a minimum of two years.
Buffalo Trace Warehouse C (photo courtesy of the Louisvil
le Convention and Visitors Bureau)
Let’s talk about the barrels. We all use white oak, since that variety allows the bourbon to penetrate the wood but also can hold the liquid for the years needed without losing integrity. Before being made into barrels, the wood is cut and set outside in the open air for several seasons to allow it to age in the elements. This helps get all the green out of the wood and tempers the wood against some tannins and other elements that are undesirable during the aging process.
As I explained in the last chapter, charring makes the natural sugars come to the surface of the interior of the barrel so that the bourbon can imbibe the qualities, flavor and character of the wood, which is what gives bourbon its beautiful color and seductive taste. Most distilleries use the deepest, or level four, char. In contrast, wine is typically aged in lightly toasted barrels with no char. Bourbon distillers are allowed to select their char level, but barrels must be charred, not just toasted or seared. The way the coopers char the barrels is to assemble the barrel staves, and before they put the heads on the ends, they introduce a flame through the inside of the barrels. If you’ve ever seen a hot air balloon and its burners, it’s similar to that.