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When Lars Williams and Mark Emil Hermansen created the Danish microdistillery Empirical spirits four years ago, they weren’t sure what they were doing. For weeks now, the two men — veterans of the quaint top restaurant Noma, where Williams led research and development and was Hermans ’“ concept manager ”—thought to be making a gin. It was clear and full of botanical plant flavors. But he had no juniper. “And someone in the industry said, ‘You can’t call it a gin,'” Williams says.
They even thought they were making a whiskey. It was smoky, like whiskey on the Isle of Scotland. And it was brown because they had aged in a barrel that once contained sherry. But this did they had juniper before adding the mixture. “And so we couldn’t call it whiskey,” Williams says. “So we were like‘ Pssh, fucked up ’” They bottled it anyway.
Today’s Empirical creates half a dozen spirits, and only one of them fits the category of a dozen classics you’d see on signs on the corridors of a BevMo. Their newest, Ehime, is certainly similar to bourbon, brown, made with grains, aged in barrels. (Koji is partially fermented with a mushroom that makes sake). This drink is sui generis, made with substrates like plum pits, pasilla Mixe chiles and kombucha. from a chemistry laboratory. The company has also started selling carbonated and boozy canned drinks that fit the modern “hard seltzer” category, except when White Claw can offer flavor combinations such as mango, empiric, oolong tea, gooseberry and walnut wood.
It’s weird, yes, but perhaps the weirdest thing about all this atypical and unclassifiable alcohol is that it’s really normal. Spirits are experiencing a kind of biotech revolution, the application of new methods and the recovery of old ones, applied to classical and unknown components. The result is shelves equipped with products that seek out multiple and newer customers. And these products also (bonus!) Support sustainability in the face of climate change. The future of drinking could be here, improperly distributed and distributed to high-end bars and liquor stores.
That future may seem bleak, but it still doesn’t take away from the theatrical side of Williams and Hermansen – probably stemming from working at Noman in the heyday of the molecular gastronomy movement. “Taste has a poor vernacular, and we have few words to talk about it,” Williams says. “So I fall into literature. You have peaks and moments of crisis and moments of joy to create a fascinating narrative. We want people to take a trip. ” Professional glass tasters often talk (sometimes curiously) about the nose, taste, mouthfeel, and finish of a drink. So Williams has a point. These things happen sequentially and add to an experience, like the chapters in a book or the actors in a movie. The sensory experience will be different when sitting in a glass … and sometimes after spending a lot of time in a bottle, even if that’s a little less, because it’s harder for manufacturers to control.
Distillation as a process has a similar temporary type. Spirituals begin with a substrate — fruit or grain in general. They want to ferment, which is to let the yeasts eat the sugars inside to turn them into alcohol. But yeasts don’t eat all kinds of sugar; in grains, they are stored behind a layer of protein and are incorporated into polymers called starches, which are not edible by yeast. “Malting” is a way to turn these starches into sugar, leaving the grain to germinate a bit. Convert this into a sugary liquid and you can pass it through an alcohol. Typically, a large copper pot or tall column that uses heat to separate lighter and heavier molecules. Clearly, the alcohols evaporate first and leave the water behind, carrying other soluble and flavorful chemicals on the sides. Sometimes you can put what comes out of the still in a wooden barrel to oxidize and get some of the flavors of the wood. (The chemistry of aging, ironically, has a long history.)
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