SPIRITS WITHOUT BORDERS
LOOKING to OTHER DISTILLING TRADITIONS for INSPIRATION WRITTEN BY GEORGE CATALLO
e’re at a point where people’s palates are leaning towards more exotic flavors in food, drinks, or alcoholic beverages. We’re seeing it trend in every aspect of consumables: Passion fruit gum, sour beers with tamarind and guava — hell, I can even go to Taco Bell right now and get a frozen dragonfruit drink (and it’s good!) We are even seeing it in spirits, with more exploratory voyages into traditional spirits from around the world, like soju/shochu, mezcal, mastika, arak, pisco, cachaça, and so many more. Implementing or drawing inspiration from these fruits, flavors, and spirits is absolutely on the table for craft distilled spirits.
W
Fruits of your Labor First and foremost, it’s important to remember that beverages are very much a culinary thing. A good dish is always balanced. If you have a particular flavor that you want to incorporate into a spirit, I would recommend looking into recipes for foods using that item. The types of complimentary flavors used are a window into what you want your spirit to be overall. For example, I think it would be fairly obvious that you would not want to flavor a bourbon with lychee. It would be awful. However a lychee rum or eau-du-vie would be delightful. On the note of a lychee bourbon being a bad idea — make your spirit with purpose. Slapping a flavor, especially an unusual one, into one of your existing spirits may not work perfectly. Build your spirit from the bottom up
designed around the end goal. The sum needs to be greater than the parts. If you are flavoring a spirit, you need to take into account the characteristics of the base spirit, the characteristics of the flavor you’re using, and how they interact with one another. For example if you have a sweeter rum with a sweeter tropical fruit, the spirit may end up being too overwealmingly sweet. You may need an acid component to balance the sweetness out. You may want to consider citric or phosphoric acid for that purpose. When creating a spirit from an unfamiliar fruit, remember that fermentation can drastically change flavor. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing by any means; just take that into consideration when building your vision for the final result. Yeast selection is also massively important when ferment-
ing fruit. There are strains of winemaking yeast that could potentially fare very well, but it all depends on the conditions the fruit creates in your mash if any one yeast will perform better than others while also achieving the profile you desire. My favorite use of exotic fruits and flavors in a contemporary spirit is undoubtedly in gin. There are already countless gins on the market that utilize tropical fruits or botanicals with great success. There are many that use a plethora of Asian citrus and tea leaves, which are a good starting point for inspiration as they lean towards a fresher more fruit-driven style. The most important thing in building a botanical blend for an exoitic fruit, in my opinion, is to think twice about using cinnamon. Cinnamon is already a very heavy-handedly used ingredient in a lot of contemporary American gins, it rarely plays well with most tropical fruits (except for pineapple, believe it or not).
NOTE: Some spirits I would recommend giving a try while researching both foreign spirits as well as American takes; Akashi Ume Plum Flavored Whisky (It’s basically a barrel aged plum old fashioned), Mizu Green Tea Shochu, Yobo Soju (Contract distilled by Finger Lakes Distilling), El Massaya Arak, Nikka Coffey Gin, Ki No Bi Navy Strength Gin, Four Pillars Bloody Shiraz Gin, Kas Krupnikas, Cruzan Guava Rum, Amarula, Soho Lychee Liqueur.
108
WWW.ART ISANSPI RI TMAG.CO M