Last week I went on a trip to visit the Canadian Mist distillery in Collingwood, Ontario.
The first day we sampled cocktails made with the product. As Canadian Whisky generally doesn't have a walloping strong flavor profile and it's sold at a "popular price point" (read: it's cheap), it's good mixing whisky for cocktails.
The focus of their cocktail recipe program is on simple drinks with a small number of ingredients. This makes sense from a marketing standpoint, as Canadian Mist is a product most often purchased at stores to take home, rather than being served in bars. People don't make extravagant cocktails at home all that often, so why populate the
website with
recipes nobody is going to make. (I hate it when products' websites list 200 drinks and you can never find the basic one you want.)
I was surprised to find that the whisky sour (a.k.a. the "misty sour") to be my favorite of all drinks we sampled. Here's a tip we learned- to get a sour drink really foamy, shake it extra hard in the shaker and the thick foam should stick to the glass and remain there the whole time. And of course, make your own sour mix if you don't want it to taste like powder and corn syrup.
The next day we headed to the distillery in Collingwood, about an hour and a half drive from Toronto. The distillery is not open to the public, resembling more a shoe factory than an old-timey barn.
They produce 2 million cases of the stuff each year, with only 35 people working at the mostly-automated distillery. Unlike the small-batch bourbon and scotch companies who tout how hand-crafty and slow their products are, here it is all about efficiency. The control room computers show the entire distillation process on computer monitors, and you can see exactly how much grain or liquid is in every tank. The distillation process in good detail is
here.
After the resultant whisky is poured into casks, it's aged on a rotating system so that they go through more temperature cycles than they would just sitting in one place waiting for the seasons to naturally heat and cool the barrels. More cycles is supposed to impart more flavor into the whisky. (The marketing line is "it's not about age, it's about cycles.")
But to me, the most interesting part of the process is how it's flavored. I was under the impression that all whisky sits in barrels as finished product, ages the legally required amount of time, then is blended together for consistency. Not so here. What they do is create a simple, mostly corn "base whisky" in large quantities then flavor it with both other whiskies produced in-house that are heavier on rye or wheat, and also other flavor components from other types of booze up to the legal limit of 10% of the total volume.
As a demo, we did a little experiment where we were given bottles of base whisky, wheat whisky, rye whiskey, port, sherry, and brandy, and our goal was to try to blend something that tastes like good whisky. Mine came out not good, but less than disgusting, so I felt pretty proud.
See my full photoset on Flickr
here.
Labels: canadian_whisky, distillery_tour, whisky
