Blue Ice and Distilled Resources Trip

Two days after I returned from Finland, I was off again visiting the Distilled Resources distillery in Rigby and Sun Valley, Idaho courtesy of Blue Ice Vodka.

At DRinc (Distilled Resources, Inc.- pretty clever) they produce about 17 different potato and grain vodkas and liqueurs, and also organic alcohol for use in food goods and processing. But we focused on potato vodka and Blue Ice, since they were footing the bill.


There was a great, small group of writers on the trip, including New York wine and spirits educator Harriet Lembeck , Chicagoan Sean Ludord of BevX.com, Louise Owens, booze writer from Dallas, and LA-based Meridith May, publisher/writer/co-owner of The Tasting Panel Magazine and former monster truck driver. (When we learned this, we all pretty much bowed to her awesomeness forever more.) These were really smart people who know their booze. But my relative ignorance meant I was learning the most. Here are some fun facts I picked up.

Distilling:

• The DRinc distillery was a biofuel plant leftover from the Carter administration that they bought and turned in to the distillery.
  
• They use a four-column distillation process. Column distillation does not scale down so that you can have a small column still. Also, pot stills only scale up so far, so that if someone needs to produce mass-quantities of a pot-distilled product they need to buy a whole bunch of pot stills.
  
• After the raw material (potatoes in this case) is fermented into beer, they heat it up and distillation starts. The first distillation column just strips out all the solids from the beer. The rest break down the vapors into the desired components.
  
• You could have just one giant column instead of four or five or whatever, but this way is more compact. So booze that's x-times distilled should refer to pot distillation instead of number of columns, but you never know with the vodka marketing craziness what's really up. Blue Ice compromises and labels their bottles as "four column distillation."
  

Bottling

• The bottling process isn't just taking finished booze and sticking it in bottles. Bottling is often diluting, blending, filtering, flavoring, and bottling at a "bottling facility." Thus, one could order up alcohol from a distillery and flavor it at a separate bottling facility where it becomes distinct products/flavors. (At DRinc they bottle on site.)
  
• Thus the water that brings the product to proof and the flavorings are added at the bottling facility. It is the bottling facility city that is legally required to be put on labels, not necessarily the distillery where the alcohol was first created.
  
• The filtering and treatment of water is a big factor in the finished product- vodka is 60% water, after all. The line between "treating the water" and "flavoring the vodka" isn't terribly clear to me.
  
• There are a lot of ways to filter the water and the final product. Many places run the vodka through a charcoal/carbon filter, but here they add carbon granules to the tanks then filter them out. They say their carbon filtering is actually a clarifying agent for the vodka rather than an important part of the flavoring (they use a "five stage filtration").
  

Waste Products (You know I love distillery waste products):

• The name for the grains or potatoes leftover after fermentation is stillage DDG, or distillers dried grains. Except at Blue Ice they're still wet and they're potatoes, so I guess they should be called DWP. Anyway, this gets sold off as animal feed.
  
• The heads and tails from the distilling process combined are called fusel oils, and are often sold off to be used in chemical processing and cosmetics. However, at DRinc they have to prove to the ATB (via purchase of testing equipment) that there is no more recoverable alcohol in the fusel oils before they do, and by "recoverable" they mean "taxable."
  
• I had the opportunity to smell a jar of fusel oils!
  
• Waste heat from the distillery (steam) is pumped under the floors of the storage warehouse in the winters to heat it.
  

Blue Ice

• They have to get certified to say that they make the product from Idaho russet potatoes, as that term is trademarked, by proving that all their potatoes come from Idaho.
  
• They don't make a lot of organic potatoes in Idaho, which is why DRinc makes organic grain-based vodkas for other brands but not an organic potato vodka. It would be just too expensive on the shelf.
  

Call me a sucker, but I love distillery tours. At every one I learn more, and also how much more I need to learn. It's an ongoing study of booze, and these are the field trips that keep it exciting.

Land of the Hangover

Hey y'all- I'm in Finland right now courtesy of the people at Finlandia vodka and Brown-Forman, whose products I drank way too much of last night. I'll post a more complete entry later, but here are my thoughts so far:

• If the luggage loader breaks and they can't load half the luggage on the plane, why not wait until it's fixed before sending the plane off? My comfy airplane t-shirt did not make a great urban exploration t-shirt for the additional 24 hours I was forced to wear it (so far).
  
• Finn Air's wine and spirits selection in business class was delightful. The veggie meals? Not so much.
  
• Monday night and we went bar-hopping to four venues. I think we got back sometime after 3:30AM. I like this place.
  

Thursday update-I'm back from a night of partying in Lapland, where the sun is shining 24 hours a day now. I am absolutely polluted with vodka that at some point of the night we stopped drinking in cocktails and began chugging out of the bottle. Boy do I ever need a shower.

Sunday update- I'm back in SF now. Pictures are here. More details after I'm back from my next trip.

The Mists of Canada

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.