Alcolog

It's important to shop for alcohol when you're traveling. From a pragmatic perspective, it exposes you to some things that might not be available in your home town. It also helps compare prices between what you're used to and what people pay for elsewhere. From a romantic perspective, even a mediocre find can have a level of nostalgia associated with drinking it. The drink becomes a way to reconnect with a memory of a place and time in your life.

But this purchase comes with some pitfalls if you're flying domestically in the USA. The first critical issue is that, as of September 2006, you cannot carry any alcohol on a plane in a container larger than a mini-bottle. To be precise, the limit is three fluid ounces which translates to 88 mililiters. You might be able to carry a flask on board but if you're buying liquor on the road it's not something you'll want to parcel into 3oz opaque flasks. You may also encounter an over-eager TSA employee who wants to enforce the local jurisdiction's open container law. So until the ban on fluids is lifted, you're left to packing the alcohol in your checked baggage.

If this gives you pause, you're not alone. I have seen the horrors of cases of wine destroyed in transit when people check those cases. Packing is a critical function of checking alcohol and must be done in a way that limits the chance that bottles will break. Consider buying some "expendible" bottles before making a habit of checking alcohol.

Then you run into Chapter 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations, section 175.10. Knowing this section is vital to the protection of your cargo. Violating this regulation may lead to the confiscation or disposal of your alcohol. Yes, the TSA will toss a $300 bottle of Scotch into the trash because someone went over the limit. They don't care, they don't have to -- they're the government.

Learn and swear by these basic rules:

(a) This subchapter does not apply to the following hazardous 
materials when carried by aircraft passengers or crewmembers provided 
the requirements of this section are met:
    (4) Alcoholic beverages containing:
    (i) Not more than 24% alcohol by volume; or
    (ii) More than 24% and not more than 70% alcohol by volume when in 
unopened retail packagings not exceeding 5 liters (1.3 gallons) carried 
in carry-on or checked baggage, with a total net quantity per person of 
5 liters (1.3) gallons for such beverages.

What this means is that anything below 24% alcohol by volume (48 proof) is free game. If you're between 24% and 70% abv (48 and 140 proof) you're limited to 5 liters. Anything over 70% abv (140 proof) is prohibited. Bacardi 151? Banned. George T. Stagg cask strength? Not allowed. Everclear? You'll probably end up on the "persons of interest" list. Most distilled spirits fall in the 40-50% abv range and bottle at 750ml. To be safe, don't go over six 750ml bottles of distilled spirits.

These limitations do not apply to surface transportation. Train, bus, or car and you'll be fine. I've been fortunate in the last few months that my travel has been by car. The bounties of those trips will be the subject of tomorrow's post - bootlegging in the 21st century.

One of the more interesting trends in alcohol of the last few years has been the rise of the American microdistillery. America has a long tradition of small batch distilling of Bourbon and rye, but this latest set have branched into vodkas, gins, brandies, and European-style whiskies. Minnesota has one of the first of this class with its Shakers vodka. Oregon is one of the leaders of this new breed with a handful of its microbreweries like Rogue and Widmers branching out into distilled spirits. As a result of this explosion of small batch distilling, the diversity of selection in any given location can be quite refreshing.
Enter Iowa's sole entry in the batch of microdistilleries: Templeton Rye. It's hard to beat this offering in the realm of romance. During Prohibition, the town of Templeton used its ample supply of grain to create a sensational whiskey. Their booty ended up being the staple whiskey in Midwestern speakeasies and mob hangouts. After prohibition ended, the town went back to legitimate farming and other basic industries.
The recipe was gradually brought back to life and the town started making rye whiskey again. Since the fall of 2006, the distillery has been bottling about 120 cases of whiskey per day and distributing it within the state of Iowa. The next year's run will be shipped out of state, but if you want the stuff now you have to be lucky to find it in Iowa.
To clarify how hard this can be, I should explain the details of the last purchase. The bottles were filled on 12/29/06, and I purchased them on 01/10/07. The employee at the liquor store had put the case, the only case they had, on the shelf less than an hour before I arrived. By the time I left the store, there was one bottle left. I and two other people grabbed five bottles in less than ten minutes.
Why is this such a hit? Ultimately it's a rye unlike anything on the market today. It shares some of the best qualities of Bourbon, Canadian, and rye whiskies. Smooth, a little sweet and fruity, and a reasonable level of burn.
So look for this little gem in Iowa for the next few months and, hopefully, they'll have a distributor soon and people outside Iowa can start enjoying this again.

It's important to keep an open mind about alcohol tastes. It may appear that I focus a lot on aged whiskies, but I prefer the non-grain distilled spirits to be unaged. This is probably due to the fact that when a drink comes from sugars like sugarcane or agave that the unaged spirit captures some of the original taste of the fermented energy. Sad to say, but unaged grain spirits have a tendency to taste like gasoline. Granted that one can glean a fine vodka from distilled rye spirits, that requires multiple distilations in a column still in order to make it smooth. Sugar-based distillates seem to do fine after a couple runs though a pot still and have a lot more character as a result.
From the sugar cane plant come two popular distilled spirits: Rum and Cachaça. The former ought to be produced from molasses but recent introductions like 10 Cane are derived from sugarcane juice and blends of flavors that suggest a molasses base. Cachaça typically comes from Brazil and is a disilate of sugarcane juice. Rum, the more popular offering, will be easier to find than cachaça, though lately cachaça has seen a cult following and will be easier to find over time.
In the French-speaking areas of the Carribean, a product called "Rhum Agricole" dominates the market. It's like cachaça, but differs in its origins and production.
Currently, I have just one bottle of rum, and that is a blanc rhum agricole from Martinique. One aspect endearing to this rhum is its roasted taste. At times it can taste of botterscotch or children's candy. It tends to be inoffensive and worthy of slow sipping like any aged whiskies on offer.
Other rums worth considering are the Matusalem Platino, the 15yr Barbancourt, or the Saint James Hors de Age. Any of these are sipping rums that might change your mind about the spirit if you've only had rums like Bacardi or Malibu.

If it's not obvious, beer and wine are my weak areas in the spirits world. That isn't to say that they're absent, just that I don't drink much of them.
But one thing I do use them for is cooking and baking. Recently I've been trying to create sourdoughs from bottle conditioned beers. After a couple of tries, I finally managed to culture a yeast and have been cranking out breads formed from yeasts not to be found in the grocery store or wild in the air of Minnesota.

If you're not familiar with sourdoughs, they're basically flour, water, and yeast. Natural starters will typically take a week to gather wild yeast from the air and then the fermentation begins. This is similar to the creation of lambic beers where the wort is exposed to the air and starts fermenting naturally.
The problem with the lambics strains has been that they ferment optimally at temperatures below the average temperature of a kitchen. Thus switching to a bottle conditioned porter did the trick. This is the Meantime London Porter, bottle conditioned to 6.5% abv.

The starter recipe is rather simple if you work in metric weight. One 750ml bottle of beer added to 1 kilogram of bread flour. Mix the two together and cover with plastic film. Stir about once a day and "feed" it with the same proportion of beer/water and flour to replace the sour that's used to make the bread.

The resulting breads aren't too boldly sour, but it is apparent that it's a sourdough and the flavors of the beer do survive into the final product.

Tasting parties are truly enriching experiences. At a social level, it represents a group of friends (or soon-to-be-friends) gathering around a kind of alcohol to talk about it and the other experiences that come to mind while tasting it. Educationally speaking, each palate can catch various flavors or descriptors and the rest of the group might try to pin down those tastes themselves. And, of course, there's the alcohol. Typically threaded together in some kind of theme that the host chooses; the theme of the tasting is a path, preferably one that leads to a deeper understanding of alcohol.
Last night's tasting was themed around Laphroaig. There were seven expressions, five from the distillery and two from Signatory. I won't go into the various tastes of any of them (I'm not much of a note-taker in that regard), but if you've had Laphroaig at all you'll know its house style is, well, iodine. It's more respectable to call it "phenol" but that's just a technical term. Essentially all five of the original bottlings held true to the house style, but the Signatories were less so. The seven year actually tasted more like a non-Lahproaig Islay malt. The 14-year Signatory tasted more like Laphroaig, but had more Speyside-y tones.
Interestingly enough the 10-year cask strength had a lower alcohol content than the 14-year that was also cask strength. This was likely due to a few factors like the 10-year was aged on Islay whereas the Signatory was likely aged in Edinburgh under stable conditions. The other consideration would be that the 10-year could have been a vatted from older barrels whose cask proof was lower. In other words - just because it's cask strength doesn't mean it's single barrel.
The consensus opinion came out that the 30-year was the best tasting, though the 14-year Signatory was the best high-end deal and the 10-year cask strength is the best cheap deal. The reasoning: water breaks down Laphroaig in bad ways.