Alcolog

One year ago, I started this web log as an attempt to educate people on alcohol. Not necessarily in the ways most web logs had started, either focusing on mixology, a specific kind of alcohol, or the experience of drinking. This is about alcohol, and the study of its history and experience. Throw in a little bit of the business side of things and that's a good explanation of the last 24 posts.

Underpinning all things related to alcohol is how they are classified. Governments typically split them three ways: beer, wine, and spirits. The drinks industry separates that last category into white and brown spirits. But these really aren't very useful categories. Are vodka and tequila the same drink? Are moonshine and whiskey all that different? I find it useful to think about these drinks based on their roots.

At is core, all alcohol is produced from yeast. Without yeast, you would not have any alcoholic drinks because that's how every one starts. So at the top of the taxonomy is the yeast and how it produces alcohol. It does this by consuming sugars. You can feed yeast these sugars either from direct sources or by breaking down starches into simpler sugars that can then be consumed by yeasts. Thus creates the most major split in the alcohol taxonomy: alcohol made from sugar, and alcohol made from starch. The fermented parent on the sugar side is wine. Wine is created from grapes, whose juice contains sugar. Also within this category would be cider or pulque. The key is that the starting ingredient has a sugar that can then be processed by a yeast which then produces alcohol.

Starches cannot be processed by yeast naturally, and thus they require the additional step to turn the starches into simpler sugars. The most common of these are beers, who typically start from grains. One other example would be (rather confusingly) rice wine. Ultimately these fermented drinks are different from their sugar-based relatives because they must be broken down before fermentation can occur.

Beneath this primary stratum of classification are the distilled drinks. These are the distillates that come from the fermented parents. For the sugar-based drinks you'll find things like brandy, applejack or rum. In the starch-based realm you'll find most commonly the whiskies and Tequila, though traditional vodka and soju will fall in this area as well.

This taxonomy creates interesting relationships in modern times. Vodka is the best example as now any neutral spirit can be diluted and bottled as a vodka. This makes that bottle of Ciroc closer to brandy than Belvedere. In Central Asia, you will find whiskies made from sugar cane, thus making them more like rums than Scotch. These examples are not examples against the system, rather, help explain why some drinks are more similar than others. A martini using Ciroc and vermouth seems to work more closley together than a traditional gin or grain-based vodka. Beer pairs nicely with Scotch, mainly because Scotch comes from a rather crude beer.

So as you taste a drink, it's imporant to remember where it came from. It may influence which drink you should take next.

Whereas there are exceptions in beers and a common traits in wine, liquor as a universal truth, does not improve once placed in a bottle. The contents, at best, can stay the same as once they're bottled. But as mentioned before, distilled liquor can suffer some bad effects once it's put in the bottle. But in some contexts, that static nature of liquor can be a good thing. Especially when proper storage and care is performed on the aging bottle.

In some context, a bottle of liquor is a time capsule. Not just in the label, but the contents themselves. Once a liquor is bottled it becomes a point on a timeline. That bottle will remain static but the world around it will change. Countries change their names, distilleries close, and copyrights change hands. But that bottle, and the label on it, will never change.

This phenomenon is the glory of the astute liquor buyer (either at the wholesale or retail level) because they can come across some rare finds when shopping around. Months ago I came across a local liquor store with some curiously old bottles. I didn't buy them at the time, but their presence gnawed at me until I stopped by and bought a few bottles. Only after I got them home did the age of the bottles really set in.

The first, most common, was Buchanan's Black & White Belended Scotch Whisky. This is still available and is probably unchanged, but it's not really sold in the US anymore. Once the merger that formed Diageo happened in 1997, Black and White was one of the casualties of the merger. It's still available in France, Venezuela, and Brazil. But none is shipped to North America anymore. Any bottles found are likely holdovers from the days when the brand was owned by United Distillers. The way to be sure is to look at the name of the importer.

The second, most interesting, was the Glenfiddich Special Reserve Pure Malt/Single Malt. This bottling pre-dates the Cardow/Cardhu debacle of 2003 that tainted "pure malt" forever. Instead this harkens back to a time, again in the late 1990s, when Scotch was finding its footing in the drinking culture. Back then it was more important to distinguish between blends and malts than to specify ages or the origin from a single distillery. So this bottle is the progenitor of the Glenfiddich 12 - the staple of the William Grant line of single malts. What makes it very interesting is that its taste profile is notably different from the modern Glenfiddich. It's more buttery/marshmallowy than modern Glenfiddich. Possibly a sign of changing times, or at least the maturation/aging of a master blender's taste.

The last bottle, and possibly the most special of the set, is a Black Bull Blended Scotch Whisky. This also dates from the late 90s, isn't likely to ever come back. A few years after this was bottled, a sprightly Austrian company called "Red Bull" contested the trademark in the US. The local importer at the time was either out of business or in no position to contend it, so the trademark went inactive in 2002. Red Bull trademarked "Black Bull" but only for non-alcoholic drinks. Later, the new owner of the brand, registered it in the US but did not start bringing the brand back. Later, a US company started marketing a "Black Bull Vodka" and so the chance we'll ever see the Black Bull Scotch in the US any time soon is quite slim. End result? The bottle I'm holding on to now will be part of a dwindling stock of Black Bull in the US - unlikely to be refreshed and definitely will never be the same.

An epilogue: This moment of clarity would not be possible for two very important players. The first was a diligent liquor manager at the store, ensuring that these bottles did not suffer the same fate as the All Saints brands. These were well preserved specimens of history.
Second, I would like to thank these bottlers of the late 90s for having the foresight to use screwcap closures because they avoided the fright of cork taint. Sure cork is a romantic closure - but it sure isn't a long-lived one. stryrofoam barriers and plastic/metal screwcaps preserved these beautiful bottles for nearly a decade. Had they been cork, I'd expect that the bottles would be worthless today.