Within the oversaturated spirits market that’s battling with declining alcohol consumption numbers, distilleries are all the time on the lookout for one thing novel to set themselves aside from the competitors. I’ve encountered two new — or no less than new-to-me — merchandise out there recently that I feel are worthy of your consideration.
The primary is the brand new Inexperienced River Honey-Completed Whiskey. I’ve been a fan of lots of the merchandise from Inexperienced River Distillery, the most effective factor to return out of Owensboro, Ky., since Interstate 165. Now owned by Lofted Spirits, the dad or mum firm of Bardstown Bourbon Co., Inexperienced River distills their very own merchandise alongside contract work for another well-liked smaller manufacturers and superstar whiskeys.
The distillery acknowledges that customers go loopy for honey whiskeys, whether or not they’re truly infused liqueurs like Wild Turkey’s American Honey or just completed in beforehand used whiskey barrels that then held honey earlier than lastly ending the whiskey once more — like Belle Meade Bourbon has completed with its Honey Cask Bourbon.
Inexperienced River has taken a mixture of these two approaches to their new product. First, they distill a batch of their flagship product, a 4-year-old straight bourbon made utilizing their signature 70 p.c corn/21 p.c rye/9 p.c malted barley mash invoice recipe, after which create a mix of one hundred pc actual honey sourced from native farms.
Inexperienced River provides that honey on to the barrels of whiskey, eschewing extracts or syrupy liqueurs in favor of simply including the sweetness and slight funkiness of actual, honest-to-goodness honey. It’s uncommon that you simply see directions to shake a bottle of spirits earlier than ingesting, however that’s what the distillery needs you to do to make sure that the flavors are unfold evenly.
The result’s a delightfully toasty and spicy honey whiskey, not cloyingly candy or overpowering of the bourbon undertones. At a typical retail value of simply $25 a bottle, it’s nice for ingesting straight up or over a big dice of ice. It additionally takes one step out of certainly one of my favourite cocktails, The Gold Rush. As an alternative of creating a honey syrup, you may simply add 2 ounces of Inexperienced River Honey-Completed Bourbon to a shaker tin with three-quarters of an oz of lemon juice and half an oz of easy syrup, shake it with ice till your hand will get chilly and pour it over contemporary ice for a incredible cocktail.
You possibly can thank me after you get pleasure from a kind of poolside quickly. (However keep in mind to make use of a plastic tumbler!)
Rum is one other summertime favourite, however the vary of high quality and artisanal spirit amongst rum producers is sadly huge. The Caribbean is mainly the Wild West in the case of guidelines and rules, with huge warehousing operations mixing several types of spirits from totally different nations and including flavors and coloring to provide you with their ultimate merchandise.
Rum wasn’t all the time that method. Actually, the U.S. was once recognized for rum manufacturing even earlier than we grew to become a worldwide whiskey capital. Particularly round Louisiana, we used to have a robust home sugar cane trade, lengthy earlier than sugar beets from the Midwest handed conventional cane sugar because the sweetener of selection.
A couple of Southern distilleries are nonetheless leaning on the outdated strategies of agricole-style rhums, that are produced from fresh-pressed cane juice as a substitute of from molasses, the thick by-product from sugar manufacturing. Rhum agricole demonstrates the potential seasonality of the spirit because the cane modifications over the course of time. It typically reveals an earthy, vegetal taste that’s extra complicated than many Caribbean rums.
Baton Rouge-based Oxbow Rum Distillery is without doubt one of the leaders in home agricole-style rhum manufacturing. I not too long ago bought to pattern their Oxbow Rhum Louisiana Cane Juice Agricole, and I personally assume this can be a fascinating product.
Photograph courtesy of Oxbow
The corporate harvests cane within the fall and presses the canes contemporary from the fields. They then pot-distill the juice in small batches to create a rhum that exhibits off the character of the terroir of Louisiana and modifications from 12 months to 12 months. Overlook the craze to purchase a Ninja Slushi Frozen Drink Machine (I do know, I do know, I thought of shopping for one too …), however a correct daiquiri ought to have the consistency of an Icee.
A legit daiquiri is rum, lime juice and easy syrup, shaken and served neat in a relaxing glass. Such simplicity implies that it’s as much as the substances to supply the complexity, and the one doubtlessly mutable ingredient is the rum.
So the daiquiris I made with Oxbow demonstrated that inexperienced vegetal complexity and barely oily mouthfeel that actually elevated the basic cocktail. At a retail of round $42 to $45 per bottle, it is best to be capable of make a dozen daiquiris for about $4 apiece. I problem you to do this at Fats Tuesdays in New Orleans!
Drink higher.
