10 litres of whisky - finally!

A few Christmas' ago I was given a 10L American oak barrel, medium char as a gift and filling it has been on my list of things to do ever since.

The barrel needed to be soaked for a few days prior to use to get it to expand and tighten up, and from the amount that seeped out at first I was glad it hadn't just rushed in and filled it with distillate - but I get ahead of myself...

A few months ago ago I got started and made 5 x 23L batches of mash (roughly one batch every 2 weeks and as the next was fermenting out I split each 23L in two and ran them through the pot still to push them up to about 35% alc.

This weekend I ran the roughly 25L of low wine through the 10L alembic still in 4 batches to get around 8.8L of distillate that produced 10L of 65% casking strength whisky.

The 10L bucket of distillate is seen above. It has a whiskey profile already and the colour will come from the oak, as well as the more complex flavours developing.

10L of 65% whisky all tucked away in it's new barrel, which will be ready by the end of Feb 2019. At that stage I'll decant it and drop it down to drinking strength, probably in the 38-45% region. Depending on how much the angels have taken it could yield between 12-15L or so. I hope it will be drinkable, because there'll be a lot of it!

ANZAC Day 2015 - 100 years on...

Up this morning at 03:45 to get ready for the Dawn Service at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Over the last week or so I have dug out my Grandfather's service medals and done some background research on him - and learnt a lot. More of that later. The medals had their first outing for many years when I wore them to the service.

We parked on the western sports field and the museum was looking great.

There was an estimated 30,000 people at this one service, or 3% of the city's population. When you think about all the ceremonies taking place around the city it shows the respect the day holds.

Reports are of 80,000 attending the Melbourne service and 100,000 in Canberra.

Pinning poppies to the cross at the base of the Cenotaph, before visiting the Field of Remembrance, holding named crosses for all the Auckland servicemen fallen in the first year of the Great War.

Making yeast slants

In the interests of economy I've decided to try and make up some yeast slants.

First, I needed to make some agar up

Bring around 500ml of water to the boil

Add enough dried malt extract (DME) to produce a s.g. of around 1040-1045.

Add in 1/2 capsule of Servomyces yeast nutrient

Boil for 10 minutes.

 Filter out the hot break

Add 7gm of agar agar and boil for 2 minutes

Split into slant tubes, between 15ml and 25ml/tube

 Put the tubes into a pyrex jug inside a pressure cooker

When the vent starts steaming throw on the valve and leave under pressure for 10 minutes

 Leave to cool, release pressure and lay out tubes on a slant to produce a large surface area for yeast inoculation

Take your mother yeast colony - in the case White Labs Brettanomyces Bruxellensis Trois (WLP644) Belgian Ale Yeast (on the left, below), a slant and a sterile needle (here a single use tattoo needle, EO sterilised)

 Below is just an illustration of a slant tube, agar (that dropped out and is about to be disposed of) and the inoculation needle

 Five finished tubes, will keep in the fridge for up to 12 months. They can be used to make starters for more than 100L of ale. Should keep me quiet for a while...

Mutton dressed as ham

One of my customers was talking to me recently about an old NZ tradition of 'mutton ham'. This is taking a leg of mutton (a sheep that is more than 2 years old) and treating it as you would a ham. On looking into this there are a pile of recipes on the internet for this, so I decided to have a go.

Ingredients

1 leg of mutton
75gm brown sugar
4 tbs golden syrup
1 tbs ground ginger
1 tbs ground cloves
1 tbs allspice
1 tbs white pepper
300gm PVD salt

It starts as a more or less dry rub on the mutton, but as you turn it and re-apply the brine every 12 hours it becomes a wet brine and more and more liquid is drawn from the meat.

After 6 days wash the meat down, rub all over with malt vinegar and leave to hang for 24 hours to dry.

It can then be either smoked or boiled the next day. I'm off to Australia for the rest of the week, so mine will hand for a week and I'll smoke it next Sunday and boil it after that. It should last a month in the fridge.

Lined up and ready to go

It's that time of year again, and this morning I took a number of my distillates down for judging in this year's competition.

Here are all my little soldiers, lined up in a row, ready to go into battle...

Left to right - Vodka, Gin, White Rum, Chilli Vodka, Pommeau de Normandie, Bourbon, Golden Rum, Malt Whisky and Cherry Brandy.

The Vodka we've discussed before, and is a sugar wash distilled twice through the alembic still.
The Gin and White Rum are essences added to a neutral spirit.
The Chilli Vodka we've also talked about earlier, but I chickened out which the 'in your face' boldness chosen by The Siberians and opted for the diced cayenne without seeds.
The Pommeau is 'Pacific Rose' apples with caster sugar and a splash of natural vanilla soaked in neutral spirit and is one of the top things I've made.
The bourbon is a Kentucky Bourbon essence with neutral spirit, but back blended with a portion of a 2 year old batch that had been on wood.
The Golden Rum is a surprise success. It was a mix of 2 essences that I'd had lying around but I dropped the alcohol content way down and it's been around since November.
The malt whisky was fermented from malt extract and then casked in a sherry-soaked 1L American oak barrel for 14 months. When I took it out and bottled it I was disappointed that the sherry flavour was very dominant and the the oak almost wasn't there. It was the third time I'd used the barrel and I think that it could do with re-charring. I've lifted the oak a little by using chips after bottling.

We'll know in December what the judges think.

Chilli Vodka

Back on 23 March I made some Chilli Vodka. My first attempt was to just cut a chilli from the garden, push it into a bottle and top up with 45o neutral spirit.

Then I thought I'd open up some more surface area and split a chilli in two, left the seeds in, pushed that into a bottle and topped up with spirit.

The third version was a finely chopped chilli with no seeds.

The distilling competition is coming up next week so it was time to get the samples out of the cupboard and see which was best. I asked some Siberian friends who have some experience with Chilli Vodka to do a blind test. The 3 samples were labelled A, B & C.

The darkest one, on the right side of the photo, was the chopped chilli, which to my mind looked the most interesting. However the split chilli with seeds was voted by the panel the best, so that's the one I'll submit. The chopped chilli came in second and the whole chilli rated third.

Now we'll have to wait and see what the competition judges think...

Hi, ho, hi, ho, it's off to work she goes...

We've been having a problems with the grass:alpaca ratio lately, and so the alpacas have had run of the property. It's been quite fun having them stroll past the kitchen window or pop up outside the bedroom. They are creatures of habit though, and they love watching the chickens being fed in the morning and saying "goodbye" as we go to work...

They have knocked hell out of the hostas and eaten all the mondo gras, but we wanted to redevelop the entance way anyway. Ah well, they've just raised a 'like to do' job to a 'must do' job.