Just Some Ice Cubes, My Good Man — White Whiskey at the '21' Club

Next week, I'll be in Northern California and, come July, be back in New Orleans for a talk on brandy with Paul Clarke at Tales of the Cocktail. But between NorCal and NOLA, there's New York City, where I haven't stepped foot in years. Of course, there won't be time to do even a quarter of what I'd like, but that's the way these things go.

I am, however, already pulling together a punch list for where to drink, where to eat, and of the distillers, bartenders, chefs, and cheesemongers with whom I want to reconnect. In all likelihood, I won't eat at '21' Club, but I did pull The '21' Cookbook from the shelf when I recalled that bar book collector Brian Rea used to work there.

Flipping through the drinks section (so nice to find drinks in their proper place at the front of a book rather than tacked on, as if in disgrace, at the end), I found an old Gene Ahern illustration. Ahern was a 20th century cartoonist whose comics at times took bizarre turns (Robert Crumb, among others, took inspiration from his work). In this undated panel, Ahern pays tribute to Mac — presumably Colonel Maxwell "Mac" Kriendler — with a little spot of unaged tabletop corn whiskey.

Unaged? Shoot, it's practically instant. Sure, the illustration is tongue-in-cheek, but who would've guessed, mid-century, that raw whiskey would one day earn enough of a mantle of respect that fancy bars across the country would carry "legal" moonshine without the slightest hint of irony?

Michael Lomonaco and Donna Forsman (1995)
The '21' Cookbook
400 pages (hardback)
Broadway
ISBN: 0385475705
$35.00

Goes well with:

• Even the Ten Dollar Whore Sneered at Me, an anecdote about just how far white whiskeys have come in a few short years. 
• Legal Moonshine? You've Been Conned. I've said it before and I'm sticking to my guns: If laws permitted the manufacture of moonshine, it would cease to exist.

Champurrado for Day of the Dead

One night, when we were still new in San Diego, Dr. Morpheus and I attended a neighborhood party commemorating Día de los Muertos. We live about 20 minutes outside Tijuana; this is a very local tradition. Friends had spent days preparing mole, forming tamales, and doing the other prep work for the feast of traditional Mexican foods.

As we chatted with neighbors, Morpheus suddenly told me “I’ll be right back. Want some hot chocolate?”

“Sure,” I said.

Then I saw that he was headed to a huge, cylindrical Rubbermaid cooler. Guests were coming away from it with cups of steaming drinks. “Wait...” Even from across the room, I could smell what flowing from the cooler’s tap. But he was already gone. When he returned a few minutes later, he handed me a cup. He still hadn’t tried his.

“Don’t drink that,” I warned him. “You won’t like it.”

“It’s hot chocolate,” he explained as if I were an imbecile.

“That’s not all it is. Try it. It’s not something you’re going to go for, though.” We’ve known each other nearly twenty years; I know what the boy likes to put in his mouth. The look of surprise that leapt to his face at the first sip was pretty much what I expected.

“What the hell is that?”

That was champurrado, a subspecies of corn-thickened beverages common to Mexico known as atoles. Atoles can be plain or flavored with pineapple, peach, cinnamon, pumpkin, coconut, guavas, sweet potatoes, plums, peas, mangos, strawberries, sunflower seeds, and, quite literally, hundreds more fruits, spices, vegetables, and seeds.

Champurrado, one of my favorite varieties of atole, is flavored with canela (Mexican cinnamon) and chocolate. At a glance, it does look like hot chocolate, but if you’ve spent any time around corn (ahem), you can pick out the aroma well before tasting it. And if the aroma doesn’t give it away, the consistency certainly does.

An acquired taste? Yeah, sure, I'll grant you that. An acquired texture is more like it, though. Sometimes, it's almost pudding-like, but in general, champurrado isn’t thick like oatmeal or Cream of Wheat cereal. But even the smallest sip reveals it’s thicker than hot chocolate. More like a cream of tomato or pumpkin soup. Use masa if you’ve got it, but the corn that’s most commonly added around here is masa harina, a finely ground dry cornmeal used to prepare tamales and some kinds of tortillas. It’s first mixed with water to make a loose slurry, then added to the chocolate mix, the whole thing then heated a few minutes; if you add the masa harina all at once, the stuff clumps up like cornstarch.

Aficionados are split on whether to use all water, all milk, or some combination of the two, but here’s how we do it when Autumn sets in and the mornings are so chilly. This makes a moderately thick champurrado. If you like it thinner, simply add more water or milk to the pan while heating.

I've got the champurrado covered for tonight; who's making the mole?

Champurrado

One 3 ¼ oz disc of Mexican chocolate (Ibarra brand)
One 5-6” stick canela (Mexican cinnamon) or 3-4” regular cinnamon
2 ½ cups water (divided use)
1 cup milk
½ cup masa harina
1 small cone of piloncillo* (or ¼ to ½ cup turbinado or brown sugar)

Bring 1 ½ cups of water to the boil in a saucepan. In a separate mixing bowl (or the measuring cup if it’s large enough), mix together the remaining 1 cup of water with the milk and the masa harina. Stir together until it reaches a smooth, uniform consistency.

When the water comes to a bowl, stir the masa mixture again to loosen it. Pour it into the boiling water along with the chocolate, piloncillo and cinnamon. Reduce the heat and simmer for 10-15 minutes, until the chocolate and sugar have dissolved and the canela flavor has suffused the entire mixture.

Serve in squat mugs (to better hold the heat).

* Piloncillo is the small, very hard sugar that comes in cones/pylons and is available at almost every Mexican market. We've used it here before in our pineapple vinegar.

It's a Nice Day for a White Whiskey

Some months back. Lew Bryson of Malt Advocate asked me about increasingly common options for so-called "white" whiskeys from American distilleries. Lew was probably just looking for a quip. What he got was me in a chatty mood and (edited for length and clarity) this:

Whether drinkers find white whiskeys most useful for sipping, mixing, or shocking depends in part on their existing impressions about moonshine. Shock for today’s waves of crystal grain comes in two distinct flavors: disdain and fun.

Some whiskey aficionados look on the entire class as not just suspect, but an insult to whiskey. Some won’t even deign to call it whiskey at all (and, under US law, grain spirits untouched by barrels are not whiskey, but that’s just using the law to enforce one’s prejudices). White dog, they’ll tell you, is useful only as a teaching tool. It is a proto-whiskey, a foil that elucidates the power of barrels and age. Those who would drink it as their drink of choice are defined by what they’re not: they are uncouth, uneducated, unsophisticated, and practically uncivilized. That some would actually want to drink the stuff is indicative only of their woeful state.



The other drinkers — those who realize the inherent fun in a jar of white lightning —revel in the breakin’-the-law history of illegal hooch. They expect it to be bad, and so play up their reactions to it. We have hundreds of years of stories about the horrible things that happen to people who drink moonshine and, not surprisingly, an entire class of YouTube videos has evolved that feature young drinkers trying their best to down Heaven Hill's contribution to the genre, Georgia Moon. Drinking it, still, is a test of machismo. For the shock value, one might as well be drinking a bucket of spit.

Distillers who deliberately tap moonshine history as part of their brand must understand that the sketchy nature of the spirit runs deep in America’s psyche. Other than absinthe, few spirits are actually feared. Moonshine is. If drinkers mock and heap disdain on white spirits that come in jugs and jars, it should come as a surprise to no one.

The surprise comes, though, when spirits lovers actually sample these new spirits. While most of us would agree that Georgia Moon is no sophisticated sipping whiskey, some of the white spirits on offer now are. Tuthilltown’s Hudson corn whiskey is a great example of America’s primal spirit. They don’t call it moonshine, but it’s a better execution on the theme than much of the so-called commercial moonshine I’ve had.

I recently tried the range of Koval’s white spirits out of Chicago — American Oat, Levant Spelt, Midwest Wheat, Raksi Millet, and Rye Chicago — each of them a lovely spirit made entirely of a single type of grain. The clearly distinguishable taste of base grains is one of the reasons that we’ll see white whiskeys around for some time.

Drinkers who delight in cocktails are going to adore home-grown American whiskeys whether they’re aged in oak or not.

I’ve no doubt that in ten years, new brands and new distilleries that can't cut it will have folded, but for the foreseeable future, we’re going to have even more choices in white whiskey. Get it while you can — and possibly ensure that minimally aged grain spirits become a more enduring part of the American drinking repertoire.

TheZenchilada and a Corn Whiskey Cocktail

TheZenchilada launched yesterday. The New Mexico-based online journal aims to use food as a “vehicle for better understanding ourselves and one another.” First issue is all about corn. Yes, there’s a body/mind/spirit angle — New Mexico, remember? — but don’t let that scare you off. It’s also a really enjoyable read, at turns both erudite and funny.

Ronni Lundy (who once quipped “If God had meant for cornbread to have sugar in it, he’d have called it cake”) meditates on what it means to be a Corn Tortilla Nation and provides a recipe for Shrimp and Grits Tamales; Diana Del Mauro writes about the role of a corn cake in kinaaldá, the Navajo rite of passage for girls; and Matt and Ted Lee also tackle shrimp and grits — as well as corncob wine.

There’s Sarah Fritschner’s Corn Smut, her take on huitlacoche, the black fungus that I love on tacos and Bill Smith’s honeysuckle sorbet. I haven't had Bill's sorbet, but his cooking at Crook's Corner in Chapel Hill remains one of the highlights of my time in North Carolina. And, oh, hey. Know what else is there? My piece Corn Whiskey Makes a Comeback, including a discussion of current brands American corn whiskey (there aren’t many — but that’s changing) and recipes.

My notes on a corn whiskey cocktail:

When I’m not drinking corn straight up, I’ll sometimes make a Corn Tassel, an original drink that started as a whiskey sour but morphed into a more complex short drink with a distinctive corn nose. If you don’t have a bottle of Jerry Thomas’ Own Decanter Bitters knocking about, you can substitute Angostura bitters, available in most grocery stores. But the former, from The Bitter Truth, are worth seeking out.

Corn Tassel


1.5 oz Mellow Corn 4-year old whiskey
1.25 oz fresh lemon juice
1 oz Cointreau
2 tsp orgeat
1 dash of Jerry Thomas’ Own Decanter Bitters


Shake with ice in a cocktail shaker, strain into an old fashioned glass, and serve up. If you go for frou-frou, give it a lemon twist. Don’t even think about a baby corn garnish. That ain’t cute; that’s just nasty.

Thanks to Ryannan Bryer de Hickman for the Corn Tassel shot. For the rest, go to TheZenchilada.com

Fanciest Moonshine Site Ever

Packing my bags today for a trip to Philadelphia for research, an interview on WHYY, visiting Rum Bar, and a family reunion. Since I’m generally known as Rowley, this reunion thing with a hundred or more Rowleys milling about may prove confusing, especially if whiskey is involved.

But before going offline for a few days, I’ll leave you with a link to one of the fanciest moonshine websites around: Ian Smiley’s L.S. Moonshine. Heads up that the site is in Chinese. Smiley, along with Mike McCaw, was on a panel with me at Tales of the Cocktail last year in which we discussed home distilling from historical and practical angles.

Smiley is also partner in a Huarong County (Hunan Province) distillery that provides Chinese drinkers with American-style corn whiskey, a taste some say compares favorably to bai jiu, a high-proof Chinese liquor that can be made from rice, sorghum, barley, or other grains. Production capacity is 90,000 liters per year.

Haven’t tasted any yet and I’m curious to get my hands on some. So far, LS Moonshine is not imported to the US, but with a growing appreciation of unaged spirits (i.e., white dog), we should be seeing increasing examples of similar raw spirits on liquor store shelves.

Which brings me to a request: if anyone else is distilling corn whiskey these days, drop me a line, eh? I’m putting together a survey of commercial liquors made with 80-100% corn in the grain bill, regardless of where it’s made or whether it’s called corn whiskey or something else entirely.

Email is moonshinearchives [at] gmail [dot] com.

Back next week, babies ~

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Monday Roundup: Moonshine, Grappa, Absinthe, and Scotch

The production of grappa is part of northern Italy's social and cultural tradition and is carried out in the Alpine regions by hundreds of families, as it always has been.

~ Senator Sergio Davina
arguing for legal home distillation of grappa

I've been offline for a few days, but the world of booze just keeps rolling on. Some of the highlights from the last week include—

• Writing in Esquire, David Wondrich demonstrates the correct way to serve absinthe (note there are no flaming sugar cubes which translate into ruined absinthe spoons and little globs of caramelized sugar arc-welded to the sides of your glass). He also includes thumbnail reviews of the brands he considers The Five Best Bottles of Absinthe.

• Let's hear it for Italian moonshine; Italian senators Enrico Montani and Sergio Divina have proposed in a recently submitted bill that Italians be allowed to make up to 30 liters of grappa for home consumption. Home distilling is legal or tolerated in so many parts of Europe, why not in places where it's been practiced for hundreds of years? Predictably, the grappa trade is none too pleased with the proposal.
  

• Our friend and all-around great guy Ian Smiley is in the news. Ian has been working with Michigan enterprise LS Moonshine to develop a distillery in China for producing unaged corn whiskey. Seems the Chinese have a taste for young corn liquor. I do remember a tale of a family member drinking shots of corn liquor with a Chinese general and breaking protocol by not allowing the general to win that little competition. Maybe Ian can help me steer my way through Chinese drinking protocol...
  

• Speaking of China, seems there's a (gasp) serious problem with counterfeit goods the producers of genuine articles are trying to combat. Diageo has rolled out an anti-counterfeiting measure with their Johnny Walker scotch. In some markets (e.g., India) about half the scotch is counterfeit and, from what some distillers have told me, the figure is much higher in Pakistan where the scotch is not only fake, but very expensive. Like, someone-is-going-to-hell-for-this-scam-expensive. Diageo's solution? Make a bottle that can't be resealed to look new once it's been opened. According to Australian Food News,

Caps on Johnnie Walker bottles will now not return to their original position after opening and a permanent gold band appears at the top of the neck of the bottle upon opening - effectively eliminating the prospect of a disguised refill.

And for today, that's all the news that's fit to drink.


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Moonshine Cocktail: The Corn Popper

Hats off to Erik Ellestad, proprietor over at Underhill Lounge. About two years ago, Erik decided to start working his way through all the cocktail recipes in Harry Craddock’s The Savoy Cocktail Book making each and every one. With over 700 recipes, the bartenders’ guide, originally published in 1930, has gone through several reprints. Erik, bless his liver, is starting at the Abbey Cocktail and working his way to the end, taking photos, recreating obscure or lost ingredients, and—naturally—tasting along the way.

When writing about the Corn Popper cocktail—a Prohibition-era cocktail and one of the few written examples of a recipe intended for mass consumption with even an oblique call for moonshine—he asked me about its call for corn. The recipe was stolen verbatim from inspired by Judge Jr's 1927 book Here's How, a tiny, pocket-sized manual filled with utter cornball humor of the times (see photo and click to enlarge).

Apparently, I had little to do that day, so wrote him a somewhat lengthy reply on the nature of “corn.” The answer reads in part

Now you’ve drifted into some interesting semantic territory rather than merely obscure ingredients. In the Savoy book, some things are what they seem - absinthe is generally that, despite variations in style. So is applejack (usually). “Corn” is a shorthand code, especially a post-prohibition work, merely for illicit spirits (often, but not necessarily, whiskey) that may be made from nearly any ingredient except fruit, but including sugar, wheat, rye, “ship stuff,” sorghum, cattle feed, mule chop, and, on occasion, corn.

Read the rest of the notes, including Erik’s photos and tasting notes, here.

The demi-original Corn Popper (Craddock, cribbing Judge Jr.)

1 Pint Corn (Georgia or Maryland).
1/2 Pint Cream.
The Whites of 2 Eggs.
1 Tablespoonful Grenadine.

Fill highball glasses half full of this mixture and fill up with Vichy or Seltzer.

Erik’s modern Corn Popper (single-serving)

1 1/2 oz clear, pungent, liquid of unknown origin
1 egg white
3/4 oz Cream
1 teaspoon Grenadine (homemade)

Measure ingredients into cocktail shaker. Seal and shake well. Break seal, add ice and shake vigorously. Strain into collins glass. Top with selzer or sparkling mineral water.

Goes well with:

• Stomping through the Savoy, Erik's chronicle at eGullet of his cocktail recreations to date.

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