Bookshelf: Garden & Gun Magazine

There are just some things that male writers, of a certain ilk, feel they have to do. I call it the Curse of Hemingway. We have to like to fish. We have to be proficient in blowing birds from the sky with shotguns. And we have to love oysters. We have to sit around a table in some sun-blasted shack on some desolate, mosquito-infested cay and slurp ’em right out of the shell.

Your First Oyster
~ Rick Bragg

You’ll never see me with People or Us magazines, but find me on a plane and you may just catch me toting one of my favorites: Garden & Gun. Since I tend not to work in transit, planes are where I catch up on reading for fun and studying the craft of some damn good writing.

Garden & Gun regularly features food and drinks stories. After all, being Southern entails an appreciation for both. The above quote is from the current G&G’s six-part A Southerner’s Guide to Oysters in which Rick Bragg, Robb Walsh, and others consider oysters—what they are, where to get them, and how to cook them. Justin Devillier spikes Oysters Bienville with Angostura bitters, Edward Lee whips up a mess of cornbread oyster dressing, and Linton Hopkins uses Anson Mills Antebellum fine yellow cornmeal for frying the little suckers.

In the same February/March 2010 issue, Joe Bargmann writes on a quartet of Kentucky bourbons and PJ O’Rourke applies dog-training concepts to child rearing in Fetch Daddy a Drink (“It goes without saying that the idea of Seeing Eye kids is wrong—probably against child labor laws and an awful thing to do to blind people.”).

John T. Edge is a frequent contributor, as is Roy Blount, Jr. and roving New Orleanian Pableaux Johnson. You’ll find stories by culinary historian Damon Lee Fowler and boudin junkie Sara Roahen. Funny, insightful, sometimes poignant, the writing is treat. Get yourself a subscription or check it out online.

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Bitter Elements in Albuquerque

In the land of red and green chiles, of honey-slathered sopaipillas, of carne seca, and Christmas-style enchiladas, I stumbled across the ingredients to make buckets of homemade cocktail bitters.

On a recent trip to Albuquerque, I stumbled across The Herb Store, a small shop in the Nob Hill neighborhood. From the street, I had seen shelf after shelf of apothecary bottles and wanted a better look. Little ones, big ones, brown ones, blue ones, some with caps, some with droppers, some with spray tops, and some with stoppers. It was if Dr. Seuss had penned a siren call for the cocktail geeks of New Mexico.

I snapped up a few blue bottles with droppers—good for homemade bitters and tinctures—but then froze at the smell. A rich, earthy, almost smoky aroma was coming from the back of the store. Although the commingled smell included many elements, the piercing, high, root-beer scent of sassafras stood out even from fifteen feet away.

The walls beyond the register were lined with gallon jars of exactly the kinds of spices, herbs, and oddments used to create those bitters and extracts—gentian, wild cherry bark, marshmallow, aloe, sandalwood, licorice, angelica, quassia, sarsaparilla, elecampane, and that sassafras root I’d smelled from halfway across the store. I scored some of each. Space limitations meant I left dozens more for another day.

Even if I don’t make it back to Duke City anytime soon, I’m glad to put the Herb Store on my list of suppliers. Good news: they’ve got a huge selection and will ship to you. Bad news: there’s no online catalog, so it’s best to have an idea of what you want, then call.

The Herb Store
107 Carlisle Blvd. SE
Albuquerque, NM 87106-1427
505.255.8878

Meet Me in Kentucky: ADI's Whiskey & Moonshine Conference

For casual drinkers, Springtime means a switch from brown spirits to white. That means an uptick in vodka, light rums, gin…and—something new this year—moonshine. Or at least a slew of spirits meant to emulate and suggest unaged whiskey. And there are few better places to learn what the buzz is about than the annual meetings of the American Distilling Institute.

The ADI’s 7th annual meetings run May 3-5 in and around Louisville, Kentucky. The theme this year is Whiskey & Moonshine. I’ll be joining Chasing the White Dog author Max Watman, distiller Rick Wasmund, and Bill Owens, president of ADI, for a panel discussion on moonshine: what it is, what it’s not, where it’s coming from, why it’s back, and what its resurgence means for spirits producers and cocktail enthusiasts.

We might even agree on a few points.

The rest of the conference will include talks on building and licensing distilleries, fermentation, distilling, malting, blending, the effects of barrel aging, tax issues for craft distillers, marketing and selling of spirits, getting press coverage for your brands, and tasting.

Lots and lots of tasting.

The full registration info and schedule are here (click on the 2010 conference registration button on the left to download a PDF).

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I am a Meat Wagon

Eugene O’Neill’s line about the shackles of history runs through my mind — There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now. Circumstances are different, but I know what’s coming.

Because of what I’m about to do, the security line at the Baton Rouge airport will grind to a halt. After all, this has happened before. And will happen again.

I tried to look natural, relaxed, as I slipped off my shoes into a grey plastic bin. It’ll be fine, I thought. Out came the laptop. They won’t stop me, not here. Off with the jacket. Though in New Orleans I was stopped with a payload smaller than this. There isn’t a piece of steel or iron on me, not one coin of copper or nickel. Last time, when the agent finally saw my package, she had said she wanted to come home with me. As I breeze through the metal detector, the TSA agent guarding it is already looking at the passenger behind me. I’m through. No incident.

Then the conveyor belt lurches to a stop.

“WHOSE is this?!” Today’s agent, a local boy, had seen through my façade. He’s pointing to my overnight bag and now knows as well as I what it holds: forearm-sized sticks of andouille sausage, several pounds of smoked beef sausages, packets of little pork sausages no bigger than my ring finger, smoked turkey legs, hot pork sausages, and—why not?— more sausage from a different producer about 200 feet down from the first. I have been to LaPlace, Louisiana, andouille capital of, if not the world, then of my heart.

“We might have to keep this bag,” he tells me. Then, breaking into a smile, he indicates my Timbuk2 laptop bag, just out of reach. It's bearing a similar carnal load: “And that one, too.”

LaPlace andouille is powerful stuff, but it’s no match for X-ray technology. Clearly, I'm not the first sausage smuggling bandit to come through security.

I am, it's been said, a meat wagon and my Baton Rouge experience is not untypical when I travel. In addition to my well-known affection for spirits, I am a fiend for cured and smoked meats. Whenever I travel, I try to make time to investigate not just bars and distilleries, but smokehouses, butchers, charcutiers, delis, carnicerias, cheese shops, wurstmachers, and any other place that might have some local meaty specialty.

Sopressata, sobrasada, chorizo, chaurice, speck, rookvlees, jerky, carne seca, horka, finocchiona, pfefferwurst, bacons, hams, smoked hocks, tasso, burnt ends, the assflesh Saucisson d'Arles—there’s no end to the sausage and cured meats I’ve schlepped across state and national boundaries. I even pack throwaway clothes as a sort of sartorial ballast so that, once ditched, I have have more room for meat on the return trip.

This morning, I made about a two-hour round trip drive just for the smoked treats—notably andouille sausage—from two shops in LaPlace, Louisiana. The LaPlace andouille is thick as my wrist and longer than a bottle of rum, each like a rolling pin of seasoned and smoked pork. That ersatz andouille I get in my local place is fine for what it is, but this stuff is transcendental. The sheer awesome deliciousness of proper Cajun andouille is unparalleled. Each batch of gumbo I make with it is stellar, filled with smoky goodness.

For my colleagues headed to Tales of the Cocktail this summer, LaPlace is a bit of a hike outside New Orleans. But just a bit. My suggestion for scoring the thicker, heavily smoked andouille typical of the town? Drive the half-hour west or pool your cash and send an emissary who will maybe skim, as courier fee, only a stick or two. If your plans don’t take you to LaPlace, stop by Cochon Butcher in the warehouse district. They’ve often got the same style of fat “sticks” in the deli case.

LaPlace

Bailey’s World Famous Andouille
513 West Airline Hwy
LaPlace, LA 70068
985.652.9090

Jacob’s World Famous Andouille
505 West Airline Hwy
LaPlace, LA 70068
985.652.9080

Wayne Jacob’s Smokehouse
769 W 5th St
La Place, LA 70068.
985.652.9990

New Orleans

Cochon Butcher
930 Tchoupitoulas
New Orleans LA 70130
504.588.PORK

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This Mother in Law's Welcome Any Night

Jim Beam isn’t my go-to bourbon, but it's a good value and I do like it enough to buy 1.75 liters at a time. This amount, just shy of a two-liter, is a measurement we call a handle around here. In the back of my mind, I knew that our hall liquor closet held an unopened handle of Beam somewhere. Hauling it out last week and regarding its heft made me think of one cocktail in particular: Brooks Baldwin’s Mother in Law cocktail.

Brooks didn’t name the drink. In fact, when he wrote about it to Chuck Taggart in 2003, it didn’t have a name at all—just a New Orleans heritage and a notable lack of being listed in any of the cocktail books. For something that was practically unknown a decade ago, the drink’s gained a wide circle of fans. Taggart tells the tale of its discovery here.

Some—such as Dale DeGroff, Ted Haigh, and Taggart himself—have offered smaller versions, but the original recipe was for about a quart of the stuff, made up at home and poured as needed. After whipping up a sample batch of this bitters-heavy cocktail, I went for the whole batch. Here’s how:

Mother in Law Cocktail

2.5 tsp Peychaud’s Bitters
2.5 tsp Angostura Bitters
2.5 tsp Torani Amer (or vintage 78-proof Amer Picon)
1.5 oz Maraschino liqueur (Luxardo or Maraska)
1.5 oz Cointreau or high-quality orange Curaçao
1.5 oz simple syrup
One 750ml bottle bourbon

Combine ingredients thoroughly and pour into a clean one-quart bottle. To serve, pour three ounces into a cocktail shaker with cracked ice. Stir for no less than thirty seconds, then strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a stemless cherry.

On the nights I want something stiffer than tea, more complex than whiskey alone, and about as easy as opening a bottle, I reach for my mother in law.

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Eggs, William S. Burroughs — Wait, What?

In 1945, the American author William S. Burroughs may have had a dish named after him by the French chef who claimed to have created Crêpes Suzette. Why?

At the time the recipe was written, Burroughs had not yet published any books and had no particular reason for being known outside his circle of friends. There’s a chance Henri Charpentier’s Eggs, William S. Burroughs referred to someone other than the author of Naked Lunch, Junkie, and Cities of the Red Night. But that’s no fun.

I don’t know for sure how the two may have known each other, but I’ve got the recipe from a privately printed book now in my library, some backstory, and a tenuous connection. Perhaps someone with access to more extensive archives can fill in the gaps in this burning, all-consuming literary mystery.

Henri Charpentier (1880-1961) was once a well-known French chef who worked at the Savoy in London with Escoffier and at several other posh kitchens. His claim to fame was accidentally inventing, so he said, the orange liqueur-spiked dessert Crêpes Suzette while a young assistant in Monte Carlo. Later, he moved to the United States and eventually died in California. Before California, however, he had restaurants in New York and Chicago.

In New York, he worked at Delmonico’s but saved to open his own restaurant—Original Henri Restaurant & Bar—around 1906. For the next three decades, he took a role in several New York restaurants and was a celebrity in his own right. His customers included luminaries, presidents, and foreign heads of state. In 1938, he closed shop and moved to Chicago where he opened Café de Paris. By 1945, he had moved on to Southern California. Eventually he opened a restaurant, of sorts, in Redondo Beach: a single table, in his own home, where the reservation list was so long, it might take a year to secure a seat.

In a nutshell, that’s Charpentier.

So. William S. Burroughs. It’s possible Burroughs ate at one of Charpentier’s places in New York. Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. While he was there, after all, he made trips to New York to explore the city with Richard Stern, a friend from Missouri. Maybe, possibly, there’s a connection there. I’m not feeling it, though.

My gut tells me the connection—if there is one—lies in Chicago. For a few years, in the early 1940’s, Burroughs lived in Chicago while Charpentier ran Café de Paris in the city’s Park Dearborn Hotel. He had a few jobs in Chicago, including a stint as an exterminator, a role that would resonate through his writing for decades. Exterminators don’t make bank, but with an allowance from his well-to-do family, Burroughs probably could afford to eat well. And he was definitely a character: he’d sawn off one of his own fingers in an effort to impress a man with whom he was infatuated. I’m guessing that even in 1943, William S. Burroughs made an impression.

I’m also supposing it was during this time, while Burroughs and Charpentier where both in Chicago, that the French chef caught a wild hare and decided to name a dish after an eccentric customer. Of course, this wouldn’t have been a unique honor. I don’t think ol’ Henri buttered toast without naming it after some American celebrity, friend, hero, or other person he’d want to compliment.

In fact, when Charpentier privately published 1,000 copies of Food and Finesse: The Bride’s Bible for friends and customers, he included hundreds of recipes of the kind Americans once thought were terribly fancy. The recipes read like a Who’s Who of American history: Pheasant, Samuel Morse; Lamb, Grover Cleveland; Cauliflower, Eli Whitney; Peaches Barbara Fritchie, Guinea Hen, Ulysses S. Grant; Brandy Apples, Amelia Earhart. There, on page 426, is the recipe for Eggs, William S. Burroughs.

Other than this single thing, I’ve never seen a reference to Burroughs in Charpentier’s writing. I admit I haven’t read every single thing Burroughs penned, but I don’t recall the chef showing up ever. Dr. Benway, yes; Chef Henri, no.

That’s all I got. If someone can make the connection, please let me know. I’m not exactly losing much sleep over this—any sleep, really—but it would be nice to put this mystery to bed.

Of course, in his mania for naming every dish under the sun for Americans known for one thing or another, Charpentier may have named an egg-and-pasta casserole after William Seward Burroughs (1857–98), inventor of the adding machine and grandfather to the beat author. I’d like to think the historical record’s so sketchy, though, that we’ll just never know.

Eggs William S. Burroughs
By Henri Charpentier, 1945

Chop one onion and place it into a pan with 1 tablespoon of butter. Brown it.

Take the green part of 1 chicory salad (keep the white part for a salad). Chop it fine and add it to the onion. Cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Then add 4 chopped hard-boiled eggs, 1 clove of garlic that has been crushed into a little chopped parsley, 2 chopped peeled tomatoes, 1 more tablespoon of butter, 1 teaspoon of meat stock, 1 pinch of pepper, one pinch of salt, and one sherry-glassful of claret. Cook for 5 minutes.

Boil 2 handfuls of noodles for 15 minutes. Strain. Be sure they are free of all water. Place them on the bottom of a baking dish. Cover with the chicory, etc., and bake in a preheated moderate oven of 350°F for 15 minutes. Season to taste.

Henri Charpentier (1945) Food and Finesse: The Bride’s Bible.
Privately printed, Chicago, IL

Goes well with:

• William S. Burroughs' Birthday Beer, a for-real Burroughs recipe with a legitimate provenance from his days as my neighbor in Lawrence, Kansas.
  

Stoughton's Elixir, an Early Example

Stoughton (or Stoughton’s) bitters are one of those classic cocktail ingredients, now defunct, over which a certain breed of cocktail enthusiast swoons. First concocted in the late 17th century by British apothecary Richard Stoughton, Stoughton’s “elixir” was hugely popular and spawned countless homemade imitations. Just as ersatz Kahlúa recipes now pepper American recipe collections, ersatz Stoughton’s receipts cropped up in household manuscripts throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

While looking for something else entirely last night, I came across an even earlier example: To make Stoughton’s Elixir from 1758. Eliza Smith’s’s book, The Compleat Housewife, was originally published in London in 1727, but was so popular that it went through many editions and reprintings in Britain and, later, America. As far as current research indicates, it was in 1742 the first cookbook published in what was to become the United States.

This makes Smith’s recipe for Stoughton’s the earliest published in America—assuming the recipe was in the 1742 edition. I looked and looked though the shelves at home and didn’t find one to confirm. All I got is this lousy 1758 reprint.

To make Stoughton’s Elixir. Pare off the rinds of six Seville oranges very thin, and put them in a quart bottle, with an ounce of gentian scraped and sliced, and six penny-worth of cochineal; put to it a pint of the best brandy; shake it together two or three times the first day, and then let it stand to settle two days, and clear it off into bottles for use; take a large tea spoonful in a glass of wine in a morning and at four in the afternoon; or you may take it in a dish of tea.

Eliza Smith (1758, 16th edition)
The Compleat Housewife - Or, Accomplished Gentlewoman's Companion

From Pineapple Cups to Pineapple Vinegar

Drinks around our house mostly come in glass or ceramic vessels. But now and then, I catch a wild hare and end up carving out whole pineapples to make oversized cups for two-handed drinks that invariably contain a bucket of rum. Yeah, yeah, it’s all terribly fancy.

The problem is what to do with the pineapple mugs when you’re done with the drinks. Some throw them out. Some compost them. Me? I rinse mine out and cut them — skin and all — into small pieces so I can make a light, fruity vinegar for my pork marinades, salad dressings, and some sausages.

The idea came from Diana Kennedy’s opus on Mexican food, The Art of Traditional Mexican Cooking. Piloncillo, the sugar she calls for in her recipe below, is readily available in Mexican markets. The hard little pylons of dark brown sugar may be either grated or crushed. I crushed mine in a tea towel with a hammer. The vinegar takes several weeks to make, but it’s good to have around.

It's worth noting that the vinegar, as it ferments, becomes a nasty, vile little pot of scum that attracts fruit flies from the surrounding five counties. I keep it outside, loosely covered with a lid to keep out rain and critters, but not so tight that it excludes air. I also use a rubber band to secure a large square of cheesecloth over the opening to keep the fruit flies out. Can't stress enough how disgusting this looks as it develops. No worries. When it's done, you'll strain it — and maybe rack it — and it will clear into a limpid, amber vinegar.

Pineapple Vinegar

When you are using a pineapple for other purposes, save the peelings, along with a little of the flesh. Add:

4 heaped tablespoons crushed piloncillo or dark brown sugar 1 ½ quarts water

Mix well and set, uncovered, in a sunny, warm spot to ferment. In it should begin to ferment in about three days and keep on fermenting until the sugar has been converted and the liquid becomes acidy [sic]. It may be cloudy to begin with, but as it sits it will clear and gradually turn to a dark a amber color. This may take three weeks or more. By this time a mother – a gelatinous white disc – should be just beginning to form. Leave until it is quite solid – up to another three weeks – then strain the liquid and cork, ready for use. Put the mother with more sugar and water – a little more pineapple if you have it, but it is not really necessary – and leave to form more vinegar.

Diana Kennedy (1989)
The Art of Traditional Mexican Cooking:
Traditional Mexican Cooking for Aficionados.
Bantam Books, New York.

Goes well with:

• Tiare Olsen's tiki drink Pineapple Delight calls for using an entire pineapple as a cup. See her recipe at A Mountain of Crushed Ice.
• For instructions on carving that pineapple cup, see Dr. Bamboo's clear illustration here.
  

Ginger Pie, a Rescued Recipe

Harold and Maude—Hal Ashby's’ black-humored 1971 film—once inspired me to bake a pie. If I’d known how much research eventually would be involved in making the simple dessert, I’d’ve said to hell with it. The perseverance paid off.

In the movie, Ruth Gordon’s seventy-nine year old Maude invites a much younger Harold (played by Bud Cort) into her rail car home. Maude—eccentric, art-loving, vivacious—stands in wild contrast to morose Harold whose faked suicides are sad jokes staged to wring some evidence of warmth from his frosty mother. In the rail car, Maude offers him oat straw tea and ginger pie. While prospects of oat straw tea did nothing for me, I was left dumb in the wake of increasingly irrelevant dialog at the mention of ginger pie.

Ginger pie? I’m no stranger to baking, but I’d never heard of it. At first, I mistook the pie for a physical thing. It had a homespun, old-timey ring that reminded me of something long forgotten. Dandelion wine, maybe, or spring tonic. At first dozens, then hundreds, then—literally—thousands of cookbooks stymied me as I hunted for a recipe. Gingerbread, ginger tea, ginger snaps, stir-fries, ginger syrups, ginger cordials, chutneys, beers, ales, candies, ginger-lacquered duck, and more, but no ginger pie.

Since nothing suggested or resembled what I was looking for, I put together working notes on a recipe of my own. Some of the ingredients were obvious, but I felt as if I were reinventing something that should be easy to find: Pie? No problem—got pans, got dough. Next! A great big mess of ginger. And eggs. And…um… sugar, of course. Plus…maybe…damn. There’s got to be a recipe in one of these books.

But I forged on. Southern chess pie had a sturdy, crack-topped custard that seemed a versatile base—But what kind of ginger? Fresh? Candied? Dried and ground? Preserved in syrup? In sherry? Just ginger juice? I try each of those. Fresh ginger turned out to have the strongest, most assertive flavor, giving racy overtones to an otherwise sweet and homey pie.

Fresh ginger holds promises of liveliness and sass, of exotic and ancient histories. There is a potency in a fat hand of fresh ginger that just might inspire a breath of fire when it's reduced to tiny, tiny cubes and strewn throughout a rum-laced custard.

The search for the recipe and subsequent experiments with what I thought ginger pie should be brought me a deeper understanding of what I was stalking. When I failed to uncover any recipes, I went back to Maude, the root of my inspiration.

Her eccentric, nuts-to-tradition take on life is a big part of the film’s appeal. During a memorial Mass, she psst, psst, pssts Harold’s attention with sibilantly inappropriate offers of licorice. Her wistful reminiscences hint at a past built on old world loves and tragedies. Once a firebrand activist, Maude continues in small ways undermining worldly complacency by finding joy in simple, everyday things; somersaults, a field of daisies, raucous songs, and seagulls, as well as frequent and spontaneous episodes of grand theft auto.

I came to realize that ginger pie was not some old-fashioned recipe fallen out of favor. It was more than that. By offering a slice, Maude extends not only hospitality, but a slyly camouflaged offer of herself and Harold’s first hints of escape from his doleful life. With the point of that pie, she wedges open Harold’s somber soul and floods it with bracing warmth and sweetness, the distillate of her own fading life’s fire and spice. Harold’s change is so profound that he picks up a banjo, abandons his mourning suits, turns cartwheels, and declares his intention to marry a woman old enough to be his grandmother.

This pie doesn’t affect those sorts of change; it’s not likely—not likely, mind you—to prompt proposals. Sitting here with a late-night wedge pilfered from the kitchen, though, I can’t help but smile. In the end, I don’t know what Maude’s recipe was, but I’ve cemented friendships over slices of this rich, ginger-and-rum custard pie. Surely that is the sort of thing she meant to dish up.

Ginger Pie

1 unbaked pie crust
¼-1/3 cup minced young ginger
2.5 oz aged rum*
1.5 cups sugar
8 Tbl unsalted butter, room temperature
¼ tsp salt
3 eggs
2.5 Tbl all purpose flour
¼ cup heavy cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon zest

At least one hour before beginning, combine the ginger and rum in a small bowl or jar and set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar. Add eggs one at the time and mix after each addition. Add remaining ingredients, including the rum and ginger, and combine thoroughly.

Pour the mixture into the unbaked pie crust and bake at 350F about 50 minutes, until the center has mostly set, but is still just a little wobbly – it will firm on standing. It should have a slightly darkened, crusty top. If necessary, cover the pan with a tented piece of aluminum foil or an overturned stainless steel bowl to prevent overbrowning while the pie bakes.

Warm, the pie cries for heavy dollops of whipped cream barely able to hold itself together. Cold, it’s best to sneak mall slivers while the rest of the house sleeps.

* Appleton Estate V/X or Clement VSOP are both grand rums for the pie. You want something with some age to it. In a pinch, you could use a white rum, but avoid spiced and dark ones: After all, this is a ginger pie, not a rum pie.

Recent Projects: The Art of Distilling Whiskey

At Tales of the Cocktail in 2008, I sat on a panel to talk about the resurgence of homemade spirits in modern America. With me were distillers Mike McCaw and Ian Smiley. In the audience sat Max Watman, Bill Owens, and a smattering of other distillers (some with permits, some not) who knew full well that a sub rosa renaissance in small batch spirits was underway.

Afterwards, Owens asked if I would write about moonshine for a book he was planning on whiskey distilling. I tweaked the Tales talk and the result is a section in his The Art of Distilling Whiskey and Other Spirits released recently. My section covers the resurgence of off-license distilling in the US, traces its recent history, and makes an attempt at categorizing such distillers into broad and sometimes overlapping categories.

Other contributors are essentially people in the room that day: McCaw, Smiley, Watman, me. Andy Faulker contributed photos and Fritz Maytag of Anchor Distilling—one of the godfathers of modern craft distilling—wrote the forward.

The book isn’t a manual of how to distill, but more an explanation of spirits categories with a heavy focus on the modern American market. There’s a section on stills and how various kinds work, but for me the most engaging aspect of the book is its profiles of distilleries and distillers that are shaping the future of artisanal American spirits. It's this section that reveals just how widespread distilling is becoming.

Distillers and distilleries highlighted include:

• Sonja Kassebaum (North Shore Distillery, Illinois)
• Guy Rehorst (Great Lakes Distillery, Wisconsin)
• Chris Weld (Berkshire Mountain Distillers, Massachusetts)
• Phil Pritchard (Pritchard’s Distillery, Tennessee)
• Steve McCarthy (Clear Creek Distillery, Oregon)
• Garrison Brothers Distillery (Texas)
• Leopold Brothers (Colorado)
• Tuthilltown Spirits (New York)
• Philadelphia Distilling (Pennsylvania)
• Chris Sule of Celebration Distillation [i.e., Old New Orleans Rum (Louisiana)]

And a few dozen others. Not a book to teach you how to distill, but definitely worth a look if you want to see what others are doing with their knowledge of how to run a still and—just as importantly—a distillery.

Bill Owens and Alan Dikty (2009)
Forward by Fritz Maytag
The Art of Distilling Whiskey and Other Spirits
176 pages, paperback
Quarry Books
ISBN: 1592535690
$24.99