WHY FOLKS LOVE OUR SPIRITS
Richard Braastad offering Ansley Coale a taste of his cognac
People love our products. They pour them for their good friends. Why?
Because they can feel/taste/experience the care and the love of mission that went into what they are drinking.
Crispin Cain/American Craft Whiskey Distillery
A lot of the mission is simply thinking seriously about what you’re doing.
Karina Abad, Maestra Destiladora of Los Nahuales
and, of course, you have to know a lot about how to do it.
Alberto & Onofre Ortiz
But two aspects are both crucial and rarely encountered. One is a genuine enjoyment and love of what you do.
Miguel Cruz Rios of Cuentacuentos
Truly great spirits are made by hand. That
breaks down into a long series of apparently
simple acts, but almost every one of them
involves doing just the right thing at just the
right time.
San Juan Del Rio
It can be as simple as cutting roasted agaves into the right-sized chinks for milling
Joe Corley of Germain-Robin
Or it can be making the heads
cut – at exactly the right moment
– on the second distillation run
of wine from 2000/ton old-vine
pinot noir grapes. Maybe you’ve
done this hundreds of tines, but
every run is a bit different.
Luis Contreras of Venenosa
Or maintaining the right temperature in
the condensing pan atop a clay Filipino
still.
Crispin Cain happy with his work
The people who are best at this have some inner urge to get it all right, but not in a mechanical way. A still is not a machine. It’s more like a skillet in the hands of a great chef: how do you get the best out of what’s in it? If you don’t love it, it won’t happen.
Angel Cruz Robles of Cuentacuentos
The second aspect is having a profound understanding of your ingredients. This runs deep. Here’s why:
Medieval Still
Distillation goes way back. The ancient Greeks learned it from Egypt and used it to make medicine. Using a still to make strong alcohol is pretty recent.
The word “spirit” comes from medieval alchemy, when you were purifying and concentrating some interesting substance, isolating its essence. The process had mystical overtones, which is why humans called the results a spirit, which derives from the Latin for breath, what makes you alive. It often meant soul.
Truly great spirits have souls.
Viognier Grapes
So a distiller is trying to capture the pure concentrated essence of the plant he is distilling: grape, corn, agave. Its soul.
The photo is of viognier grapes. They make fabulous brandies. Distilled into vodka, they take away the rubbing alcohol smell when blended into vodka distilled from grain or corn.
Know what? You have to pick them at exactly the right time, different from when they are harvested to make table wine. You go into the vineyard, crush a bunch, test the percent sugar in the juice with a refractometer, and tell the grower: ”Harvest the day after tomorrow, early morning”. You know the grapes better than he does. Why’s that? You love your materials. You want to do them justice. Ever watch a great chef buying vegetables?
Like we said: there are many many different things you do when you start out with a plant and end up with a bottle of great stuff. What’s the final aspect? You’re thinking about providing genuine pleasure to the human who will take a drink of your spirit. Here’s mezcal issuing from a potstill in Santa Ana del Rio, in Oaxaca. Think for a minute about everything it took to make this happen.
Hector Vasquez of Comunidad
Here’s the best part: giving someone an genuinely rewarding experience: “Hey, this is GOOD!”. And it IS good, from its taste, not from hype. So go ahead. Drink Real. Love our spirits. They are all made this way.