Follow Sean Inman to the best in craft beer
I used to be in Burbank five days a a week. But now I am WFH so I totally missed that Story Tavern now has The Ciderworks next door.
They have some interesting combos such as cherry/blueberry, pineapple, ginger/lemongrass, strawberry/orange that use fruit fruit from the owner’s home as well.
If you need a cider break, might be a place to check.
I have been listening to Fred Minnick on the Bourbon Pursuit podcast that he contributes to and then I saw he had a book about women and whiskey and bought it.
Whenever I read a book about women in history, I wonder what the world would be like if weak men weren’t so damn scared of women.
Whiskey Women brings a few women from whiskey history to the fore and if any of them had as much rope to use as men did, wow, would Bourbon, Scotch and Whiskey be different.
We learn about poitin in Ireland, bootleggers in America and peat in Scotland through names new to me that should be talked about far more than they are now.
To me, the most fascinating tales were of the wives and daughters who inherited distilleries and proceeded to run them very well. Basically men had to die for a woman to run a distillery.
Thankfully, this is shifting in the right direction but it is still too slow for my taste. Minnick shows page after page and woman after woman that we miss out when we don’t allow everyone to rise to their potential.
A Sazerac is a classic cocktail and two Ventura beverage makers have a beer version, Mystik Krewe Breux, a festive rye beer from Ventura Coast Brewing and Ventura Spirits.
Old Tom doesn’t get the same shelf space as gin but maybe that will change with Aviation Gin adding it to their line-up. Sometimes you need the marketing muscle of a celebrity distillery to open a style up.
I have as many oak aged gins now as I do the regular. Now if Aviation would make a Genever, that would be great.
Thanks to my lovely spouse, I got a Blind Barrels tasting for my birthday.
Here are my thoughts on the spirits and how it worked…
First, the first reveal of the four varieties
A. Corsair Triple Smoke American Single Malt Whiskey
B. Broken Barrel Barrel Pick Rye Whiskey
C. RY3 Cask Strength Blended Rye finished in Toasted Barrels
D. Krobar Cask Strength Straight Bourbon Whiskey
Second, my ranking was D nudging slightly ahead of B and C who were tied with A being a very far distant fourth because I am not a fan of smoke in my whiskey. The Krobar had just enough vanilla to it that it balanced out the cask strength. A was only 80 proof while B through D were all between 106 to 120 proof.
And that was my only real issue with this specific box. A was such an outlier that it was either gonna win by a country mile or be dead last. I might have liked all cask strength but maybe have one be have a finish instead of two, one be rye instead of two and have the proof range be 100 to 120. Maybe that is because I prefer teasing out the subtle difference.
But this is a fun way to taste and the reveal is as easy to do with the QR Code. And I know now to look for Krobar spirits.
The bottle of whiskey in the fancy bottle above will set you back $75,000. Why? Because it will be aged in a low altitude orbit above the Earth. The very definition of “space aged”.
But wait, that is not all. You get an NFT, exclusive launch and re-entry parties, a piece of one of the space barrels and a sample bottle so you do not sully the main bottle. If the wooden barrels filled with alcohol do not explode on re-entry, of course.
Part of me wishes that craft beer would bring back the over the moon, wack-a-doodle ideas that cost more than they taste good. Age a beer in a cemetery. Brew a glitter seltzer shandy. Break some rules!
Needed? – Of course not. You can spend that 75k if you want, but you have to spend the same amount on a charity at the same time.
Ice is a cocktail thing but beer is linked via water so I am interested in the new Camper English book, The Ice Book.
I fear that I do a lot of wrong things with ice much like my disregard of proper beer glass etiquette at times. Always good to have people hold one to the mark.
The next cider up from Portland Cider is their Prickly Punch that uses the desert prickly pear.
And not just prickly pear but orange, guava and strawberry. Which flavor will lord over the others? Or will it be a democracy of fruit?
The orange and guava have ceded ground to at first strawberry and then the prickly pear before the cider itself steps in. Thankfully it is not as sweet as I feared it would be. Has a nice bracing mouthfeel to it.
As I found out in my trip to Kentucky, there is a lot and by a lot, I mean a LOT of bourbon out there and finding a favorite is hard especially at some of the bottle price points.
Enter Blind Barrels.
You can get a quarterly subscription or annual. Annual has a price saving. You get four samples of unknown whiskey. You get tasting notes and a QR Code to show who made it as well as a link to buy it if it strikes your fancy.
Thinking about this for my birthday.
The next cider up from Portland Cider is Lemon Drop made with not just regular lemons but the extra fancy Meyer variety.
I was really hoping to get a big ol’ punch of Meyer lemon in this one. I really like lemon flavor but I just did not find it in this cider named after a cocktail. That is not to say that this wasn’t a good tasting cider, just that the name led me to a destination that it just could not arrive at.