This is the first podcast episode coming from our live show at the Chicago Women's Funny Festival. It's a little departure from our usual structure, as there's very little drinking except for shots of Malört and Girl that Jen and Erica do at the top of the show, but Jen talks about Disaronno and the origin of the show and it's funny. Next week, we have some actual reviews from the live show.
This week, Jen and Erica are drinking another moonshine (or "white dog")--Maker's White.
I hate to have to correct the ladies, but Erica refers to Maker's White as a whiskey a couple of times. It's not. As I learned from Death's Door White Whisky, it has to age in barrels for at least 72 hours to qualify as a whiskey. Maker's White makes no such pit stop.
It’s a fourteen hour drive down to where Erica’s brother and sister-in-law live in South Carolina, so our last trip, over the Independence Day weekend, we decided to break up the return trip. We left a little early and spent the night in Asheville, NC. From what we’ve heard, and what I read on a scattering of Yelp reviews, Asheville is quite a food town. There’s Southern food, of course, but then there’s also a hearty dose of a hippie/outdoorsy vibe, so everywhere seems to have plenty of vegetarian options, local organic ingredients, and so on. A number of places we would have liked to try were closed for the holiday, but we had a great pizza and good beer at Asheville Brewing Company. And the next morning we had the best breakfast sandwiches on biscuits that I’ve ever had (that I didn’t make) at The Green Sage.
Looping back to the beer for a second: we had brought a growler of Half Acre Daisy Cutter down to South Carolina with us, and so we happened to have an empty and clean growler in the car. We figured it would be a shame to waste that opportunity and not take some Asheville Brewing beer home with us. Now, we’ve only been getting growlers of beer for the last couple of years, and only in Chicago, so we’re certainly no experts on nation-wide growler custom and/or law. In Chicago, it’s your responsibility to show up at the brewery or brew pub with a clean growler which they will then fill (Revolution gives your growler a quick rinse using the water-squirter thing, but that’s the most I’ve seen). At Asheville Brewing, they said that they wouldn’t fill our growler, but instead would trade us for a clean one of theirs. So I’m wondering if that’s just their custom or if that’s the law in North Carolina? And what do they do with the Half Acre growler we left there—do they clean it out and now some Asheville resident has Asheville Brewing beer at home in a Half Acre growler? Things I wonder.
So on Monday the 4th we woke up with an eleven hour trip back to Chicago ahead of us. I doodled around with the map and realized that it would only add an hour to our trip (plus whatever time we spent there) to stop at the Maker’s Mark distillery on our way back.
The trip was a win right from the start, because we got to take US-150, a Kentucky Scenic Byway. It’s a little silly, but we had just seen Cars a few weeks prior and had been telling ourselves that we really should try to get off the highway more often. It feels like a big commitment to do that for the entirety of a long roadtrip (though, clicking the “avoid highways” option on the Google Maps directions for Asheville to Chicago only adds 3 hours to the overall trip) but it’s good to remember that you can often just do a section of a trip that way.
We both like Maker’s Mark, which is why we wanted to visit the distillery, but I have to admit that my affection also had me a little worried. I had never visited a distillery before, but I’ve been on brewery tours and it’s always seemed that at any sort of scale brewing quickly becomes a gleaming stainless steel industrial process that, but for the requisite tasting at the end, might as well be making soda or floor wax or something.
The Maker’s Mark distillery turns out to be a delightful combination of modern technology where needed or useful and of old-fashioned hand-crafting where it isn’t. The bottling room, for example, is plenty modern and efficient (and smells heavenly) but each of those bottles really are hand-dipped in the red wax. Waste material from the distilling process goes through a modern “anaerobic engine” that produces methane that fuels the actual stills. But the vats where the fermentation takes place are huge wooden vats, open to the air, that date back in essence to the early 1800s.
In the gift shop we went, as we Gerdeses say, hog wild. We of course wax-dipped our own bottles of Maker’s Mark. And Maker’s has a new white whiskey which, when we visited, had only been available for sale for 10 days and only at the gift shop. We’ve been enjoying Death’s Door White Whisky cocktails at Watershed, so we were excited to try this raw offering from one of favorite big brands of whiskey. Maybe I can get Erica to post her Maker’s White Sour recipe.
There are five other distilleries in Kentucky who offer tours and together promote the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. We’re already planning a weekend getaway to go down and finish off the trail, perhaps in conjunction with the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, if we want to overload ourselves.
"Well Portland, Oregon and a sloe gin fizz, if that ain't love than tell me what is."--Loretta Lynn and Jack White, Portland, Oregon
I'd been hearing a lot about Sloe Gin Fizzes recently. It was showing up in song lyrics left and right. I was getting curious. I knew that it was made with Sloe Gin, and that it was not a less-fast version of regular gin, but I'd never had one.
I mentioned to a friend about it, and he said he'd had one before. He also called it a "Lady Drink."
Hmm. Well, I'm a lady and I like scotch as well as pink champagne, so that could be anything.
So I mentioned to Fuzzy that I wanted to try one, and in typical amazing Fuzzy fashion, he showed up one night with a bottle of Plymouth Sloe Gin.
HOLY YUMMERS!
Each summer, I like to delineate one cocktail or drink to be my "official drink." In an earlier post, I mentioned "The Summer of Flights," and I've also have had 'The Summer of Weiss Beers," "The Summer of Whites" and I think last summer was all about beers. Undoubtedly, this summer is "The Summer of the Sloe Gin Fizz." We killed off that bottle pretty fast and are now onto another one.
A few weeks ago, I was out with a few friends and I was telling them about the SGF. My friend Jeff asked where you can get one, since it isn't a commonly consumed drink anymore. It just so happened that we were at a martini bar, so we decided that if they could make us one, we would all order one. They said they could, so we did. It was just good--way sweeter than what we make at home and a totally different color. Turns out, they used sour mix (which I love, but generally when mixed with a cheap whiskey or oooh, apple whiskey. Hey, while I am in this parenthetical moment, I just remembered that last summer was "The Summer of the Whiskey Sour" which I made with Leopold Brothers Apple Whiskey, which isn't as easy to find anymore.) but I must say, I much prefer the ones we've been making at home. Kinda fruity, a little sour, easy to drink and really refreshing.
I think I have to make myself one now!
Fuzzy adds:
Sloe Gin is, simply enough, Gin flavored with sloe berries. Binny's, our local well-stocked liquor store, has two varieties: the Plymouth at $30 a bottle and Dubouchett at $10 a bottle. The Plymouth has been so good I've been hesitant to try the Dubouchett, but I suppose if it's OK, it'd be a lot cheaper.
The recipe I'm using for a Sloe Gin Fizz comes from the Cocktails+ app on my iPhone and is:
2 1/2 oz sloe gin
1 oz lemon juice
1/2 simple syrup
Shake with ice. Strain into an ice-filled collins glass. Top with club soda.
I like to have a special theme for my drinking each summer--just a little something fun to sample and learn about. Since two years ago was my "Summer of White" and last year was my "Summer of Weiss Beer," I dedided that 2007 would be my "Summer of Flights." To kick things off, Fuzzy and I decided to try the Duke of Perth's Whiskey Flights. Since we're big fans of the Duke of Perth (and their fish and chips), we've been eyeballing them for some time, but we always find ourselves with a car, or a show or some other reason to not drink. So when we found we had last Friday free, we went for it!They offer 4 flights--three of them are $18 each, and one is a whammy of a $70 flight, each with a different theme. Fuzzy opted for the Roving Dover, and I dove into the For Peat's Sake. As well as three samples each, they provide menus for each flight with descriptions of each's Nose, Body, Palate, and Finish. From left to right, they were weaker to stronger (not that the weakest was "weak"), and I found that my favorite was the first one, a Talisker 10 year from Skye. Likewise, Fuzzy's first one was his favorite, a Glenkinchie 10 year from Lowland. I was glad that our food came quickly, cause samples of six whiskeys on an empty stomach could have made for a different evening.All in all, it was delicious, and the awesome atmosphere (the patio is open!), friendly waitstaff, and delicious food and drinks makes this Highly Recommended in my book!The Duke of Perth is at 2913 N. Clark Street in Lakeview.
Sadly, when people think of New Orleans and drinking these days the first image that pops into their mind is probably drunken frat guys at Mardi Gras. Which is true. But New Orleans has more than just drinking volume, it's got drinking history. I mean, this is the city where the modern cocktail was invented.
And the first cocktail that was invented was (arguably) the Sazerac. I was turned onto the Sazerac by a link from Making Light and started making them back in 2005. A Sazerac isn't too complicated to make, but it does involve three ingredients that you probably don't have in your standard home bar -- rye whiskey, Herbsaint liqueur, and Peychaud's bitters. If you've seen my home bar, you know that obscure liquors are my stock-in-trade, so finding all those pieces was no problem. And we've enjoyed the Sazeracs I've made, but never having had one that anyone else had made, there's always a lingering question of whether I'm doing it "right". So on a December 2006 trip to New Orleans, Erica and I decided to check in with some experts.
The place to get a Sazerac would be the Sazerac Bar at the then Fairmont, but the Fairmont was still closed from Katrina damage. (The hotel reopened in 2009 as the Roosevelt and the bar is open as well.) So we went to the Rib Room at the Omni Royal Orleans for Sazeracs and dessert.
So, yes, I was making them fine (the Rib Room uses Angostura bitters in addition to the Peychaud's bitters, but we'll let that slide).
Here's the recipe:
1/2 teaspoon Herbsaint (you could also use absinthe now that's it legal again in the US)
1 teaspoon of simple syrup
4 dashes Peychaud's bitters
You could use a tiny, tiny drop of Angostura bitters, but I think that's wrong
2 ounces rye whiskey (you'd think "Sazerac Rye" would be the best choice, but I prefer Old Overholt)
Strip of lemon peel
Chill a rocks glass. In another glass or Boston shaker combine ice, simple syrup, bitters, and rye. Stir gently to chill. Pour the Herbsaint into the chilled rocks glass and coat the inside of glass, pouring out the excess. Strain whiskey mixture into the rocks glass. Twist lemon peel over mixture to release lemon oil and then rub peel over the rim of the glass. Drink.
