We started out our third 'season' with the very girly Girl and now we round it out with a hardcore wormwood liqueur, Chicago's own Jeppson's Malört. As Jen notes, many people have a strong reaction to their first shot of Malört, but it's been gaining something of a cult following over the last few years. Even though it's a sign of the end times.
So now we'll be taking a little bit of a break until we film our next season. This is a great time to remind you that you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and then when we do release new episodes they'll just show up on your computer or iThing like magic. Magic, I tell you. (And, you know, if you wanted to give us a five-star rating, that wouldn't be terrible, either. Magic!)
Jen and Erica are really getting into the "things you normally drink mixed with other things" spirit by tasting three different bitters: Angostura, Peychaud's and Fee Brothers' Grapefruit.
Erica mentions the Sazerac, one of our favorite cocktails, and Watershed, one of our favorite Chicago bars for cocktails. A bartender at Watershed introduced us to a remedy for the hiccups that seems to have worked for us so far: a half-shot of bitters followed by biting on a lemon wedge.
Erica notes that bitters are about 40% alcohol, but I learned from Hella Bitter that bitters are classified as a condiment, and so may be sold in grocery stores and the like.
Jen and Erica are drinking straight vermouth, both dry and sweet, so that you don't have to.
Vermouth is, as Erica says, a fortified wine and the other ones that Jen mentions are sherry, port, and madeira. Jen first had madeira at the New York restaurant Hearth. Jen's shot glass is from El Jardin, 3401 N Clark, Chicago.
The vermouths that the Drunk Monkeys are drinking are a Martini & Rossi Rosso Vermouth and Gallo Dry Vermouth.
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.
Our friend Kenner just returned from a trip to Poland with intriguing tales of heated alcoholic beverages and as the weather chills here as well those are sounding very attractive. We're already fans of toddies, Glögg, Quelque Chose, etc. so we're very open to the whole concept. One of Kenner's finds was a warm mead, which sounds great. The only problem with mead is that the same word is applied to a lot different things, so I feel like we'd need to find the same brand or style to make sure we were trying the same thing.
The other drink he described was both more re-creatable, but had a certain dangerous sound. Piwo grzane--hot beer, with a flavored syrup, that you drink through a straw. Let's break that down for a second.
Beer. Yay! We like beer.
Hot beer. Huh. I know I just said we like Quelque Chose, but to an American palatte warm beer sounds odd, and saying the words "hot beer" out loud just sounds wrong.
... with a syrup. Here again--we drink plenty of fruity beers--lambics and fruit-flavored beers, but we tend to prefer the tart-er ones and there's something about adding a syrup that sounds a little weird.
... that you drink through a straw. You drink soda with a straw. But Kenner was very insistent--it's better through a straw.
OK, well we were ready to give it a try. Kenner said there were lots of variations--different beers, flavored syrups, etc (but the straw was important!) but that they had liked Okocim lager with raspberry syrup.
Our local liquor store didn't have any Okocim (this being Chicago, I'm sure I can find some eventually) so I thought I'd go with a tasty but simple lager and picked up a six-pack of Red Stripe.
We already had some Torani Raspberry Syrup, which is mostly sugar-water with flavor, but our local grocery store happened to have real Polish Polonaise Raspberry Syrup (Syrop Malinowy), which is made with raspberry juice. Our cashier gave us the thumbs up as we were checking out. "Very good with just a little water," she said. Noted.
The actual preparation was dead easy. I poured two bottles of lager into a big Pyrex measuring cup, heated it up in the microwave for about three and a half minutes, then poured it out into two pints glasses. I gave a healthy pour of raspberry syrup into each glass -- which fizzed up and mixed nicely on its own. And then two straws.
The verdict: very nice. Warming, tasty. Maybe a little too easy to drink fairly quickly. Definitely an addition to our winter-drink list.
We're a married couple--Erica Reid Gerdes and Fuzzy Gerdes--who love food and drink adventures. Well, we love food and drink, period--Fuzzy will as happily eat mac & cheese as lobster and Erica won't pass up a Miller Lite, if you're buying. But we do like seeking out new tastes and new stories.
We both blog pretty regularly, but about all sorts of topics, and we thought it might be nice to have a separate place just for our food and drink posts, for the people who share our curiosities and tastes.
We've pulled in some entries that we've posted on our blogs and on the Chicago Metblog over the last few years, to give you a flavor for the kind of flavors we like.
Jen Ellison and Erica Reid like to drink weird things and tell you about them. What started with a simple fascination with Disaronno has turned into a fun and educational web series (we are saving lives!!!). Jen has been performing, writing, and directing in Chicago for over 17 years. She is the brains behind the popular Tumblr Drunk J. Crew. Erica Reid has been performing, choreographing, dancing, and directing in Chicago for over 15 years. Their husbands Dave (Jen) and Fuzzy (Erica) are the oft heard but never seen others in the room. Cheers!
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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.
I was first forced to drink Malort as the last shot of the night at my bachelor party at The Sovereign. It tasted, let us not beat around the bush, like ass. But maybe, I thought, my taste buds were off from the cigars, and it has that cute little Chicago flag-shield on the label, and it's made in Chicago (well, in Florida, but for Chicago), and the little pamphlet the bartender handed me (yes, there's a booklet) challenged my manhood: "Most first-time drinkers of Jeppson Malort reject our liquor. Its strong, sharp taste is not for everyone. Our liquor is rugged and unrelenting (even brutal) to the palate. During almost 70 years of American distribution, we found only 1 out of 49 men will drink Jeppson Malort after the first 'shock-glass.'"
So, I bought a bottle. And we had a little tasting.
Kate: "Nail polish remover. It's a little sweet, you know like they add that scent to nail polish remover."
Shaun: "Bug spray, with Robitussin. Because bug spray on its own would probably be a little thin, so they mix in the Robitussin to thicken it up."
Fuzzy: "Varnish remover. With herbs."
Erica: "Why did you make me drink that!? I can still taste it!" (From the pamphlet: "It is not possible to forget our two-fisted liquor. The taste just lingers and lasts - seemingly forever.")
* It clearly says "Malört" right on the bottle, but everyone spells it "Mallort". Probably, after one shot they see double Ls.
