I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a massive line when my Uber dropped me off in front of New York’s Industria studios, where Juicy Brews was being held. Hazy IPAs and long lines to procure them seemingly go hand-in-hand in 2017, and this beer festival was a shameless celebration of the style, the first such curated beer festival of its kind.

Hazy IPAs (also known as New England-style IPAs, Northeastern-style IPAs or simply NEIPAs) have captured the imagination, Square swipes and so-called “throat share” of beer geeks more than any other new-fangled style in craft beer’s short history. Whereas once you could literally name every single brewery in the world that made the style—here’s my all-inclusive primer from a mere 14 months ago—at Juicy Brews, there weren’t just breweries whose juicy brews I had never tasted. A few of these breweries I had never even heard of.

And, even if just about every NEIPA I tasted at the festival was good, a certain sameness overtook me after awhile; today, just a couple weeks later, I can hardly remember any standouts. Perhaps that’s just me. For our year-end beer roundtable, we decided to ask a few big names in the industry what they think about the present and the future of the NEIPA, the only beer style apparently that anyone wants to discuss, drink and brew.

Sitting around our digital round table are:

• Kenny Gould, co-founder Hop Culture and Juicy Brews
• Jim Koch, founder Boston Beer Co./Samuel Adams
• Gage Siegel, head of customer success at BeerMenus.com
• Scott Jones, owner Triple Crossing Brewing, a top NEIPA maker in Richmond, VA
• Ryan Crisp, head brewer at AleSmith Brewing Company in San Diego, an early industry leader in West Coast-style IPAs

The following answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Will the NEIPA craze continue through 2018 and beyond, or have we already peaked?

Gould: After every craft beer festival Hop Culture throws, we ask people what styles they want at their next event. Occasionally, people say “sours” or “stouts,” but almost everyone wants more juice. We’re in the midst of a juicy revolution, and that’s a reality.

Siegel: I think every brewery has figured out the formula, so it’s no longer a predominantly New England phenomena. Even areas known for their own brand of IPAs, places like San Diego and the Pacific Northwest, have breweries focusing on making this style. However, there are plenty of breweries who aren’t quite doing it the “right” way. There’s room for more breweries to make them, and there’s plenty of room for them to be improved.

Koch: We think the smoothness and citrus juiciness of the New England IPA style are an appealing alternative to the drier bitterness and piney, resiny hop notes that have characterized West Coast IPAs. Our New England IPA was our top-selling growler [at our Boston taproom] in 2017 [and] we expect this juicy haze craze to continue in 2018 as we launch [it] on draft and in cans.

Crisp: Consumer interest in the style remains strong and I don’t see any sign of that trend slowing soon. Craft drinkers continue to want more hops, but now without the bitterness of traditional IPAs. It appeals to most craft drinkers’ love of IPAs while offering something new and, unlike some of the styles that experienced short-lived popularity in the last decade, the NEIPA is an everyday option for many drinkers.

Have NEIPAs created a monoculture where the beers aren’t singular enough to tell apart?

Gould: I can’t tell a Laphroaig from a Lagavulin. For the people who can, that’s a blasphemous statement. But if I were to blind taste three hazy IPAs, I’d tell you which one was Equilibrium, which one was Tree House and which one was Trillium. Yes, a lot of people are making stuff that tastes similar, but I think that results from a decline in flagships. Instead of doing one beer all the time, a brewery might do subtle variations on the same beer. In the last year especially, I’ve seen many groundbreaking variations that subtly push the boundaries of the style, including NEIPAs with lactose, fruit and even breakfast cereal.

Koch: One of the best parts of brewing, other than sampling the finished brews, is creating new beers and knowing that no new beer is brewed the same way. We’ve found that because of the newness and loose definition of the style, there’s a real range of flavors [available].

Jones: There is the risk of monoculture, sure, but that exists with any style. The more discerning palates will be able to pick out the nuances between different NEIPAs. Hop varieties vary year to year, and lot to lot—they are drastically different as well. Brewers being able to identify the top tier hop crop will have drastically different results. As hop growers and breeders continue to push the envelope with new hop varietals, it will help expand the NEIPA style year after year.

Crisp: Because so many breweries are making NEIPAs for the first time, I think it’s natural that we’re seeing a lot of similarities within the category. Many brewers are still learning how to make the style and are talking to each other about how to control the final product. The immediate result of that learning process might be a lack of diversity amongst NEIPAs, but brewers will inevitably perfect their own processes and recipes. Once they do, I expect we’ll start to see the idea of a NEIPA “monoculture” flip and breweries will push to differentiate their beers in this crowded market by experimenting with new ingredients and processes unique to their brands.

If there is any style that can usurp the NEIPA in terms of growth, what do you think it’d be?

Gould: Every style has the potential to usurp the NEIPA, but I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next year. But two years from now? Sure. Five years? Definitely. In my opinion, we seem to be swinging back toward cleaner, easier drinking beers. Originally, the market rebelled in response to flavorless “Big Beer” swill—that’s where the craft scene gets its desire for flavor, flavor and more flavor. Now, people are realizing they can make the same lagers as Big Beer, but with high-quality ingredients, and that those beers actually take more time, skill and effort than creating something that tastes like a donut. In the next few years, I think table beers, saisons and lagers will have their moment.

Crisp: I think it’s inevitable that a new style will eventually surpass the growth of the NEIPA. My personal hope is that it will be something like a flavorful, clean craft lager (Schwarzbier 2019!), but it’s too early to tell where demand will shift. That’s not to say that NEIPAs will disappear. I think they will remain an important part of the industry and will continue to be brewed and appreciated by a strong fanbase; they simply won’t dominate the conversation the way they currently are.

Jones: Mixed fermentation wild ales and spontaneously-fermented beer is a style I see growing rapidly over the coming years. Brewers are actively investing in barrels, foudres and coolships to meet the demand and provide a nice creative outlet for brewers. Being able to ferment beer with a yeast culture cultivated on the brewery property provides a deep connection between the brewer and beer. I believe that really resonates with the craft beer consumer.

Siegel: Right now, the growth in the IPA sector just doesn’t suggest that anything else is going to stop it. We added the NEIPA style as a category on [BeerMenus] over the summer, and there’s now already more than 2,000 entries in just six months. That’s strong growth for a style with no real historical ground to stand on. The data says the IPA will continue to reign supreme, and this NEIPA sub-style certainly isn’t slowing either.

The post Will the New England IPA Continue Its Reign in 2018? appeared first on PUNCH.

Sometimes, when it’s late at night, after I’ve had a little too much to drink, I think about quitting the writing life.

Fuck it, I say to myself, I’ll just open a brewery instead. On Monday we could brew a New England-style IPA (NEIPA), double dry-hopping it with, oh, Citra and Galaxy. The next Saturday I’d arrive at work and find several-hundred hirsute and heavy men camped outside on the sidewalk. I’d open the garage doors and sell each a case of pounder cans and maybe some branded TeKu #glasswhales as well. By the end of the day, I would have made a cool $500,000.

The continuing fervor over juicy, hazy NEIPAs became so predictable and ubiquitous in 2017 it’s almost impossible to satire. If you simply brew these beers, beer geeks will magically come, quod erat demonstratum. Thus, even breweries that promised to never, ever make an IPA started completely betraying their ethos to do so. I don’t blame them, they’re businesses first, and there’s a seemingly endless amount of NEIPA-earmarked money burning holes through beer geeks’ cargo shorts. Nevertheless, while 2017 may indeed be the year of the NEIPA, the style represents a small portion of my essential beers list.

What impressed me the most in 2017? Craftsmanship, for one. This was often seen in Old-World styles made from beer’s four basic ingredients, like TRVE’s Cold; breweries making beers of nuance and subtlety, like Jester King’s Saison Americaine and Threes Brewing’s Grain of Salt; and beers created through the use of the wild yeasts and bacteria inherent in each brewery’s unique location, like The Ale Apothecary’s Minotaur and American Solera’s Norton Fellowship.

Of course, this list is highly personal. A good 100,000 new beers were released in the last 12 months, and I am but one man (who, yes, lives in New York). The beers below also reflect where I am at in my own craft beer-drinking journey—one that has taken me from the more bombastic beers of my youth to styles that reflect, more purely, both the expert hand of the brewer and the unique place they come from.

TRVE Cold | 4.9 percent

No longer were hip breweries embarrassed to make no-frills lagers in 2017, especially if they were the delicate, unfiltered kind. Such was the case for this heavy metal brewery out of Denver, Colorado, whose Czech-style kellerbier (a somewhat obscure, cold-lagered style) pours a hazy straw yellow, with a nose of hay and grass, leading into a biscuity, if not a tad fruity, note on the palate. A crisp, slightly bitter finish keeps you coming back for more of this sub-5 percent ABV crusher.

Proclamation Tendril (Double Dry Hopped) | 7.5 percent

I literally drank every single beer at every single Rhode Island brewery on a single Friday back in February. I found a highly-underrated brew scene, with quite a few local heroes that should be nationally renowned by now. The best of the bunch is Proclamation Ale Company, a spot just outside Providence making, yes, de rigeur hazy and hoppy beers, but coaxing unique character out of them. In a double dry-hopped version of their “1 and 1/2 times IPA,” Tendril—i.e. halfway between a single and double IPA—old-school “C” hops (Columbus, Centennial, etc.) play nice with the hipper, experimental varieties of today. It makes for a beer that is, yes, juicy and tropical as is the style these days, but still balanced by a piney, resinous quality the East Coast now mostly avoids.

Tree House Bright with Citra | 7.8 percent

Of course, the reason NEIPAs became the dominant fad in brewing today was because some places were just so damn good at making them. The preeminent producer—if not the initial popularizer of the style when they released Julius in 2012—comes out of central Massachusetts. I tried most of Tree House’s 2017 offerings and this was the one that stuck with me the most: A double IPA that’s surprisingly clean, and allows for the extraordinarily citrusy Citra to take center stage. With strong notes of mango and tangerine on the nose, with a flavor profile and texture leaning toward fresh-squeezed OJ and ruby red grapefruit juice, it’s become the archetype of the style for me.

Hudson Valley Amorphia | 6 percent

When I ran into brewer Jason Synan in early October, he hinted that he’d invented a new style of beer with the upcoming release of this sour IPA. I was leery to say the least. Weren’t there plenty of Brett-spiked IPAs already out there? This was a completely new vision, though. It is NEIPA-esque in body, green-hop character and softness—he calls on both malted oats and milk sugar—but with an added spike of tartness from strawberries. If NEIPAs are ever going to advance from their salad days, this is the direction in which they should head.

Folksbier Citrus Melange Glow Up | 4 percent

Fruited Berliner weisse is another style that has seemingly become a pure cash grab, with every brewery making fairly one-note offerings, simply because they sell so well. Not so at Travis Kauffman’s Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn brewery, which produces a series of these beers under the Glow Up moniker. Though this year saw pineapple, watermelon and cucumber-lime releases, Citrus Melange (featuring Cara Cara navel oranges, Minneola tangelos and Meyer lemons) was the best of the bunch. Wheaty with a yogurt tang on the palate due to the Lactobacillus inoculation, the addition of citrus fruit and a tinge of salinity has this drinking like the beer version of a Salty Dog.

Jester King Saison Americaine | 5.2 percent

This Austin-area brewery continues questioning what certain once-localized beer styles should offer, often to groundbreaking results. Need a lambic only be made in Pajottenland? Can you make a saison in the hot Hill Country farmlands of Texas? Whatever you want to call it, the answer in this case was a definitive yes. A true standout in the category, Saison Americaine is fermented with a mixed culture inside foudres (essentially massive oak barrels), producing a beer that is tart but not punishing, and redolent of dried apricots and fresh-squeezed lemon juice.

Threes Brewing/Eleven Madison Park Grain of Salt | 5.8 percent

Today, quality beer isn’t just served at the best restaurants in the world, it’s commissioned by them. This collaboration between a hip Gowanus, Brooklyn brewpub and Daniel Humm’s Michelin three-star spot arose when the latter’s team wanted a unique beverage pairing for a new dish on their tasting menu. A quintessential food beer, this saison is brewed with Amagansett sea salt. Bright and slightly funky, the salinity almost acts as seasoning for whatever you’re eating, while the fizziness scrubs your palate for another bite, another sip, ad infinitum.

Blackberry Farm Barrel Series 18 Month Brett Saison | 8.5 percent

“Farmhouse” breweries were long a misnomer in the American beer game, with most saisons coming out of your typical urban warehouse district. That’s why it’s been exciting to see a new breed of great beers actually coming from the farm. This farm in Walland, Tennessee, which has become a food-world destination, started brewing their own farmhouse and Belgian-style beers in 2013, but of late they’ve really come into their own. This special release takes their classic saison (which is high on the fruity esters from a special house yeast) and ages it in red wine barrels for 18 months. Bright acidity and and a dose of funk give way to plenty of bright, tart strawberry fruit with an herbal freshness that recalls dill. 

Suarez Family Backroads | 5.6 percent

This Hudson Valley outfit might have become the best brewery in America in 2017. Dan Suarez proved to be a master with unfiltered lagers last year; this year he showed his excellence in the art of funk and barrel-aging. He calls his farmhouse ales “country beers,” and they range from the simple to the sublime. While he typically eschews adjuncts, this atypical offering features foraged staghorn sumac and locally grown tangerine marigold. A masterclass in nuance and complexity, Backroads hits you with expressed citrus oils on the nose, leading into a bramble of berries and then more vinous notes, finishing with a lemon drop candy note.

Oxbow Ish | 7 percent

So often brewery collaborations are less than the sum of their parts. Not this time. Maine’s top farmhouse specialist combined with LA’s Monkish, who started out exclusively producing Belgian-style offerings to produce Ish, a dark farmhouse ale made of 95 percent Maine grains (including triticale, a wheat-rye hybrid) barrel-aged with Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus and saison yeast. Oaky and highly acidic, almost vinegar-like, it’s full of highly concentrated dark fruit (think plums, blackberries and sour cherries).

The Ale Apothecary Minotaur | 8.67 percent

My most memorable brewery visit of the year was at this just-opened barrel-aging facility in Bend, Oregon. There, Paul Arney produces single-barrel offerings that are strictly fermented by wild yeast and bacteria—though sometimes he adds fruits and botanicals—and then aged. Hardly a get-rich-quick scheme, Arney’s beers take years to mature, and such patience leads to extraordinary complex, truly one-of-a-kind brews. This year’s release of Minotaur, which is aged in wine and bourbon barrels with blackberries, particularly wowed me. Bordeaux-like, with rich, dark fruit and bittersweet chocolate notes and a tart finish, there’s simply no one else on earth making beer quite like this.

Four Quarters Brewing Co. Little Umbrellas | 3.5 percent

It would seem impossible for a beer, if not a brewery, to fly under the radar in the beer geek wonderland that is Vermont, but such is the case here. Located in Winooski, just outside of Burlington, Four Quarters is fond of using unexpected fruits for their wild ales. Thus, this unusually composed sour ale is made with toasted coconut and pineapples. Like a piña colada in a tulip glass, sweet coconut notes on the nose betray a lean, high-acid beer. Highly carbonated and just 3.5-percent alcohol, it’s extremely drinkable and refreshing.

Holy Mountain Brewing Wraith | 6 percent

Released in the last weeks of 2016, this fruited sour ale shows why many folks now hail this Seattle brewery as one of the best in America. Mixed-fermented in oak barrels with their house culture, the beer is further aged in puncheons that include blackberries and raspberries. The color of NyQuil, it’s funky, yet fruity on the nose, finding a delicate balance between the tart and jammy. Bone dry on the palate, like the best Belgian fruit lambics, the vinous mouthfeel and vivid berry flavor stuck with me all year long.

Logsdon Farmhouse Ales Spontane Wilde | 7.4 percent

The breweries with the chutzpah to attempt to make American-style gueuzes are some of the biggest names in the industry. And while Logsdon Farmhouse is hardly chopped liver, I still didn’t expect them to completely dominate our November blind tasting. Yet they did with their coolship-fermented, oak-aged spontaneous blend. Coming from Oregon’s Hood River Valley, this so-dubbed “method van lembeek” offers intense blue cheese on the nose, with notes of banana and “Honey Nut Cheerios,” matched by a mouthfeel that manages to be both creamy and sharply acidic.

American Solera Norton Fellowship | 6 percent

As Tulsa Oklahoma’s breakout brewery enters year two, brewmaster Chase Healey (formerly of Prairie Artisan Ales) is already firing on all cylinders. Norton Fellowship is American Solera’s most sophisticated, ambitious offering to date, a blend of a sour ale fruited with norton wine grapes as well as two-year-old spontaneous-fermented beer. Funky on the nose, the beer is dry and lip-puckeringly tart with a tannic finish; think of it as an American version of Cantillon’s much ballyhooed Saint Lamvinus.

Casey Brewing/Side Project Brewing Jammy | 8 percent

Another collaboration, this one between two of America’s most sophisticated wild-barrel blenders. Both the Colorado-based Casey and the St. Louis-area Side Project brewed the same saison recipe at their home base, which they then fermented and aged in oak with their respective house yeast and bacteria. After aging for several months, Colorado blackberries were added, creating two wine-like beers with assertive acidity. The beer is funkier on Side Project’s side, and jammier on Casey’s. Both are excellent.

Toppling Goliath Assassin | 12 percent

“Dessert” stouts are in the same boat as NEIPAs. These Banana Split beers are easy enough to enjoy, but they aren’t exactly nuanced. Still, if Tree House is able to stand out in a crowded field of NEIPAs, Toppling Goliath does so in the dessert stout world. First released in 2012, this latest batch was exceptional. So thick you can almost chew on it, the 12-percent ABV offering is hardly one-note. Mocha and chocolate-covered cherries are prominent with underlying notes of caramel, vanilla, marshmallows and coconut.

Mikkeller SAS RAS No. 5 – Past, Present & Future | 9 percent

I used to be happy to see Goose Island Honkers Ale on the inflight menu. This year, however, I was completely shocked to find a chardonnay barrel-aged sour ale made specifically to be served on Scandinavian Airlines and engineered for “high altitude” drinking. This “Rare Air Series” beer is citrusy and slightly herbal on the nose, with a tart and tropical body backed by a spicy yeastiness. I’m not going to tell you to fly Scandinavian Airlines just to try this beer. But I’m not going to tell you not to, either.

Bokkereyder Framboos Vanille | 6 percent

I saw no way Bokkereyder could live up to the immense hype American beer geeks started bestowing on it in 2016. But Raf Souvereyns’ one-of-a-kind blends (he doesn’t brew currently) are as good as anything produced by the blue bloods of Belgian beer. There’s also utterly unique, calling on barrel finishes and flavor additions traditionalists would never dare attempt. Framboos Vanille is a lambic aged for two years in pinot noir barrels with Pajottenland raspberries and Tahitian and Madagascar vanilla beans. Extremely fruity and sweet on the nose, it’s a roller coaster ride between the bombastic notes of barrel and vanilla and the tart, lactic notes characteristic of lambic.

3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze Cuvée Armand & Gaston (2016-2017) | 5.2 percent

Often unfairly seen as the 1B to Cantillon’s 1A in the Great Lambic Wars, 3 Fonteinen continues to produce world-class blends every year. This classic gueuze only utilizes lambics brewed at 3 Fonteinen, which started brewing these current batches in 2013 (though they have been blending since 1883). Armand Debelder took over from his father, Gaston, as current brewer and blender in 1982. Their eponymous beer, a blend of lambics aged on four different barrels originating from eight different brews, is incredibly refined and complex. Funk, hay and a cheesy note on the nose gives way to more delicate stone fruit flavors and a crisp, dry finish.

All these beers were released in 2017, or released late in 2016 and not not available to most until this year.

The post The Top 20 Beers of 2017 appeared first on PUNCH.

On what was supposed to be a sleepy Wednesday morning last November, the beloved Belgian brewery, Cantillon, had released that season’s bottles of Fou’Foune, Nath and Lou Pepe Framboise. Whereas in past years, these lambics might have lasted several days if not weeks, this time they sold out in a matter of hours due to an onslaught of atypical customers. Brewery owner Jean Van Roy claimed in a Facebook post that some of these locals “couldn’t even pronounce the name of the brewery or of the beer correctly.” They just knew they could quickly flip it to Americans on the black market.

For most people today, the only way to access Cantillon is via beer’s online black market, where bottles sell (illegally) for hundreds of dollars apiece on sites like MyBeerCellar. Over the last half-decade, Cantillon has been become a black market darling among American beer geeks. It wasn’t always this way, though.

According to Joel Shelton, in 1993, when his then-fledgling import company, Shelton Brothers, first started working with the brewery, the traditional lambic-makers weren’t just unknown in America, they weren’t particularly popular at home either.

“When we started with [Cantillon], sales were nearly non-existent, even in Belgium,” Shelton reveals. It’s been reported Cantillon had a mere 20 accounts in Brussels when they first met the Sheltons. “They mentioned that they had no U.S. distribution and that’s what I half-jokingly told [my brother] Dan when I returned home many weeks later with a pile of 750s in a green duffel bag.”

As for abruptly deciding to start a beer import company to get some bottles into America, he notes, “It was more about wanting to share my experience with my bros. I didn’t imagine anything else would come from it.”

For awhile, nothing really did. The first 1,200 cases the Sheltons brought into the country took several years to sell. Sour beer wasn’t just unpopular in America in the late-1990s, it was virtually impossible for your average consumer to find. The only makers of the style stateside in these nascent days of craft beer were a few small, hyper-local artisans like California’s Russian River and The Lost Abbey, Michigan’s Jolly Pumpkin and Colorado’s New Belgium, whose La Folie was one of only three “sours” on Beer Advocate’s Top 100 Beers list in 2007, at No. 53. For Cantillon to eventually tip in America, sour beer itself would have to become far more ubiquitous.

Of course, “sour” beer is not a style per se, but instead a recently-created catchall term for everything from historical Belgian lambic (like Cantillon) and Flanders red ale up to the modern American riffs on those styles. Eventually the latter group would take the stylistic nomenclature of “American wild ale,” as in the case of Russian River Supplication (No. 36 in 2006), a brown ale aged in pinot noir barrels alongside sour cherries and wild Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus and Pediococcus.

Russian River certainly helped pave the way for Cantillon in America. Whereas most “sour” breweries in Belgium and America exclusively focused on, well, sours, Russian River was unique in that it produced everything from pilsners to blonde ales to porters. By the mid-2000s, piny, dank west coast IPAs were America’s hottest style, and the Santa Rosa brewpub also made the best of that bunch.

In 2008, Russian Rivers’ Pliny the Elder (double IPA) and Pliny the Younger (triple IPA) both entered Beer Advocate’s top 10 for the first time. Those beers were basically unobtainable outside northern California and beer geeks began trading local buddies to acquire them. It’s not hard to imagine a Russian River local throwing a Supplication or Beatication in the FedEx box, too, which is exactly is what happened to me. It wouldn’t be long before beer geeks learned Russian Rivers’ sours were Americanized homages to Cantillon. (Russian River owner Vinnie Cilurzo visited the brewery in 2006 and came back home inspired to brew his own version of lambic.)

By 2010, American sour beer really began to garner acclaim. Russian River had four of theirs in Beer Advocate’s top 100 and Cantillon began to pick up steam, too; the days of seeing “Loons” on shelves was almost over. In fact, by 2011, the thirst had grown enough that Cantillon owner Jean Van Roy decided to reward the international beer drinkers who had made his brewery so unexpectedly popular by throwing a little celebration.

Called Zwanze Day, speciality Cantillon kegs were tapped simultaneously at eleven American bars like Monk’s Cafe in Philadelphia and Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn—all places that had been early devotees of the brewery. These “tap takeover” events allowed many Americans to finally taste these beers for the first time. Even then, however, Van Roy seemed to be wary that his cult brewery would soon be in the throes of, in his opinion, unscrupulous profiteers.

“Because of my dedication to my work as a brewer and out of respect for the product itself,” he wrote in the Zwanze Day press release, “it is very important to me for prices to stay reasonable. Unfortunately, there are those out there who couldn’t care less about spontaneous fermentation beer but who do care a lot about making easy money.”

By then there wasn’t a lot left he could do; Zwanze Day would only lead to a more rampant thirst for his offerings. By 2013, 113 years since Van Roy’s great-grandfather had first started producing beer, Cantillon finally conquered the American beer geek firmament. Within that year, 11 Cantillons suddenly jumped into Beer Advocate’s top 250. Fou’Foune, a lambic aged with apricots that had been unranked for years, was now Cantillon’s highest ranked offering at No. 11.

“America is the reason [Cantillon] survived,” Tom Peters of Monk’s told My City Paper in 2011, on the heels of Van Roy’s first goodwill visit to the States for that initial Zwanze Day. “We get a full third of Belgium’s lambic production, and we’d take more if they would give it to us.”

With a production capacity of only 1,500 barrels a year—which was just recently doubled—Cantillon needed only get mildly popular amongst a small sect of American beer (and wine) geeks to become completely unavailable the world over. While any Cantillon fan can tell you, anecdotally, that it’s become increasingly difficult to find Cantillon over the last decade—hell, I used to see it gathering dust in Whole Foods—the data actually supports it. According to BeerMenus, while the number of instances of Cantillon being available in bars, shops and restaurants has held steady, the number of businesses their website tracks has increased twelvefold.

In the late winter of 2014 I finally visited the brewery for the first time. Even then, Cantillon remained mostly an American beer geek phenomenon. In Brussels, few bars served it and I was amused to find cheap bottles at touristy postcard shops. I was likewise impressed that I could walk into the brewery with no hassle or ceremony and sit there all day drinking bottles for a dozen Euros.

It was unfathomable to me that Cantillon wasn’t as pursued by its hometown locals as it was by Americans. It appears today, however, it finally is—though, mainly as a profit opportunity.

As one angry fan who had been shut out on bottles commented on their Facebook page: “How about you Americans stop buying beers at rediculous [sic] prices? That way those resellers don’t have any business at all.”

The post The Moment Cantillon Happened appeared first on PUNCH.

Travis Hill really wanted a bottle of Four Roses 2012 Limited Edition Small Batch. Unfortunately, only around 4,000 were released, and by 2014 they were selling for a good $900 on bourbon’s black market. Way too much for the Georgia man. But, he thought, maybe he could simply blend a version of the limited edition himself.

When it comes to most of the rare and highly coveted bourbons on the market, recreating the blend would be, at best, a guessing game, but more likely impossible without access to the brand’s barrel warehouse. This isn’t the case with Four Roses, though, as their wholly unique production methods make jerry-rigging your own limited editions somewhat possible.

Four Roses is one of the most transparent companies in the oddly secretive whiskey world, completely forthright about what their grain bills consist of and the ratios of their blends. Secondly, unlike many other distilleries who have a couple grain bills and one yeast strain, Four Roses has two grain bills and five yeast strains. That means—does the math on fingers—every barrel of Four Roses could be any one of ten different recipes, each with unique flavor profiles identified by a four-letter naming structure that appears on a small sticker panel to the left of the front label. An OESQ Barrel, for example, would be a high-rye bourbon (“E”) with floral yeast notes (“Q”). The “O” and “S” are immutable and stand for “Four Roses” and “straight whiskey,” respectively. The second and forth letters correspond to the grain bill and yeast type, and they change from bottling to bottling. 

The final thing you need to know about Four Roses is that, while their standard single-barrel release in all retail stores is the OBSV recipe, the other nine recipes can be obtained with a little hustle courtesy of what are known as private-barrel picks. These are special single barrels sold by certain liquor stores like Binny’s and Julio’s (which are usually, but not always, released in the nine- to 11-year age range).

Thus, to make that 2012 Limited Edition Small Batch, Hill simply had to acquire a 17-year OBSV, an 11-year OBSV, a 13-year OBSK and a 12-year OESK.

“I could buy all those single-barrel [bottles] and mix them together at the right ratios and do that for about $300,” Hill explains. “I thought it’d be fun to make it. Plus, I’d have leftovers to drink.”

Four Roses is more than aware of this emerging phenomenon and doesn’t just not mind—they gladly encourage it. And why not? You’re still buying plenty of Four Roses in the process.

“I get emails every other week: ‘What are the recipes?’” Brent Elliott, Four Roses’ master distiller, tells me. He gladly answers all the emails—and any other questions you may have—with the accurate information. (“Brent is eager to chat with bourbon fans far and wide,” it is noted on the Four Roses online contact form.)

I met Elliott in his lab down in Lawrenceburg, KY, just outside of Lexington, where he’s currently in the midst of putting together 2018’s Limited Edition blend. I’m surprised to learn he’s actually tasted some of these ersatz blends.

“The first [amateur] sample I tried was out of the trunk of some guy’s car,” he tells me.

That “some guy” was indeed Hill, who had stopped Elliott in the parking lot of a St. Simons Island liquor store before a scheduled Four Roses event. (“How can I pass over this opportunity? I gotta have you try this!” Hill remembers thinking.) Elliott chuckles when he admits Hill’s blend wasn’t just good, it was close enough to the original release that it would be hard for many folks to tell them apart.

“I’ve since talked to a lot of these other guys who have done it,” Elliott notes. “And I just think it’s really cool.”

Blake Riber—who popularized the “Poor Man’s Pappy” blend—has also tried to simulate a few Four Roses blends, with his main focus being on recreating 2013’s terrific 125th Anniversary Small Batch Limited Edition (currently $450 or so on the secondary market). To make it, the Jacksonville man used a 55/33/12 blend of an OBSK single barrel he had actually picked himself (for his blog, Bourbonr), as well as an OESK and OBSV from two in-state retailers. His blend cost? Around $50.

In this case, however, the real 125th Anniversary uses an 18-year-old OBSV that is virtually impossible to find as a single-barrel bottling, and Riber was stuck with a mere 12-year-old OBSV. Riber played with his percentages for a month, adding more oak notes to truly nail the correct flavor profile. Even so, he found his blend just wasn’t tasting quite right. Then he got a great tip for how to improve it.

“I was talking to a Four Roses rep about it and told him I was having trouble getting close,” he tells me. “He said that’s because their mixer ‘spews’ the barrel when blending them,” he says, meaning it violently shoots the liquid around, aerating it. “I started throwing my blends into a Vitamix, and it’s greatly improved the results.”

Still, it’s easy to think something tastes close the original when you already know what it is—not to mention when you also know you just hacked it for a deep discount. But what about blind? Riber decided to do a tasting of five “real” Four Roses releases alongside three of his amateur blends, enlisting a few unsuspecting tasters (which just so happened to include Hill).

While some of the legitimate limited editions, like 2015’s Small Batch (around $300 on the black market), scored poorly among the blind tasters, the three amateur blends performed admirably. Riber’s “Poor Man’s 125th Anniversary” blend easily won it all. Riber joked during the live Google Hangout that maybe he should “put in a resumé for Four Roses master blender.”

Of course, what Four Roses fans like Riber and Hill have learned is that it’s easy to make a great “limited edition” when a master distiller like Elliott has already set the basic template for you. The real struggle is making the great blend in the first place.

“They don’t always work,” Elliott notes. “You try to make it too unique and it’ll go outside the realm of mellow and smooth. It’s all about balance.”

The post How Whiskey Geeks Are Recreating Rare Four Roses Bourbons appeared first on PUNCH.

When Sugarlands Distilling’s new Roaming Man Tennessee Straight Rye Whiskey appeared on my stoop in an ornate, copper foil-embossed box, I wasn’t exactly impressed. Inside the box was a handsome, wax-dipped bottle. Because, of course. How else are you going to convince folks to spend $50 for a 375mL bottle of two-year-old whiskey?

But perhaps I shouldn’t have judged the whiskey by its pretty package. The rye was surprising good—spicy, potent and wise beyond its years. And then I noticed the bottle’s back label, which didn’t merely list the government-required alcohol proof—one of the few things the TTB actually demands—but many other seemingly arcane facts, like how long its barrel staves had been air-dried (six months); the char level inside each 25-gallon barrel; and the barrels’ average percentage of liquid evaporation over their lifespan (17 percent). Why were they disclosing this kind of esoterica?

“We believe these are all essential facts and integral in defining what our whiskey is all about,” explains Greg Eidam, Sugarlands’ head distiller.

Spinning a good yarn about one’s origin story while revealing as little as possible about the actual liquid has been par for the course in American whiskey for quite some time. As the craft whiskey market began to boom, it dealt with its own issues of transparency, which came to a head half a decade ago with Templeton Rye. Since its introduction in 2006, the Iowa brand claimed that their “Prohibition-era” whiskey was distilled right there in the Hawkeye State. But, in a 2014 article for The Daily Beast, Eric Felten revealed that it was actually made in Indiana at MGP Ingredients, the same factory that was making whiskey for pretty much every famous “craft” distillery you had ever heard of at that point in time: Redemption, High West, Smooth Ambler, Bulleit—you name it.

Craft whiskey is not just about being small but about being “handcrafted,” and the Templetons of the world were unraveling that tale, which is arguably the most important one these distillers have to tell. Suddenly, however, a new breed of craft distillery is not just rejecting the half-truths and outright lies that have undermined the craft whiskey movement, but overcompensating for their predecessors’ missteps with extreme transparency.

“There has always been a pretty high degree of transparency with craft distillers that are actually making the whiskey themselves,” explains Mike Raymond of Houston whiskey bar Reserve 101. “Texas brands like Garrison Brothers, Balcones and Ironroot Republic will proudly tell you just about everything they do.” It’s just now they’re taking things a step further.

If knowing Roaming Man’s barrels have a “#3 char” level isn’t too much gobbledygook for the typical consumer, Roaming Man’s box also includes a postcard-size slip of translucent film that lists the whiskey’s so-called “gas chromatograph profile.” This notes how chemical compounds like ethyl butyrate, iso-amyl acetate and syringealdehyde have changed within the liquid over its aging time. You almost need a chemistry degree to decipher it all.

“[That’s] essentially the DNA, or fingerprint, of the whiskey,” explains Eidam, noting that there are thousands of different chemical congeners and specific compounds that are particularly important in giving a whiskey its character. (The card notes that ethyl hexanoate adds “sweet apple flavor & pineapple aromas,” for instance.) “For the hardcore science geek, this is a rabbit hole you might not ever come out of, but for the layman, it’s just a visual way of showing how much ‘maturing’ goes on in the barrel. Consumers can geek out on this as much or as little as they like.”

How Whiskey Geeks Are Recreating Rare Four Roses Bourbons

Turns out, all it takes is a little detective work to blend your own $900 limited edition bourbon.

Read On →

As the type of nerdy kid who spent more time reading the stats on the back of his baseball cards than admiring the beautiful swings on the front, this is something I can appreciate. Other distilleries are following suit, so hell-bent on proving they actually make their whiskey that they’re ready to turn over their receipts if necessary.

“This was a conscious decision, led by my brother Mike,” explains Bob McManus, a co-owner of St. Paul, Minnesota’s Eleven Wells. It is believed they were the first craft distillery in the country to offer this form of extreme transparency when they opened, in 2013. “To him, it was about the beauty and purity. This is what we’re doing and this is what people have done for hundreds of years. There’s no proprietary recipe or secret sauce or an ingredient like the Colonel has in his chicken. That’s why we’re happy to tell you everything.”

That “everything” includes the 13 different flavor-impacting elements listed on each and every bottle of their Prototype Series whiskey. These elements range from the more standard proof and mash bill to whether it was a sweet or sour mash, its particular yeast type and even what state the oak trees used in the barrels came from and who coopered them.

Though this might seem like unnecessary information, many of these distilleries believe it can actually help whiskey fans identify what it is they actually like. “If you find a factor that seems to be impacting your choice from batch to batch, then we want to hear about it,” Eleven Wells notes on their website. Eidam feels similarly: “It’s about educating the consumer and helping them to develop their palate. If you know what you’re drinking, you may learn that you like the spicy character from rye—but maybe only up to a certain percentage of rye.” He feels that if a distillery doesn’t share it’s mash bill with consumers, it makes it difficult for whiskey drinkers to identify what they specifically enjoy and to seek out similar products.

While most craft distilleries don’t have the money to conduct rigorous analysis like Roaming Man or Eleven Wells, simply stating if you (or MGP) actually distilled the product and then revealing your mash bill doesn’t cost a dime. As more consumers become accustomed to greater transparency, the question on many whiskey lovers’ minds is whether it will force the big boys to open their own kimonos, so to speak.

“Everywhere we go, people ask about mash bills and processes of how we make the bourbon,” says Harlen Wheatley, the master distiller at Buffalo Trace.

Wheatley’s Buffalo Trace is the only major distillery going the extreme transparency route at the moment. But Wheatley and Buffalo Trace CEO Mark Brown admit that when you spend millions of dollars on distillation, aging and processing, it’s good to keep a bit of it confidential.

“We balance [that] by showing people as much as possible about our operation to explain the craft without giving away all our secrets,” notes Wheatley.

It’s true that Buffalo Trace’s standard bottlings, like Eagle Rare, Blanton’s and even Pappy Van Winkle, don’t list too much additional information, but the Experimental Collection’s labels track everything from how many barrels went into the blend, to what warehouse floors and ricks the barrels were slotted in, to Wheatley’s own tasting notes.

“We believe it depends on the brand,” explains Brown. “For the Experimental Collection, details appear to matter more [to customers]. On a brand like Benchmark, less so.”

While the number of brands that are adhering to a reveal-everything mentality is relatively few, distilleries big and small are starting to realize that a greater degree of transparency might be necessary for a growing base of consumers who are interested in how, and where, spirits are actually made. While it’s unclear whether extreme transparency will lead to a larger economic success for the craft set, it’s certainly become a more honest form of marketing. If five years ago craft distilleries were telling tall tales about Al Capone’s secret recipes and hearkening back to the rowdy frontier days of yore, today customer seduction is, at least in part, coming in the form of ingredient lists and chemistry tables.

“This shit interests me,” says McManus. “And, if this shit interests me, it might interest you too.”

The post Craft Whiskey’s New Era of Extreme Transparency appeared first on PUNCH.

In the Belgian countryside, in places like Gaume and Vleteren, sit centuries-old monasteries with names like Abbaye Notre-Dame d’Orval and Saint-Sixtus Abbey. There, honest-to-god monks exist. They pray, take walks in the garden, make cheeses and jams. Some even produce beer, often just enough to fund their life of solitude. I try and remind myself of this every time I’m at my crummy local bodega and spot neglected bottles of Chimay.

Trappist beer is ubiquitous—as available to most drinkers as a Heineken or Sam Adams. Yet it’s highly regarded too; in the mid-aughts you couldn’t find many beers more respected. But of late its reputation has gone stale—too old-world, too malty, not juicy enough.

In fact, this may be hard for NEIPA-crushing, 20-something “hazebros” to believe, but in the recent past, trappist-made quadruples dominated best-beers lists and online trading forums. Westvleteren 12, a beer supposedly only available from Saint-Sixtus (though, in actuality, bootlegged at many bars across Europe), was, for nine years, Beer Advocate’s No. 1 beer in the world. Today, while still a respectable No. 32, it’s rarely sold in this country—considered passé in our double dry-hopped world.

Trappist ales do not represent one style of beer, per se, nor are there any defined parameters (aside from the fact that trappist monks must oversee their production). But there are usually a few hallmarks. These beers are simple yet hearty, heavy on dark European malts like Vienna and Munich, boozy (generally between 7 and 12 percent ABV) with a very subtle hop profile, and typically marked by sweetness due to the addition of Belgian candi sugar (sort of like rock candy). And while the monks usually don’t label their own beers by style, beer lovers have helped create a taxonomy for them. There are the dark fruit-like dubbels, the pale and ester-y tripels, and the high-alcohol quadrupels which, for the longest time, represented the pinnacle of well-crafted beer.

Today, however, these centuries-old styles are going through a radical reconstruction—one best described as “Americanization.” Chimay now offers a Grande Réserve, aged in rum barrels, while La Trappe is now on their 29th batch of experimental beer, having aged their quadrupel in everything from Kirsch to Bruichladdich single-malt barrels. Likewise, trappist breweries have started to expand beyond Belgium’s borders into Holland, Austria and Italy.

In 2013, America’s first trappist brewery opened at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Massachusetts. Their Spencer Brewery started with a fairly standard Belgian-style pale ale, but today makes an imperial stout, a pilsner and, yes, an IPA. These new-fangled trappist beers are giving their Belgian brethren a run for their money, as we learned from our recent blind tasting of 18 bottles. Somewhere, there’s a perturbed Belgian monk wishing he hadn’t taken that vow of silence.

For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Assistant Editor, Chloe Frechette; and George Flickinger of B. United International, a top beer importer. While trappist beer still mostly exists on the dubbel/tripel/quadrupel spectrum, our tasting also included a few lighter offerings, as well as some “nouveau” trappist beers from around the world. Here are our top picks.

The post Can America Embrace the Modern Trappist Ale? appeared first on PUNCH.

Joshua Richholt has his doctor test him once a year for lead poisoning. Not because he’s been huffing paint or working out of an old office building, though. He simply insists on drinking bourbon from collectible, midcentury decanters, which, according to the FDA, have been found to leach lead into the liquid.

Richholt, a managing partner of Brooklyn’s The Well, is one of a small group of collectors (and drinkers) of these campy releases from a bygone era. “It was a way for us to get rid of old bourbon,” Fred Noe, master distiller of Jim Beam, says of these decanters, first produced by his company in 1953. “We just had so much inventory—150-months-old sometimes.”

When post-Prohibition Americans started drinking this new exotic spirit called vodka, Kentucky was soon left with a glut of well-aged bourbon. Jim Beam came up with a clever way to gussy up their lagging products: put standard Kentucky straight bourbon into decorative decanters made by the Regal China Company. The gambit worked. People scrambled to acquire these bourbon-filled keepsakes, shaped like everything from Corvettes to Poulan chainsaws to Elvis to disgraced former Vice President Spiro Agnew.

“In the ’60s and ’70s people collected the shit out of them,” Noe adds. “It was nuts.”

Other distilleries would follow suit. Starting in 1971, Wild Turkey released turkey decanters annually; Stitzel-Weller, the progenitor to Pappy, produced Rip Van Winkle versions; and Ezra Brooks made decanters in the shape of dueling pistols, potbelly stoves and the Iowa State Capitol.

Because of the potential lead concerns inherent in the ceramic, and a high propensity for evaporation due to bad closures, many modern whiskey enthusiasts have no interest in drinking the liquid. Thus, old “juice” that might typically fetch hundreds of dollars—if not thousands, in the case of Stitzel-Weller—can be purchased for dirt cheap at flea markets or yard sales.

“The thing was, all these collectors got old and died off, and no young people took up the hobby,” Noe explains. “So it went away. But there’s still a lot of good bottles around.”

Below, a few notable designs from Richholt’s extensive collection of nearly 100 vintage decanters. (And no, he doesn’t have lead poisoning.)

Jim Beam

Jim Beam released several dozen different decanters every year, for decades. These releases generated enough interest for the International Association of Jim Beam Bottle Collectors to be formed, with chapters in various cities across the globe. This typically garish decanter celebrates a 1975 convention put on by a Sacramento faction.

Wild Turkey

Wild Turkey is the most celebrated brand in the decanter game, due to both the quality of the artwork and the whiskey, which was usually 8-year-old bottled at the brand’s iconic 101 proof. Released in different series from 1971 through 1989, the liquid has the classic Turkey dusty “funk.”

Old Crow Chess Set (Queen)

The only decanter series that most modern geeks actively pursue, the one-time 1969 release offered 32 different pieces. This 10-year-old is considered by many to be some of the most exceptional liquid they’ve ever tasted. Unfortunately, bad closures means a potential buyer can only tell if a tax stamp-sealed bottle is full by weighing it. (Richholt claims it should be about four pounds.)

Old Fitzgerald Prime

A standard shape and style for the era, this “crockery” decanter was produced en masse and then painted with different honorees depending on the occasion. This 7-year-old Stitzel-Weller “wheater” celebrates South Carolina’s 1970 tricentennial. A mere two years later, the famed distillery would be sold to Norton-Simon.

Cabin Still Hillbilly

Stitzel-Weller began producing these 90-proof “hillbilly” bottlings as early 1954, eventually expanding into a full series of decanters featuring “fanciful characters from the Kentucky bluegrass where great bourbon was born,” according to the bottle’s neck. Even in 1969 when this model was released, the packaging materials were labeling it as a surefire collector’s item, “which will increase in value with the years.”

Old Bardstown LSU Tiger

Despite NCAA rules against alcohol branding, the Willett Distillery—using the name Old Bardstown—bottled a series of college mascot decanters in 1979. Though they produced ones for other teams like the Arkansas Razorbacks and Georgia Bulldogs, LSU decanters seem to appear most frequently on the secondary market and eBay.

The post Tour an Oddball Collection of Midcentury Bourbon Decanters appeared first on PUNCH.

New Mexico is held in the popular imagination for its pueblos and green Hatch chiles and scorching deserts, for Georgia O’Keeffe and Breaking Bad. But journey to the Land of Enchantment’s northernmost region and you’ll find the ski world’s most famous cocktail, the Tree Martini.

Ernst Hermann Bloch, a German who worked for U.S. intelligence during World War II interrogating captured Nazi brass, was an avid skier while growing up in St. Moritz. After the war, he moved to New Mexico with new wife, Rhoda, taking the Americanized name “Ernie Blake” (his military code name). In 1953, Blake purchased 80 acres of land in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, 20 miles north of Taos, and started his resort, Ski Valley, setting up shop in a trailer at the base of the mountain and building lifts with a mule named Lightning.

“[He] hand hewed the ski area and its precipitous terrain,” explained the Denver Post, “crafting a premiere ski school and adding flourishes like tucking beakers of martinis behind trees on the mountain.”

By the 1958-59 season, Ski Valley’s third official winter as a resort, the slopes were still too treacherous for the typical jet-setting snow bunny. As the story goes, that season, a non-expert found herself stuck in the middle of the Snakedance run blinded by the late-afternoon light and too frozen in fear to continue down its steep slope. That’s when her instructor for the day, Blake, came up with an idea: He sent his 15-year-old son Mickey down to Rhoda to retrieve something for a little “medical experiment.” Mickey returned with a glass porron filled with a dry gin Martini.

“You will drink, or you will die,” Ernie stated in his thick Bavarian accent to the teetotaling Baptist woman, according to Snow Report, an industry website. She eventually did, taking the classic Spanish wine pitcher with its long spout and pouring a thin stream of Martini directly into her mouth. As the story goes, her fear was immediately alleviated and she soon skied down the mountain “like an ace,” according to Blake. Recognizing his stroke of genius, Blake acquired several more hand-blown porrons from Juarez, Mexico, and started burying them, full of gin and vermouth, in the snow beside four spruce trees marked with yellow engineer’s tape.

Why Martinis? Because, as Blake once explained to the New York Times, “White wine is dangerous. It makes the knees buckle.”

The Tree Martini became a sensation; by the early-1960s, Blake had started an elite ski club know as HAMS—High Altitude Martini Skiers. According to the January 1980 issue of Ski, membership was available to “anyone who has downed a martini mixed at least 10 to 1 [gin to dry vermouth] at an altitude of 11,000 feet or higher.” The article noted that the one catch was the drink needed to be consumed in an unpressurized atmosphere with at least one foot on earth.

Mostly a local, ski-industry secret for the next two decades, it was first nationally reported on by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Donal Henehan in November 8, 1981’s New York Times: “…since that time Taos skiers have come to know that on certain days, if they look diligently, they might find martini-filled bottles hanging from trees along their way,” wrote Henehan. “Ernie insists that the spraying of martini into the mouth is not only therapeutic but entirely safe. ‘It is aerated and very relaxing.’” By 1985, Blake had changed his reasoning somewhat, telling the Chicago Tribune the Martinis were meant “to refurbish the aggressiveness and courage of even the weariest winter warrior.”

If this oddball exercise spread to other mountains and other ski resorts, it didn’t gain any real traction outside of Taos. Likewise, no Ski Valley resident I spoke to knew of any other mountains with Martini trees. “[I] have not heard about any other resorts adapting the concept,” claims Claire Mylott, senior director of communications for the Ski Valley resort, “and since this is a tradition rooted in the original owner and founder, it’s unique to Taos.” (In many ski resorts, however, bra trees are a popular sideshow, something that Grand Marnier once used in an ad.)

In a way, it’s not surprising that the ritual remained unique to Taos. If the mere existence of bars mid-mountain is ipso facto proof that people are skiing while sauced, most resorts still try to push that under the rug. In fact, at many European resorts it has become a crime to ski while drunk. Which makes it all the more remarkable that for a such a subversive practice, the Tree Martini continued to casually exist at Taos Ski Valley well into this century. Perhaps that’s because it was the rare family-owned resort—at least until 2013, when Blake’s family finally sold the resort to billionaire hedge-fund manager Louis Bacon.

“Other resorts—those more concerned with liability than culture—would have shut this practice down long ago,” claimed Denver’s 5280 Magazine.

Today, the Tree Martini ritual mostly lives on under the supervision of the Ernie Blake Snowsports School. Despite being one of the most highly-regarded instructional schools in the nation, for the last 60 years they’ve routinely lead skiers to designated Tree Martinis if they need a little liquid courage. (As Blake once noted: “It is especially valuable for older people like myself. I need [a martini] all the time when the light is bad.”) No longer permitted to be buried in the snow, Tree Martinis are now hidden in birdhouse-like lockboxes mounted to tree trunks.

“The times [the Martini tree is visited] are irregular and not publicized, but word of mouth can spread on the mountain,” explains Mylott, who notes that the resort now keeps a staffer nearby to check everyone’s IDs.

Nevertheless, rumors abound that scofflaws are still burying Tree Martinis in the snow. “Has anybody ever found [one]?,” asked one curious poster on a skiing message board. To which another poster smugly replied: “Yes. But helps to know the person who hides it.”

The post The Legend of the Taos Tree Martini appeared first on PUNCH.

“Why do people pay more for the same whiskey distilled in Indiana from one NDP [non-distiller producer] vs another? [sic],” pondered a man on one of Facebook’s private whiskey groups. What he is referring to is Midwest Grain Products (MGP), a Lawrenceburg, Indiana, distillery that by now is well-known for providing the whiskey for many American upstarts.

Like everything on Facebook, the responses to that initial question ranged from earnest to snide:

“Reputation. Fan following.”
“Pretty labels!”
“Presumed blending or barrel picking abilities.”
“Because there is a sucker born every minute.”

Even as a fan of MGP, I couldn’t exactly disagree with the any of those answers. Yet I, too, am certain that some MGP bottlers were clearly better than others. I just can’t tell you exactly why that is. Maybe I am just a sucker who likes pretty labels.

The actual MGP distillery has been standing in the same spot since 1847. It was purchased by Seagram after Prohibition and, by 2011, was in the hands of MGP Ingredients, a publicly-traded, Kansas-based supplier of wheat proteins and starches. Right about then, with many of those same Seagram distillers still on staff, MGP started selling bulk spirits to anyone who would buy them.

While MGP does produce neutral grain spirits, gin, bourbon and even malt whiskey, most people agree it’s with rye that they truly excel. Their signature rye whiskey is 95-percent rye grain—a ratio rarely seen on the market—which was once used as a minor flavoring component in their Seagram’s 7 Crown.

As rye whiskey began making a comeback in America, MGP’s stock of well-aged rye whiskey was suddenly in demand. New brands like High West and Smooth Ambler greedily snapped up any barrels they could get their hands on. Whiskey geeks loved these offerings and soon other brands were likewise sourcing their “craft” rye from MGP.

According to blogger Steve Ury’s Complete List of American Whiskey Distilleries & Brands, there are at least 130 “distilleries” sourcing whiskey from MGP. (There are probably even more by now, as Ury decided to quit updating his massive list last year.) These include some of the biggest names in the business: Angel’s Envy, Bulleit, George Dickel, Willett and countless others.

When we decided to assemble this tasting, the question on my mind was, when you pit all of these brands against each other, blind, how much variation can you find between each? Is a certain age the “sweet spot” for an MGP rye? Or maybe it’s a certain proof? Is single-barrel MGP superior to a blend of barrels? And how much does so-called “barrel finishing” accelerate standard MGP toward greatness? Ultimately, we learned there’s no constant as to what factors make for a great MGP rye bottling—and, likewise, what it will to cost you.

There are a few similarities we did uncover, however. MGP ryes are so famous for their “dill pickle” note that it’s become a long-running geek joke. Indeed, the younger options we tasted did offer a lot of herbal aromas, not just dill but also of wintergreen and eucalyptus, though these notes tended to fade over the years as barrel notes took over. MGP ryes have a great oily mouthfeel, too, enabling them to remain sippable even at cask strength. Other than that, even if people worry that the prevalence of MGP rye on the market has created homogeneity, it’s hard to concur with that statement after our tasting. We encountered such a vast range of different flavor profiles that, in many cases, it was hard to believe two competing products were made from the same original distillate.

For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Senior Editor, Lizzie Munro; Assistant Editor, Chloe Frechette; and Social Media Editor, Allison Hamlin. We tried to only include MGP ryes of the iconic 95-percent rye variety (of late, MGP has started introducing other rye percentages). Our tasting included bottles as young as two years old, and as old as 14; bottles as cheap as $24, and as pricey as nearly $500; and ones as low as 80-proof and as high as 120.6. Here are our favorites.

Note: While OKI Rye Reserve was one of the top picks in our tasting, we ultimately decided to not include it; New Riff Distilling has just discontinued the series as they begin releasing their own distillate. Some bottles can still be found on shelves throughout Kentucky and the Cincinnati area, however.

The post The Ultimate MGP Rye Whiskey Showdown appeared first on PUNCH.

Check TTB regulations closely and you’ll see there are only eight different bottle sizes liquor companies can legally sell to American consumers these days. That starts at the bottom with the 50-milliliter mini-bar “nip” and goes all the way up to the frat-friendly 1.75-liter “handle” size, which sounds reasonable enough. But in the 1960s and ’70s, that wasn’t the case. Back then, distilleries were not only producing, but were legally selling, enormous, gallon-sized vessels filled with bourbon.

“The big bottles don’t really have huge history behind them,” explains Justin Thompson. “They really were just used as a showy display.”

Thompson, the co-founder of the Bourbon Review and co-owner of Belle’s Cocktail House in Lexington, Kentucky, has been a longtime collector of vintage (and often strange) bottles of historic American whiskey. Last year, when a Kentucky House Committee passed legislation allowing for bars and restaurants to purchase vintage bottles from private collections, Thompson knew he had found his next business opportunity. Earlier this month, with friend and fellow collector Justin Sloan, he opened Justins’ House of Bourbon, a store that stocks perhaps the largest vintage bourbon collection in the entire world, with highlights including a 1919 Bond & Lillard and the famed Pappy Van Winkle “Green Glass.” But the real showstoppers, at least visually, are some of the gallon-plus sized bourbon bottles on display, a few of which stand nearly waist-high.

“It’s crazy some of these have survived so long,” says Sloan. “They’re definitely more rare than regular [dusty] bottles, but there’re more of them out there than you’d think, too.”

Thompson is generally right that there isn’t much history or even explicit reasoning behind these giant bottles, which have been illegal to package in since 1979. None of the major Kentucky distilleries I talked to could even point to the first one to be manufactured, nor could the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. Sloan claims the earliest example he’s ever come across is a 1957 Jim Beam, and that seems about right. Much like oddball decanters, also started by Jim Beam, these big bottles emerged during bourbon’s midcentury “glut” era, perhaps in the hopes of moving excess product. (However, there are also examples of giant gin and Scotch bottles from the time.)

“They’re definitely more rare than regular [dusty] bottles,” says Sloan, “but there’re more of them out there than you’d think, too.”

If Jeroboams of wine make sense from a long-term aging and celebratory perspective, there are very few instances where you’d need so much bourbon in one place, at one time. Still, as Sloan explains, “A lot of bars ended up with them. It was probably just brands putting them behind the bar in the hopes of getting attention over [other brands’] smaller bottles.” He also points to the pouring apparatuses that came with the bottles, often cradles, as further proof that they were being used to actually serve people.

Although, quite a few of these bottles clearly weren’t being drunk by any one. “It’s crazy some of these have survived so long,” thinks Sloan.

Below, a few notable bottles from the Justins’ House of Bourbon collection of large-format bourbons.

Old Crow Gallon | 1964

The idea that these large-format bottles were merely bar showpieces is quickly dispelled when you see the Kansas tax stamp across the cap of this bottle, proof it was at one time actually sold to consumers in the state. From the Old Crow Distillery in Frankfort, bottled by W.A. Gaines and Co., Sloan calls it “usual suspect” Old Crow, meaning 86 proof and 4 years old.

Old Grand-Dad Gallon | Mid-1970s

This 86-proof “OGD” rests in a wooden cradle, which would have helped bartenders pour this cumbersome beast. Currently, Old Grand-Dad is owned by Beam-Suntory, but this is an example of National Distillers juice, some of the most ballyhooed dusty bourbon found on the secondary market. While drinking from any of these big boys would be a treat for most of us, Sloan casually notes that he’s tried them all—and particularly enjoyed this one.

Old Fitzgerald Gallon | 1972

This bottled-in-bond bourbon was distilled in 1968 at the famed Stitzel-Weller Distillery. Considered a bit of a bottom shelf pour these days—and now in Heaven Hill’s portfolio—back then it was under Pappy’s purview, and considered exceptional. The squat bottle comes with a metal-and-wood pouring cradle.

W.L. Weller Special Gallon | 1979

The crown jewel of the Justins’ House of Bourbon big-bottle collection is also courtesy of Stitzel-Weller. Bottled in the final year of the gallon bottles’ heyday, it’s no different than the standard Weller of the era, but such exemplary bourbon in such a large quantity obviously fetches a massive price amongst collectors: around $22,500 on today’s market.

Four Roses 4.5L | 1994

This extra-large Four Roses release proves distillers were still occasionally making bottles of this scale after 1979, but only for international customers. Produced as a promotional item for the Japanese market, Sloan speculates it might have just sat in a liquor store for a long time with nobody wanting it. He calls the juice inside “the start of what we know of Four Roses today.” He claims not to see a ton of the distillery’s straight bourbon from this era, making this bottle quite special.

The post Tour a Collection of Gallon-Sized Vintage Bourbon Bottles appeared first on PUNCH.

After nearly two decades covering craft beer, there are few things geeks do to secure limited beer that surprise me anymore. They swap it through private Facebook groups and make illicit black market purchases. They wait in interminable overnight lines and sometimes even pay TaskRabbits for the privilege. They’ve even been known to don disguises and chase delivery trucks. But I’m not sure I’ve heard of anyone outsmarting the system quite like Chris Porter.

Since 2013, when he and his then-girlfriend visited the Belgian farmlands of West Flanders, Porter, who is a web developer by day, has been obsessed with Saint-Sixtus Abbey’s Westvleteren XII, long ranked the “best beer in the world.” On that trip he also learned that you cannot simply walk into the brewery to secure a few bottles of the monks’ highly acclaimed dubbels and quadrupels. Instead, you must follow an arduous, byzantine telephone ordering system.

It works like this: For a few hours per day, three days per week (as determined by an always-changing bottle release timetable), the abbey opens their single landline to callers looking to buy beer. If you happen to get a hold of Mark, the only employee responsible for sales, you’ll be able to give him your information and pick up your two wooden crates exactly one week later. Afterwards, the abbey logs each buyer’s telephone and license plate numbers, both of which are locked out of the system for 60 days to prevent any one buyer acquiring more than their share.

Porter initially dismissed the idea of even attempting to purchase Westvleteren; he was based in New York, and even if he managed to place an order successfully, there was no way he’d be able to pick it up. But the following year, when he took a job that had him flying to Paris every other week, he began thinking about ways to hack the system.

With Belgium six hours ahead of New York and the line opening at 8 a.m. local time, Porter would need to start dialing in the dead of night—along with millions of other callers around the world. “I worked out the math,” he explains. “On my iPhone, the fastest I can do a full cycle—dial, call, hit the cell towers, hit their phone line, hear busy signal, hang-up—is eight seconds. The statistical odds of getting in in those eight seconds is impossible.”

In an effort to improve his chances, Porter began researching Voice over IP (internet protocol), or VoIP, essentially a long-winded term for an internet phone provider, like Skype or Google Voice, which would allow him to make faster calls. Eventually, he settled on a business plan from Vonage, which, for $50 per month, could dial two lines at a time, each with a complete time of about three seconds per call, amounting to one call made every one-and-a-half seconds. A third-party softphone allowed him to add even more dialers to his Vonage account for just $5 more. Before long, Porter was using five different phone lines, each dialing simultaneously every second or so, as he lay in bed listening through headphones.

“I hear the audio feed of all of [the calls] at the same time, a symphony of busy signals,” says Porter. But soon enough, there was a voice at the other end of the line. “He starts out in Flemish, then French, then English, saying all the greetings. You say something, then he quickly adjusts to your language.” Porter was finally able to place his first order with Mark.

The next Saturday, after working all week in Paris, Porter went to pick up his beer. He took the morning train out to Poperinge, five miles from the abbey, and found a driver via Google named “Luc”—not his real name—who showed up in what was clearly his personal car. (Taxis, it turns out, are banned in Poperinge.)

But after looping around the horseshoe driveway outside Saint-Sixtus, Porter hit another stumbling block. He was informed that he wouldn’t be able to complete his purchase after all; the abbey bans pickup by taxis or personal drivers out of fear that it might be related to a commercial enterprise. After a lengthy argument with Mark, who relented and sold him just one case, Porter was peeved that he hadn’t gotten his full allotment, and made it a mission to acquire as much Westvleteren as he could. “They broke their contract with me,” he says, “so all bets were off from that point on.”

He also caught a lucky break with Luc. “On the way back to the train station, [Luc’s] feeling bad for how I was treated,” recalls Porter. “He says, ‘Listen, if you ever need me to pick up beers for you, I’ll give you my license plate number and you can use that over the phone. Also, I have five cars.’”

With five different license plates available—and five separate phone lines—Porter was soon able to procure 10 cases, or 240 bottles, approximately every 60 days without being locked out of the system.

Still, he’s quick to point out that he was hardly operating some well-oiled criminal enterprise. Certainly, he bootlegged some—“I became known as the guy with a shitload of Westy,” he says—moving each case for $350 apiece (they retail from the abbey at around $50), mostly to friends in the New York beer scene. But because of weight issues, he could only bring back two cases per flight. While some was stored at his apartment in Alphabet City and his girlfriend’s parents’ basement in Maine, the remainder (often up to 20 cases at a time) was kept inside Luc’s garage in Belgium.

By the summer of 2017, Porter was growing tired of bootlegging beer. He was about to get married to the woman who took him to Saint-Sixtus a half-decade earlier. And, with their wedding coming up in August, he’d finally found a use for all those cases. “This is going to ostentatiously be our wedding beer,” Porter recalls thinking. “Our guests will only drink Westvleteren.”

He figured out all the customs, duty and freight forms he’d need to file and pay; he found a European freighter to ship for him and a customs broker to speed up the process; he even got his own corrugated cardboard boxes custom-designed by a German company. Still, on the afternoon before his wedding, he was sitting in the JFK International cargo lot in his Honda Element, hoping and praying his bottles would actually arrive.

“I wasn’t married yet,” he says, “so I can safely say the happiest moment of my life up to that point was when that forklift pulled out of the warehouse with my crates of Westvleteren shrink-wrapped on the pallet.”

The post The Westvleteren Hacker appeared first on PUNCH.

The crudest era in cocktail history begins with a man pruning his peach trees in Florida in the early ’80s. The gentleman in question is Earl LaRoe, a flavor scientist for National Distillers, a wine and spirits company that, at the time, was struggling mightily. In an effort to turn around sagging sales on the heels of a wave of anti-alcohol sentiment (much of it driven by concerns about drunk driving), executives at National Distillers asked him to help develop a lighter, sweeter, lower-proof product. Why not peach liqueur? he thought.

DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps was inauspiciously released in the early fall of 1984, two years after the first wave of “fruity” schnapps had hit the American market to decent success. These products, like National Distillers’ new 48-proof, crystal-clear, naturally-flavored peach cordial, were quite different from the historically dry schnapps (i.e. fruit eau de vie) that had been made in Central Europe and the Alps since the 1500s.

As the New York Times wrote, “[It was] sweet and uncomplicated, something one does not have to get used to, like whisky or dry red wine.”

At the time, whenever they were rolling out a new product, Jack Doyle, an executive at National Distillers, would have his buddy Ray Foley, come into their Park Avenue offices to offer some thoughts. A former Marine, one-time joke writer for Johnny Carson and longtime bartender, the no-nonsense Foley was managing The Manor, a multi-room restaurant and wedding venue in West Orange, New Jersey, that sold more liquor than any other venue in the state. If Foley liked something, National Distillers knew he could help move a lot of it quickly.

“For day-to-day drinks you can’t be doing those stupid cocktails with 14 ingredients, five of them organic, two you can only get on Wednesday…” Foley tells me. He was, and still is, a firm believer in creating simple cocktails that a bartender can produce repeatedly in high volume. Right there on Doyle’s desk, Foley mixed the Peachtree Schnapps with some orange juice. Doyle liked it, and joked he could “still smell the fuzz” of the peach. As he cut a navel orange wedge for garnish, Foley dubbed his new drink the Fuzzy Navel.

“Jack immediately bought suitcases for all his salesmen and ordered them to go around the country with bottles of Peachtree and orange juice,” recalls Jaclyn Foley, Ray’s wife and the co-publisher of Bartender Magazine, which they launched together in 1979. “They were all soldiers, like an army, marching into the bars with those stuffed suitcases. ‘Hi, we have a new drink… would you like to try it?’”

For the record, multiple cocktail blogs repeat a story that a liquor distributor named Jack Sherman created the Fuzzy Navel at the Wagon Tongue Bar in Omaha. “That would be bullshit. How would a product launched in New York first take off in Nebraska?” asks Jaclyn. I likewise find no proof that it is true, though Sherman may have created the Hairy Navel spin-off, which calls on the addition of vodka. (Amusingly, his bar has since become the Waggin’ Tongue Kennels & Grooming.)

These drinks suggested sweetness, a ton of juice and not a lot of thought—because who really needs to contemplatively sip a Silk Panties?

The Fuzzy Navel was such an immediate hit that DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps became the ninth best-selling alcohol in America (with 1.7 percent of the total market), moving over 12 million bottles in its first year on shelves. It was the fastest-selling new alcohol product since Prohibition. The New York Times reported that 30 other peach schnapps copycats almost immediately entered the marketplace. That same year, no less than William S. Burroughs, writing for Esquire, called Peachtree Schnapps “the liquor industry’s equivalent of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.” That wasn’t exactly a compliment.

While critics derided this new cocktail trend, young drinkers lapped it up. The Chicago Tribune attributed Peachtree and, in turn, the Fuzzy Navel’s popularity to the “so-called ‘flavor generation’—baby-boomers who were reared on sugary colas and for whom lower-alcohol beverages signify health, fitness and safe driving.” Fuzzy Navels were also cheap, as Peachtree was only about $5 a bottle.

“The days for acquiring a taste for alcoholic drinks are over,” exclaimed Patricia Wiley, director of new products for National Distillers, at the time. “The baby-boomers have a sweet tooth and want instant gratification.”

In 1987, thanks in part to the success of Peachtree, Jim Beam bought National Distillers for $545 million—around $1.2 billion today. That same year, Beverage Network reported that America’s most popular drink was now officially the Fuzzy Navel (No. 2 was the Long Island Iced Tea). It had become, as William Grimes wrote in his book, Straight Up or On the Rocks, “a kind of cult, rallying points for young drinkers in search of fun and not too picky about taste.”

The Fuzzy Navel and its spin-offs signaled to bartenders that giving a drink a silly, sexualized name was a major selling point. These drinks suggested sweetness, a ton of juice and not a lot of thought—because who really needs to contemplatively sip a Silk Panties?

The Silk Panties, named “Drink of the Year” by Bartender Magazine in 1986, gave way to the Slippery Nipple a.k.a. the Buttery Nipple (Baileys Irish Cream and Sambuca or butterscotch schnapps), the Slow Comfortable Screw (sloe gin, Southern Comfort, vodka and orange juice) and the Redheaded Slut (peach schnapps, Jägermeister and cranberry juice).

“The cheekiness of these names dovetailed with the new MTV brand of brazen sexuality,” says Jason Rowan, a longtime cocktail writer who had just moved to New York during this era. “Madonna, Samantha Fox, chicks being badass as they stepped up to being sexually aggressive to an extent not really seen before.”

The Citizen Kane of sexually-named cocktails arrived in 1987. National Distributing, which sold Peachtree nationwide, devised a Spring Break Contest in Fort Lauderdale with a simple charge: The bartender who could sell the most peach schnapps during the week would get a $100 bonus. At a spot called Confetti, a costume-themed dance club where confetti literally fell from the ceiling, 25-year-old Ted Pizio essentially took the red-hot Fuzzy Navel and mixed it with a Cape Cod. He called it the Sex on the Beach.

The Sex on the Beach quickly became the de facto order at the country’s growing crop of beach-themed bars. In New York magazine’s summer “Scenes” of 1987, for example, writer Daniel Shaw cites Lucy’s Surfeteria on the Upper West Side, where Columbia coeds devoured Ocean Pacific fajitas and “‘Sex on the Beach’ is not a suggestion, just a drink on the menu.” The drink went viral, and it didn’t seem to matter that most places didn’t know the original recipe. Countless sickly sweet combos would eventually claim the same name: one popular variant had vodka, Chambord, Midori, pineapple juice and cranberry juice, while another swapped in grenadine. Often, it was just served as a shot—half vodka, half Peachtree, with a splash of grenadine.

The Sex on the Beach and its cohorts soon spread from chic nightclubs in major markets to local watering holes in smaller towns, eventually becoming a critical part of chain restaurants like TGI Friday’s (where a drink called the Diddy on the Beach still persists). They also firmly rooted themselves in popular culture, proudly ordered in such hip ’80s movies as St. Elmo’s Fire and Earth Girls Are Easy (and ultimately used as a punchline by 2007’s Shrek the Third and 2009’s I Love You Man).

In 1988’s Cocktail, the Fuzzy Navel and Sex on the Beach famously appear in the opening stanza of Tom Cruise’s standing-on-the-bar-shouting poem “The Last Barman Poet”:

I see America drinking the fabulous cocktails I make/
Americans getting stinking on something I stir or shake/
The Sex on the Beach/
The schnapps made from peach.

That poem would also mention the Ding-a-Ling, a veracious-sounding but completely phony cocktail, and the Orgasm, a truly vile combo of amaretto, Kahlúa and Baileys.

“Some might say this poem,” wrote Jason Wilson in his book Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits, “pinpoints precisely the nadir of bartending in the twentieth century.” Nevertheless, he still sees the positives in the era. While Wilson realizes that more time was surely spent coming up with risqué names for these drinks than on the actual recipes, he does note, “Perhaps hundreds of years from now, when the history of our era in bartending is written, this type of shot will represent a primitive but significant stage of craft.”

I think he’s right. I started writing this piece on a lark, thinking I’d simply catalog a funny little footnote in cocktail history. Quickly, however, I learned that these suggestive drinks were 1980s cocktail history. The liqueurs they were based on dominated alcohol sales in an era when dark spirits like bourbon were being left for dead and vodka wasn’t yet red-hot. These drinks represented the flavor profile of the decade. They are also revealed its general proclivities.

“There’s something grade-schoolish in us all that gives us a kick out of just pronouncing the names of these drinks,” Ray Foley, as his alter-ego “Hymie Lipshitz,” writes in the introduction to his 1987 “pournography” entitled X-Rated Drinks. Back then, he had a solid theory for their popularity: “[S]ince from the time of the pyramid-building Pharaohs on down, spirits have been used as a liquid facilitator of, ah, amatory purposes.”

Lipshitz’s 250 recipes included such long-forgotten hits as the A.S.S. (Absolut, spearmint schnapps and Sambuca), The Ball Banger (ouzo and orange juice) and three different Bend Me Over cocktails. A brief mention of the book in Playboy would lead to it becoming a minor sensation itself—even if the only way to buy it was to send a personal check for $6.90 to the Foleys’ P.O. box in New Jersey.

If the sex-drink craze had mostly disappeared by the end of the 1980s, one of the most popular and still enduring entries in the canon would arrive in the mid-1990s, perhaps fueled by the then-rising popularity of lascivious bachelorette parties. The Blowjob Shot was made by slowly layering Baileys, Kahlúa and amaretto and then topping it with whipped cream. It was to be drunk by putting your hands behind your back, and moving your mouth agape toward the shot glass sitting on the bar… or in a man’s waistband. (“[T]he mother-in-law is liable to call the whole thing off when she sees the bride… downing a ‘blow job’ shot from some stranger’s lap,” Herbert I. Kauet wrote in his 1999 guide The Bachelorette Party: Creating an Event She’ll Remember Forever, the earliest such written mention I could find of the drink.)

“It seems to me that much can be learned about a society in any given point in time by the names it produces for its cocktails,” wrote Andrew Sachs on an early-internet era cocktail forum. “Let’s hope that the early 1990s have more to say for itself than this.”

They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. By the late 1990s, some of the cocktail world’s modern luminaries were laying the foundation for a revival of classic drinks that would send Peachtree Schnapps into exile. But like Hammer pants and the perm, the Fuzzy Navel and its brethren were never really meant to last. As Grimes wrote toward the end of the era: “[T]he sort of drinker who would step up to the bar and order a Teeny Weeny Woo Woo with a straight face turned out to be unreliable.”

The post How Did the Blow Job Shot Happen? appeared first on PUNCH.

There’s an old joke in Kentucky about drinkers in the state during Prohibition—if you go on enough distillery tours, you’ll have eventually heard it so many times you can no longer even feign laughter. Drumroll, please, ’cause here it goes: Back during the so-called dry days, the only way you could legally get whiskey was by a doctor’s prescription. Suffice to say… there were a lot of sick people in Kentucky during those years.

Yes, as improbable as it sounds, the Volstead Act of 1919 didn’t completely shutter every distillery. Amazingly, six companies were granted the ability to sell what is now known as “medicinal” whiskey, all of it bottled-in-bond at 100 proof, government stamped, boxed up and with your prescription attached to the back. Sick (or, rather, “sick”) patients were allowed to purchase a pint from their pharmacy every 10 days, for about $3 apiece.

What qualified for a prescription? Any of a number of things: high blood pressure, pneumonia, digestive issues, tuberculosis. While referred to as medicinal whiskey, these were “bottled in bond” distillates no different than those sold before or after the era. The most significant changes were in the packaging. But they’ve still flown under the radar, and can be had for prices well below other whiskies bottled before and after Prohibition.

“These are not necessarily connoisseurs’ bourbons,” says Joshua Feldman, a whiskey historian who writes at the Coopered Tot, and has long collected examples from the era. “They’re historical more than anything.”

Unlike many whiskey collectors, Feldman is interested in learning what his acquisitions taste like, rather than simply sitting on a valuable, sealed bottle. “My thing is [writing] history with tasting notes, so I’m looking for tastes,” he explains. He’ll often write long posts about how a distillery’s general flavor profile has changed over the decades. And he’s constantly searching for off-the-radar estate sales where he might find forgotten bottles for a decent price. “My desire is to be storyteller and, in my fantasy, I crack and drink absolutely everything.”

Feldman explains that it’s hard for a collector like him to know how any of these bottles have been stored in the intervening 80-plus years since they were bottled. Perhaps they’ve been in a cool basement since the 18th Amendment was repealed, but more often, they’ve been stored in grandpa’s boiling-hot attic. “The thing about cracking Prohibition whiskey bottles is you never know what you’re gonna get,” adds Feldman. “Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s quite bad.”

Below, a few notable bottles from Feldman’s collection of Prohibition-era medicinal whiskey.

Old Overholt Whiskey

When the Volstead Act passed, Old Overholt was owned by Andrew Mellon, then Secretary of the Treasury under President Warren G. Harding. Distilled in the fall of 1921 and bottled at the end of Prohibition, in 1933, this is not Old Overholt as we know it, claims Feldman. He should know: He once organized a full-century vertical—100 straight years—of bottles of the beloved rye. Instead, this comes from Large Distilling Co. (check the tax stamp) in the Monongahela district of Pennsylvania, and is distilled from red rye as opposed to Old Overholt’s lighter rye. Notice the dosage cup atop the cap, which is no different than you’d see on a bottle of Robitussin today.

Sam Thompson Pure Rye Whiskey

Distilled in 1916, this nine-year-old rye came out right in the midst of Prohibition, in 1926. This is yet another example of Monongahela rye from Brownsville, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the region. Released at a younger age than many Prohibition-era whiskeys, which are often over-oaked, Feldman calls it an “opportunity to taste a potentially exceptional example of a vanished style.”

Harry E. Wilken Special Old Reserve

This 15-year-old bourbon, distilled in 1917 and released in 1932, comes courtesy the ad hoc American Medicinal Spirits Company (AMS)—the biggest company during Prohibition. Though it says the Harry E. Wilken Distillery on the label, Feldman notes that it’s more commonly known as Deer Run Distillery, which would later become Old Grand-Dad Distillery. Notice the unique bottle design, with ribbed lines running the length of it; it was a design hallmark meant to make counterfeiting more difficult. It’s also one of the more commonly available, and sought-after, examples from the time (in 2016, a bottle sold at auction for £825 or around $1,100).

Old McBrayer Whiskey

Another release from AMS—again, notice the ornate bottle design, which plays off the medicinal theme—this whiskey was aged from 1915 to 1933. Though early-1800s bourbon pioneer Judge William Harrison McBrayer’s name is on the label, this actually comes from Aaron Bradley Co. “The funny thing about these labels is they create this confluence of stories,” Feldman explains. “The front of the label is about one 19th-century whiskey person, but the whiskey is actually produced at another distillery with a whole ’nother story.”

Waterfill and Frazier

This “pure whiskey for medicinal use” was distilled at Daviess County Distilling Co., which was owned by A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery when Mr. Pappy Van Winkle was at the helm. It was Pappy, in fact, who came up with the cleverly economical idea to print his company’s always-changing age statements on a smaller label, which could be then placed above the main label. As Feldman explains, “Whenever you see that red mezzaluna label, you immediately know that’s Pappy Van Winkle.” At this point, Pappy had yet to produce the wheated whiskey he would later become famous for under the aegis of Stitzel-Weller.

The post Tour a Collection of Prohibition-Era “Medicinal” Whiskey appeared first on PUNCH.

The clickbait industrial complex was ablaze in September of 2014 when it was announced that Pabst Blue Ribbon had just been sold to the Russians. “Sad, sad day. Never drinking that commy piss water again [sic],” lamented one Twitter user. It turned out this was fake news and PBR had simply been acquired by the Russian-American entrepreneur Eugene Kashper—though his plans were perhaps even more insidious. As chairman of Oasis Beverages, Eugene Kashper had begun snapping up failing beer brands to try and revive them as local products.

“We’re ideally suited for the whole locavore thing,” he told the New York Times in 2016, referring to the beer brands he now had in his portfolio. That wasn’t said tongue-in-cheek.

As of the article’s publication, the Los Angeles-based Kashper owns 77 beer brands, including once-famous names like Pearl, Schlitz and Olympia, all of which he was contract-brewing at large MillerCoors’ facilities across the country, then sending them back to their original markets.

But these lagers weren’t always owned by international conglomerates and private equity firms. There was, in fact, a time when these local beers were actually local, and often brewed by Czech and German immigrants whose names still grace many cans. They each became part of their city’s culture and iconography, lighting up giant billboards and lending their names to historical buildings; locals drank them almost exclusively and passed down their fiercely loyal allegiance to future generations. These were beers that were locavore before that word entered the lexicon.

It’s no wonder, then, that Old Style is still so beloved in Chicago (even if it’s currently brewed in Milwaukee). Or that “Natty Boh” remains big in Baltimore (even if it, too, is owned by Kashper and brewed in Milwaukee). While these products aren’t locally produced anymore—and few “local” lagers aside from Yuengling actually are—they nevertheless loom large for an aging generation of folks who came of age when they were uniquely theirs.

We are now in an era where national beer brands have begun to struggle. Not just “macro” brands like Bud, Miller and Coors, but even the bigger craft beers like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Sam Adams Boston Lager and New Belgium Fat Tire—all of which have seen sales dips of late. Similar to wanting to eat local, younger consumers want to now drink local, too. Whether that’s a day-fresh IPA from the nano-brewery down the block or, as Kashper is banking on, some ersatz local libation grandma had long waxed poetic about.

So, while it’s impossible to tell if any of these beers are as they once were, back when Gottlieb Heileman (Old Style) or Samuel Hoffberger (National Bohemian) or Joseph Schlitz (Schlitz) were brewing them just down the block, we can still check in to see if they’re still worth being lionized by locals.

For our blind tasting of more than 15 regional lagers, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Senior Editor, Lizzie Munro; Assistant Editor, Chloe Frechette; and Social Media Editor, Allison Hamlin. While we mostly stuck with once-regional lagers, we did include some of today’s national powerhouses—none of whom distinguished themselves. Here are our favorites.

The post The Ultimate Regional Lager Showdown appeared first on PUNCH.

I meet Alex Bachman Saturday morning at the corner of N. Wells and W. Division, right in front of The House of Glunz, a few blocks from where he grew up in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago. He’s smoking a cigarette when he arrives a little after 11 a.m. Tall, broad-shouldered and sporting a Cubs hat and Patagonia fleece, the 36-year-old hardly looks like the other “dusty” hunters I’ve come across over the years.

A former sommelier at Charlie Trotter’s and then beverage director at A10 and Yushu, Bachman first started hunting old amaro when working behind the bar at Billy Sunday. Since founding his company, Sole Agent, in 2015, his life’s work has become sourcing rare and vintage spirits for top bars and restaurants across the country, like Canon in Seattle, Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco and the newly-opened Fausto, located just down the block from my apartment in Brooklyn.

His most recent assignment: Assemble a full vertical of Pappy Van Winkle 15 Year, starting with Buffalo Trace’s first release in 2004, in under two months. The collection was for Mordecai in Chicago, a high-end cocktail bar focused mostly on vintage whiskey.

“It’s easy if you’re willing to pay for it,” Bachman tells me. Especially considering he was given his largest-ever opening budget, courtesy of Hickory Street Capital, a private equity firm run by the owners of the Chicago Cubs, who developed Mordecai (it is just across from Wrigley Field). “The harder things to find are obscure amaro,” he notes, nodding toward the 1950s-era Bitter Branca we’re drinking, a long-discontinued product from a producer now better known for their fernet.

As late as the early 2010s, savvy collectors were able to pull amazing finds by simply going “dusty hunting.” By now, paeans have been written to those who’ve best pulled off the task, like the so-called “Bourbon Turtle,” Mike Jasinski, who absolutely cleared northeastern liquor stores of bottles that had been gathering dust since the day they were stocked. Or the duo behind Los Angeles’ Old Lightning, who presciently started stashing away noteworthy bottles starting in their mid-1990s bartending days.

But you’re no longer going to find any Stitzel-Weller Old Fitzgerald by heading to some convenience mart on the other side of the tracks; nor does one have decades to build a collection if demanding restaurateurs want their whiskey bar stocked with the old stuff ASAP. Thus, a new breed of vintage spirits buyer, like Bachman, has emerged—one that’s forced to be more resourceful. As one of his bar clients off-handedly remarks to me, “His world is now a lot less Indiana Jones, and much more A Beautiful Mind.”

I’ve come to Chicago for a weekend to shadow Bachman. Our first order of business is to meet with his key American contact, Christopher Donovan, the current proprietor of his family’s liquor store, The House of Glunz, which has been open since 1888. “It’s not that Christopher necessarily has everything,” Bachman explains, “but his greatest asset, aside from our friendship, is that he can always point me in the right direction. If I can’t find it, Christopher knows where it is.”

Donovan takes us to the second floor in the building where he keeps his private collection; Bachman is one of the few professionals that has access to it. “Looks a helluva lot better than the last time I was here,” Bachman notes as we enter a cluttered corner room anchored by an antique round table at its center. Obscure bottles, like a 1970s Trader Vic’s Palmer House rum, are precariously balanced on stacks of old medicinal whiskey crates. “I obviously don’t come here to cherry-pick, to pull a fast one,” says Bachman. “We’ve been friends for a long time.”

Alex Bachman, proprietor of Sole Agent, sources rare and vintage spirits for top bars and restaurants across the country, like Canon in Seattle, Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco and Mordecai in Chicago.

Mordecai's second floor backbar, and a portion of their Van Winkle collection.

Some of the oldest American whiskey bottles in Mordecai's collection.

Though Bachman sources bottles from around the world, his key American contact is Christopher Donovan, fourth-generation proprietor of The House of Glunz liquor store in Chicago.

The main portion of The House of Glunz is open to the public, though much of what Bachman sources comes from Donovan’s private collection.

The collection is split between Donovan’s home bar (left) and the second floor of The House of Glunz (right), and is rarely shown to the public.

A selection of vintage spirits, including a sloe gin originally bottled for The House of Glunz.

Donovan is one of the few sources whose name Bachman is willing to reveal. “Some are chefs, some are writers, some own liquor stores themselves,” he tells me. He has “a gentleman” in Boston who finds him bottles on the East Coast, and another resource who used to own a number of liquor stores in Chicago before he retired to the suburbs. There’s another gentleman in Rome, and one in Spain who finds him most of his Chartreuse (and, recently, an oddball bottle of 1962 Cuban rum finished in sherry barrels), one in France just south of Cognac, plus two contacts in Germany and father-and-son team in northern Italy who earn their full livelihood finding Bachman bottles.

In February alone, the Italian duo nabbed 40 cases worth of vintage booze. The haul was dominated by amaro, though they do know to be on the lookout for American whiskey releases that may have escaped the country during the “glut” era of the 1970s and ’80s—like a 1979 Wild Turkey Italian export we crack open while standing at Mordecai’s second floor bar. These contacts, in turn, have their own networks of employees from now-defunct distilleries, distributors and restaurants, as well as access to local estate sales and auctions.

Bachman is also always looking to buy from estates of those who have recently passed. For instance, a famous German collector, Heinz Taubenheim, died two years ago, leaving behind one of the largest private whiskey collections in the entire world. His surviving family produced a book detailing what exactly he had. Bachman bought one of the 100 copies printed, which is how he became aware of a rare Japanese export, Willett Single-Barrel 24 Year Old, which he bought for Mordecai. It’s currently the most expensive pour on the menu at $650 for a two-ounce pour.

“It’s not just buying everything under the sun for the sake of buying everything under the sun,” says Bachman. “Every bottle [I buy] is specifically chosen for a reason—what it represents for a certain distillery, or a period of distillation history.”

Of course, sometimes he gets lucky just like anyone else. We stop in for a drink at a basement mezcal bar, Todos Santos, where we meet up with Paul McGee, the co-owner of Lost Lake and beverage director of Milk Room, the latter an eight-seat bar with a menu dominated by vintage spirits, many of which Bachman sourced. On a recent trip to Tokyo together, the two wandered into a Ginza liquor store and stumbled upon a shelf of Ancient Ancient Age 8 Year Old, a highly regarded, rare release from Buffalo Trace.

“I’m looking at Paul,” explains Bachman. “‘Did they ever make an 8 year?’ ‘I’ve never seen it.’” It turns out that it was only made for the Japanese market in the early 2000s. “‘OK, well we need to buy all of these and get them back to America,'” they decided.

One bottle from that haul now sits on the second floor backbar at Mordecai. We head there in the late afternoon, a few hours before it will open for the night. Before Bachman leaves, I can’t help but ask him whether he’s worried that the collection he so painstakingly built will be depleted once the place, which opened last month, inevitably becomes a high-end hangout.

“No,” Bachman casually notes. “I’ll just go find another.”

The post Chasing “Dusties” with America’s Top Rare Spirits Hunter appeared first on PUNCH.

I started my typical Saturday nights just out of college, in 2003, pregaming with my roommates. I’d watch a few episodes of “Fear Factor,” put on my best “going-out” button-up and trek to a row of meat-market bars in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood. The speakers would blast whatever Lil Jon-produced song was popular that week and I’d order Vodka Red Bulls at $10 each—a small price to pay for a full night of false bravado.

I was no outlier. In the early aughts, the Vodka Red Bull was also the preferred drink of hipsters dancing to Peaches and Bloc Party; Manhattan-based bankers, brokers and lawyers; even Prince Harry, who enjoyed it at upscale South Kensington bottle-service clubs. While it’s universally mocked today by the same set of night-dwellers, you’ll have a difficult time finding a cocktail that’s been more consumed—and controversial—in the last 20 years.

It’s near-impossible to figure out who was the first genius to combine vodka and the world’s most popular energy drink. That doesn’t mean people haven’t tried to take credit for it. Even the trail of Wikipedia revisions shows dueling editors trying to get their un-cited claims into official record. (The current incarnation credits “futurologist” Benjamin Reed, but there’s no information to back that up.) From the moment Red Bull was introduced by the Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz, in 1987, “it was mixed with alcohol by revelers intent on bleariness without weariness,” noted former New York Times food critic Frank Bruni.

First sold at upscale Austrian ski resorts, the brand tried to associate itself with extreme sports, sponsoring the 1988 Dolomitenmann—an Ironman-like event featuring paragliding and kayaking. An idea began to take root that it could aid in playing harder, then studying harder and, naturally, partying harder.

The drink initially struggled upon entering the U.S. in 1997. Exploring all possible avenues, the North American marketing team saw an opportunity in San Francisco’s rave and club scene, recalls party promoter Vlad Cood. When his friends, Christopher and Carlton Solle, were preparing to open a tiny “party” bar called Butter in the SoMa district in 1999, he introduced them to Red Bull’s reps; the brand, in turn, offered the duo $50,000 to feature their product on the menu.

“They all got drunk and creative, and came up with these funny drinks, kinda trashy,” Cood recalls. “All the mixers came out of cans. Dr. Pepper, Squirt… SunnyD, Tang,” and had evocative names like Prom Night Punch and the Bitchin’ Camaro. The most popular drink was the R.V. (which stands for “Red Bull Vodka”). Eight dollars got you an entire eight-ounce Red Bull mixed with two ounces of Svedka, slapped together by the bar’s self-described “intoxicologists” and served over ice in a 16-ounce glass Mason jar.

“Because of Red Bull’s investment into the branding of the drink, it was heavily pushed all the time, and was established as the signature drink of Butter,” explains Cood. He claims it spread outward from there, mostly because the top promoters in San Francisco all had some tie to Butter—whether they were investors themselves or bar regulars.

“If not for Butter’s place and role in the community, it’s unlikely the R.V. would have blown up the way it did,” Cood believes. “That’s why Red Bull bought their way in. To get in bed with the scene.”

While Butter took to calling it the R.V., a series of other, more fanciful names—the Vod Bull, Raging Bull, Speedball, Liquid Cocaine and the Heart Attack Special, to name a few—proliferated, but never quite caught on. Eventually it became known, simply, as Vodka Red Bull or Red Bull Vodka. 

There was, of course, some cognitive dissonance at play as Red Bull’s cans clearly stated, “not recommended…to be mixed with alcohol.” That didn’t mean the company was going to ignore the emerging phenomenon. As Jim Bailey, former vice president of marketing for Red Bull Canada, glibly noted in a 2005 interview, “How the consumer sort of adapts or interprets the product is in their hands.” Eschewing traditional advertising—and never once officially promoting the idea of combining it with alcohol—Red Bull instead enlisted unpaid student brand managers, giving them cases to distribute around campus. The students could do with it what they pleased. (Red Bull still refuses to acknowledge the drink, and declined to offer comment on this story.)

Throughout the first part of the decade, you were as likely to hear an order for a Vodka Red Bull as you were a rum and Coke or Jack and Ginger. It wasn’t just in dives and frat houses, either; you could find the drink in a crusty Irish pub as easily as you could an upscale golf clubhouse or nightclub. Every sort of drinking establishment had the capabilities to make the drink, and willingly did so.

It is the rare cocktail where the mixer costs more than the spirit, which enabled major upcharges over, say, a vodka-soda. “We called it ‘liquid gold,’” Cood notes. A can cost about three dollars at the time, so pricy that Eric “ET” Tecosky, a long-time Los Angeles bartender who worked at Club LUSH in the early-aughts, claims it was a fireable offense for employees to be caught drinking it during their shift.

Soon enough, TGI Friday’s took the drink and savvily linked it with the “it” drink from the previous era, the Sex on the Beach. The “Diddy on the Beach” featured vodka and Red Bull plus Malibu rum and assorted fruit. Dave & Buster’s started to offer an entire Vodka Red Bull menu, with such varieties as Red Bull Sugarfree and Absolut and Red Bull Yellow Edition (“Tropical”) with mango vodka. Similarly, Red Bull imitations started to infiltrate the bar scene. There was Roaring Lion, which could be hooked up to the soda gun and was, thus, 60 percent cheaper than Red Bull. And Rockstar, which was released in 2001 in 16-ounce cans (double the size of Red Bull) and offered “liver-rejuvenating” milk thistle along with the same dose of caffeine.

But if these were the halcyon days of energy and ethanol, there was a darker side to the era. As early as 2001, there was a growing fear around the drink causing deaths: “Red Bull cocktails giving wings, sending some to heaven,” read one Sunday Times headline. Though much of the alarmism was unproven, the cocktail also led to two decades-worth of peer-reviewed papers with titles like, “The Effect of Energy Drinks on the Urge to Drink Alcohol in Young Adults.” While the fear of a cardiac arrest on the dance floor didn’t frighten off many drinkers, another thing eventually did: the rise of the bro.

By the time the 2000s came to a close, ordering a Vodka Red Bull came with a scarlet letter. Google the drink’s name with “frat” and you’ll get no shortage of results linking it to college campuses and the variations that proliferated there, like the “The Snorkel” or “Y Bomb” (the drink, shotgunned). One 2011 article on “Jersey Shore cocktail recipes” also offers a Grenade Launcher, a riff on the Jägerbomb, where you toss a shot glass of Jägermeister into a glass of Red Bull and chug. The common belief became that only bros (or Snooki) drink Vodka Red Bull.

Yet the drink endures. Having survived an upstart industry of now-banned canned alcoholic energy drinks (Sparks, Four Loko), it’s still available nearly anywhere you can get a drink. However, there’s no denying that it’s been relegated to the place where we hide all the bad things from the early days of the new millennium, from frosted tips to “My Humps.”

At Butter, however, the Red Bull logo still hangs proudly on the bar’s outside shingle, and the R.V. still sells solidly nearly 20 years later. Like going to the Mission and getting a burrito at La Taqueria or throwing back an Anchor Steam at Swan Oyster Depot, it’s become a San Francisco tradition. “Here, you don’t drink it because it’s ironic,” notes Cood, who took over as owner in 2009. “You drink it because it’s iconic.”

The post The Life and Times of the Vodka Red Bull appeared first on PUNCH.

In 1810, Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress Joséphine divorced; one year later, Gagneur & Co. distilled some Cognac. By 1934 it was ready to bottle and, in 1935, Louis Glunz II bought a bottle of “Reserve Imperatrice Joséphine” from the Union League Club for $16. Eighty-three years later, that dusty bottle has never left the shelves at House of Glunz—Chicago’s oldest wine and liquor store—where it sits in a humble glass case near the register.

“It’s really hard to price old things unless they have come up at auctions, which are few and far between,” explains Christopher Donovan, the fourth generation proprietor, along with his mother. “But you’ll eventually find the market. I mean, some of these things we bought 100 years ago. We can afford to wait.”

Patience is certainly a family virtue at House of Glunz, which Donovan’s great-grandfather, Louis Glunz II, opened in 1888. The German immigrant chose the Old Town neighborhood, and opened his eponymous shop with the help of brewing magnate Charles Wacker and wiener baron Oscar Meyer. The former helped set him up with the contract to distribute Schlitz beer. Glunz supplied all of Chicagoland from 1893 well into the 1970s, and Schlitz paraphernalia is still crammed into every corner of the multi-room building, which was built in 1874, three years after the Chicago fire.

A mural depicting grape vines and beer production hangs in House of Glunz’s main room, something Donovan, now in his late-40s, recalls being painted when he was just a young boy. In an elegant backroom, now used for private tastings, oil paintings of Louis Glunz II and his wife, Elizabeth, watch over an extensive collection of antique glassware and furniture. The youngest of six children, Donovan’s childhood chores included polishing all the “nooks and crannies” with an Old English-covered rag. Since the Glunz family has been around for a good chunk of American distilling history, the entire facility is littered with curios: gallon-sized bottles, oddball decanters, Prohibition-era whiskey. Almost everything is for sale if you have the loot.

Inside the House of Glunz

House of Glunz, now run by fourth generation proprietor, Christopher Donovan (right), has been buying, selling and bottling booze since 1888.

Within Donovan's personal collection is a cabinet of vintage glassware (left) and a box set of Cognac, produced by House of Glunz in the 1950s and bottled under the name "Old Decanter" (right).

Among the store's historic bottlings is the Red Star Sloe Gin, prepared for Louis Glunz in the 1970s and named for the Red Star Inn, his favorite local haunt.

The shop survived Prohibition by selling sacramental wine to Catholics and medicinal whiskey to malingerers. At one time, customers could bring their own jugs to be filled with cask wine or beer. By the 1940s, the family started bottling their own products, bringing in casks of fortified wines from Spain and Portugal and bourbon barrels from Kentucky.

“Glass quality was poor at the time and transportation was expensive, so they didn’t want to cut the liquor before shipping,” explains Donovan. House of Glunz had a bottling plant in the basement where the family would proof down the spirits themselves. By the 1950s, their merchant bottling practice had become so large they had to add a plant a few blocks away.

“My grandpa was the first person to do a production of 20-year-old bourbon,” says Donovan, proudly. “He went to the Hoffman distillery and tasted barrels. He ended up buying five of them, then paid for them to age for 20 years.” The Hoffman Distillery was eventually purchased by Pappy Van Winkle’s grandson, Julian Van Winkle III, in 1983; the Glunz family developed a great rapport with the man and were one of the earliest liquor stores to stock Pappy. “We used to make eggnog with Van Winkle 10-Year,” remembers Donovan. “Why wouldn’t you? It was a 20 dollar bottle.”

When Old Town began to decline in the early 1960s, House of Glunz also struggled to keep their house bottling business afloat, eventually closing the plant down. But in the years since then, the store’s reputation has only been burnished, a neighborhood fixture who never quit trying to sell interesting products to locals  Thanks to the modern whiskey and cocktail revolution, business is booming again and House of Glunz has become one of the country’s most respected retailers of rare and unusual spirits.

“This building is really a time capsule,” says Donovan. “Some of these bottles have been in my family forever.”

House of Glunz’s Historic House Bottlings

 Red Star Sloe Gin | mid-1970s
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we made that here,” explains Donovan, noting that they also produced grenadine and a lot of other cocktail ingredients in-house. While some Chicago locals might suspect this was produced specifically to sell at the Red Star Inn—a North Side tavern—Donovan says that’s not true. Louis Glunz II was such a huge fan of the German spot, that, upon its closing in 1970, he literally purchased the entire restaurant piecemeal—tables, chairs, even the walls, and brought them back to the shop. This sloe gin, “prepared for Louis Glunz,” celebrates his favorite local haunt.

Old Decanter – Cognac Godet | 1950s
For a time, House of Glunz bottled products under the name Old Decanter. This intriguing box set of four 24-year-old Cognacs (in decanters), with matching snifters, was produced by Godet, a still-active brand. Donovan says that “Godet did a bunch of things for us,” starting in the early 1900s, though he dates this from the 1950s or ’60s. He currently displays it in the entryway to his home, which is located above the store.

Overhill 8 Year Old Maryland Straight Rye Whiskey | 1937
Not only did Glunz bottle their own liquors, in many cases they produced the labels as well. In fact, Donovan recently located the printing plate for this 1937 rye—though he has virtually no other information about the distillery or quality of the whiskey. That’s not so strange; Donovan literally has bundles of old Glunz family labels for a plethora of products that time has all but forgotten. “Once my grandfather realized he could produce all these labels and create new products, he seemingly did just that,” explains Donovan.

A House of Glunz Selection BIN #420 – 20 Years Old Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey | 1983
This 86-proof bourbon comes from that initial lot Louis Glunz II purchased from Lawrenceburg’s Hoffman Distilling Company, then the smallest distillery in all of Kentucky, shortly after its April, 1963, distillation. The five barrels would ultimately yield 520 bottles (“a yield of 35 percent of the original quantity” notes the back label), one of which is still available for purchase.

Faux Bénédictine | 1970s
Produced by French monks since the 1800s, Bénédictine was Louis Glunz II’s favorite liqueur. When he suspected their recipe had secretly changed, he confronted the monks while on a tour of the distillery. They promptly denied the change. “After a few drinks, though,” explains Donovan, “one monk said, ‘Yeah, okay, we changed something.’” When Glunz II got back to Chicago he created a mock Bénédictine based on his memory of the previous formula. His faux Bénédictine has the same iconic bowling pin bottle shape and even says Bénédictine on the label (though his label is far less ornate that the real deal). Only one bottle remains.

The post Tour One of America’s Oldest Rare Liquor Stores appeared first on PUNCH.

Whatever your reason for visiting Wyoming, whether it’s to play out cowboy fantasies roping cattle, hike Grand Teton National Park or you’re Kanye West in town to record an album in secret, it’s pretty easy to get sloshed relatively quickly after you touch down at the Jackson Hole airport.

“You can ask any of my friends, winter or summer,” says David DeFazio, “there’s gonna be a sloshie in their cup holder when they land.” DeFazio, co-founder of Wyoming Whiskey, has been a permanent Jackson Hole resident since 1996. He first recalls seeing sloshies, essentially your standard-issue frozen Daiquiri, served in a variety of unnatural colors and flavors, at Creekside Market six summers ago.

A sloshie might just sound like a typical boozy frozen drink to somebody who lives in any of the other 49 states—and that’s not incorrect. What’s remarkable is the insane fervor with which Wyoming residents, especially those in Jackson Hole, have embraced it. Originally appearing strictly at liquor stores and food marts, they are now available pretty much everywhere, from rowdy après-ski joints like Mangy Moose to craft distilleries like Wyoming Whiskey and Jackson Hole Still Works to the luxury hotel Caldera House and Dornan’s Chuckwagon grill, an old-fashioned “cowboy” range buffet where you can pair them with your $35 prime rib dinner.

The statewide sloshie takeover happened rapidly. “No one really talked about them when they first appeared,” recalls Katie Carmichael, manager and resident sloshie-maker at Creekside Market in Jackson Hole. She started working a high school summer job there in 2008; the sloshie arrived in 2012 when the store acquired a liquor license. It didn’t take long for locals to claim the drink as theirs. Today, Creekside Market has two silver Grindmaster-Cecilware dispensers—$5,000 machines that can churn out seven gallons of slush per hour. One rotates a seasonal offering like Freaky Tiki or Tropic Thunder, while the other perpetually provides The Hound, a frozen Greyhound made with Nikolai Vodka and fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. Carmichael claims that, thanks to the approximate 28 gallons of The Hound she makes per day, Creekside Market is the biggest buyer of grapefruit in the entire state.

As for the name? How the drink ended up being called a “sloshie” remains a subject of debate. Jessa Talermo, head of product development at The Liquor Store of Jackson Hole (known locally as TLS), believes it just sort of… happened. “What else are you gonna call them?” she asks. While many credit TLS as the drink’s inventor, owner Stephan Abrams claims a place formerly known as Liquor Down South was actually the first spot in Jackson Hole to sell them during the summer of 2012. But they didn’t come up with the moniker.

“I came up with the name,” claims local restaurateur Gavin Fine. “It was like a slushie, an alcoholic slushie, then it turned into sloshie.” Fine asserts that he popularized the term “sloshie” after first seeing them in New Orleans during JazzFest. Wanting to improve on what he calls “those horrible Margarita machines in cheesy bars,” he decided to offer sloshies at his restaurants, like Bodega, a “gourmet” gas station with an in-house sausage maker and fine wine selection where you can also fill up your tank. Since 2014, they’ve sold sloshies with names like Wu-Tang Cran and Lil Wayne’s Purple Drank.

TLS, meanwhile, has five machines offering sloshies with similarly punny names like Marg America Great Again and a Moscow Mule flavor called Putin on the Ritz. Prices go from $6.99 for a 16-ounce cup all the way up to $22.99 for a 64-ounce serve, dispensed by staff into sealed milk jugs. Other shops are more cavalier with what they’ll allow. In fact, most sloshie vendors in environmentally-conscious Jackson Hole let customers self-fill their own YETI insulated mug. The same is true in sloshie-slinging locales outside of town, like Poplar Wine and Spirits in Casper and Libations in Cody, the latter of which is noted for their Halloween season Drunken Punkin sloshie.

One explanation for the meteoric rise of the sloshie is that they’re easy to consume in public, and Wyoming has a history of being a drinking-and-driving Thunderdome of a state. Having a cold one in your car was actually legal until 2002, and passengers could legally drink until 2007. Even today, many locals don’t measure driving distance in minutes, but in the number of drinks they can consume on the way to a destination.

Since the typical way a sloshie is sold is in a clear plastic cup with a lid in which the checkout person has put “tamper-resistant” tape over the straw hole to make it a sealed container, it rarely draws the attention of local authorities. Still, at Creekside Market, push-pinned into the wall near a sign that reads “No Sampling,” is a small flyer advertising the services of the city’s top DUI attorney, Dick Stout (“Dick got me off”), just in case.

More likely, however, is that the sloshie became a sensation in Jackson Hole because it’s a place whose residents famously refuse to grow up—where trust fund kids put off law school to become ski bums and corporate executives cash out early to mountain climb. DeFazio, for one, agrees with that theory.

“Jackson Hole is the home of Peter Pan,” he says. “And sloshies hearken back to youth when you were allowed to drink slushies. They give you a reason to now drink them as an adult, [which] almost feels like cheating.”

The post The Frozen Drink That Took Over Jackson Hole appeared first on PUNCH.

There’s something from Tom Seefurth’s past he can’t escape: a big, crazy dream that he turned into a reality, which eventually got away from him. He still gets random emails and phone calls nearly every single day asking about it. When he visits his local supermarket, customers stop him; people invite him to meetings to discuss making it happen again. He certainly wants to, but he just hasn’t found the right opportunity. Though it’s been off the market since 2013, Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer’s legend continues to grow.

In 2005, Seefurth and his wife, Athena, were in real estate, selling houses and writing mortgages about an hour west of Chicago in Campton Township, Illinois. They were raising two daughters and flipping homes on the side. Tom, then in his early 40s, homebrewed in his garage and judged amateur beer competitions for fun. He noticed that the winners usually had one simple thing in common: “They tasted different than the rest of the crowd,” he says. “A real solid IPA back then wouldn’t ever win. The one that was different would.”

Seefurth decided to try and create a saison—a beer style that is sometimes spiced liberally with coriander and orange peel—that would nab him an award and get him a little attention. But he took things further and tossed in every single herb he had in the kitchen cabinet: “Rosemary, oregano, some mint, even sage. Whatever was growing in my backyard went into that beer.” Upon serving up the first batch, one person noted that it tasted like “pizza beer,” and Seefurth realized he’d stumbled upon the big idea he was looking for.

He approached Mike Rybinski, then the brewmaster at Walter Payton’s Roundhouse & America’s Brewpub in the Chicagoland suburb of Aurora, and suggested they brew an actual pizza beer to enter in the Great American Beer Festival’s Pro-Am Competition. “This was a guy who had made beer out of hot rocks,” explains Seefurth. “He attempted a cicada beer one time. He was not afraid to experiment.”

They tweaked Seefurth’s original recipe by adding fresh garlic, hand-chopped oregano, basil and two kegs of canned tomatoes. Their pizza saison pilot batch was put on the taps at the brewpub in May of 2007. The dozen or so kegs sold so briskly that by the end of summer they didn’t have any left over to send to the festival. Still, the local news caught wind of the oddity and came calling, from the Chicago Tribune to local television news shows.

With the sales and press, Seefurth was certain he had a million-dollar idea. He looked for a brewer to produce his beer year-round, again altering the recipe after a brewmaster friend suggested he should “dummy” down the beer. “He told me, ‘If you’re thinking of serving it in a pizzeria, at 9.9-percent ABV, not a lot of people will bring their family to order a pitcher of this and then drive everyone home.’” The rewritten recipe yielded a 4.7-percent ABV American ale: same grain bill, just less grain; American yeast instead of saison yeast; all fresh tomatoes (the calcium phosphate in canned tomatoes kept killing the yeast); and fresh herbs.

In early 2008, down to their last $10,000 with the housing bubble about the burst, the Seefurths flipped their final house. They decided to go all-in on Mamma Mia!, taking the new recipe to a friend from the Chicago Beer Society, Randy Sprecher, who agreed to contract-brew it for them, 80 barrels at a time.

Seefurth’s was a product practically designed to go viral by tickling the fancy of “dare” drinkers on YouTube, many of whom admitted it was way better than they expected. But it was likewise catnip for professional comedians, including Jay Leno who, in a 2010 episode of The Tonight Show, cracked, “It’s beer that tastes like pizza, which is pretty innovative. You know, usually to get those two flavors together, you have to wait until you vomit.”

Though that Late Night appearance gave Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer a national spotlight, it didn’t make Seefurth wealthy. The beer was better at getting notoriety than sales, especially since it was never available in large quantity. Claiming he only spent $100 on marketing (mainly for T-shirts), Seefurth instead devoted his time to going to grocery stores every single day with Athena (who started calling herself “Mamma Mia”) and hand-selling it to shoppers. “When you have no money to advertise, no money to pay for a spotting fee, no money for a preferential space,” says Seefurth, “the best you can do is get people to taste what you’ve got.”

Unfortunately, in December of 2013, Sprecher’s hard soda line started so well—thanks to Not Your Father’s Root Beer pulling up the entire category—that they had to free up tank space and quit brewing Mamma Mia!. Since then, Seefurth has been looking for a replacement brewery, annoyed by what he calls the “rich people” who have tried to fill the void since he left. Case in point: Evil Twin simply threw frozen pizzas into the mash; Stone Brewing brewed a Hawaiian pizza beer for the release of 2016’s Ninja Turtles movie and Pizza Hut offered a pepperoni pilsner as a April Fool’s gag. “I’m flattered,” he says, “but at the same time, when they do it just for the sake of grossing people out to get press, it burns my rear end.”

For now, Seefurth relies on his spin-off pizza beer-themed food products, like “Nuthin’ Hidden” Ranch Dip and Beer Taco mix, to earn income. He continues to look for a contract brewer and still dreams big: He wants to expand his beer line with a salsa beer and a curry ale, or maybe even open his own chain of Pizza Beer brew pubs. “We’ve been treading water for a decade,” he says. “We’re going to continue treading water until they finally let us swim.”

The post The Rise and Fall of Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer appeared first on PUNCH.

One beer was so improbably born it could never be repeated; another was a super collaboration with tricky logistics that would prevent it from coming to fruition ever again. One stout was from a brewery everyone now considers beneath them, while an imperial porter was from a brewery most had never even heard of. The thing they all had in common was that each of them were flavor profiles and breweries the modern beer drinker simply quit caring about.

Flaming Fury, Black Cherry Bomb, Peconic Reserve, Yellow Bus: these were just some of the beers that began appearing earlier this year on the TalkBeer thread, “Let’s Remember Some Beers (In Memoriam: Old Whales).” Currently spanning nearly 50 pages and growing, the list is primarily the work of older forum members—like, in their 30s—who recall the many once-coveted beers (better known as “whales”) that faded into obscurity.

Stylistically, these beers cover a number of categories that predated today’s wait-in-line New England-style IPAs, which have become the reining industry favorite. Bring, say, an Isabelle Proximus to a bottle share and most younger beer geeks would move it out of the way to reach for something canned and double dry-hopped.

But that doesn’t mean the whales of yore aren’t worth remembering. Here, a trip down memory lane with seven former beer-world hits.

Struise Dirty Horse

Year: 1983
ABV: 7 percent
Country: Belgium
Style: Lambic

A whale that was actually equine, but seemed more like a mythical creature. In 1978, Urbain Coutteau, a self-taught teenage homebrewer, added cherries to the wort in his homemade coolship, thinking the sweet skins would attract “atmospherical fungus” and, thus, spontaneously ferment in the four wooden wine barrels where he placed his creation. Returning from work overseas in 1983, he “discovered” these forgotten barrels and finally bottled them. Upon opening his own brewery on an ostrich farm in 2005, he could finally sell this by then 22-year-old oddity, which was met with praise from the online community: “The most anticipated beer for most of us popped with a slight hiss with ever so slight ghostly smoke that crept out of the neck [sic],” wrote one commenter on BeerAdvocate. “Dirty horse is moby fuckin dick [sic],” wrote another, perhaps less poetically. That same year, Coutteau brewed a batch that also gained whale status and was often re-blended with the previous batch. He has never again attempted to brew this legendary beer.

Hair of the Dog Dave

Year: 1994
ABV: 29 percent
Country: United States (Oregon)
Style: Barleywine

In 1994, Hair of the Dog owner Alan Sprints freeze-distilled his flagship old ale, Adam, until it had concentrated to an astounding 29 percent ABV. At $8 for a 375 mL (then a hefty price) in the mid-1990s, the boozy beer sat on shelves. Over time, as its heat calmed down and it aged in bottle, it slowly started gaining buzz—and value. Bottles still exist, and can fetch as much as $5,000 each.

Magic Hat Thumbsucker

Year: 2003
ABV: 7.8 percent
Country: United States (Vermont)
Style: Russian imperial stout

If there’s any way to show how much the industry—and beer geek mentalities—have changed in the last two decades, look to the fact that a Magic Hat offering was once a whale. Would a modern “hazeboy” deign to drink any Magic Hat? Has he ever even heard of their once-ubiquitous No. 9? This bourbon barrel-aged stout became red hot even as mid-2000s drinkers were moving onto more ballyhooed breweries. “Beer geeks hated [ No. 9] and hated the people who drank it even more,” claims Joe Carroll, who served Thumbsucker at a 2006 “Rare and Obscure” event at his Brooklyn bar, Spuyten Duyvil. “[Thumbsucker] and others from this series were taken seriously because they were well-made and often unusual offerings at a time when finding good craft beer was still a small challenge, especially if you lived anywhere outside of the West Coast.”

Midnight Sun M

Year: 2005
ABV: 11.6 percent
Country: United States (Alaska)
Style: American barleywine

Produced to celebrate the Alaskan brewery’s 10th anniversary and 1000th batch of beer, this so-called Belgian-style barleywine (aged in bourbon barrels) was considered incredibly boozy at the time of its release. So legendary by now, it’s been written about in books like Bill Howell’s Alaska Beer: Liquid Gold in the Land of the Midnight Sun: “Only a single batch was produced, and at first there was little reaction in the wider beer community; but eventually word began to circulate that M was something truly extraordinary.” In no time, bottles were trading rabidly on beer forums. (Gage Siegel of BeerMenus.com jokes that the beer must have been incredible if people were willing to wait for Alaskan trade partners to ship it to them.) As recently as 2012, back when eBay still allowed alcohol sales, a bottle sold for more than $1,500. 

Flossmoor Station Wooden Hell

Year: 2007
ABV: 9.5 percent
Country: United States (Illinois)
Style: English barleywine

The mid-aughts were an era when a relatively obscure brewery could inadvertently release a white whale into the wild. Such was the case with this brewpub in the Chicago suburbs that rocked beer geeks with a limited, bourbon barrel-aged barleywine. “I had never purchased a beer on the secondary market so I was super hesitant, but I figured I would never get the chance again, and I split it with a friend,” claims Jason Stein, a beer writer who ponied up $400 for a bottle in 2016. “And then a month after that, Flossmoor announced they were re-brewing it. Fucking joke.” Wooden Hell 2.0 hardly got any buzz, as whale chasers had already moved onto dessert-inspired stouts. 

Lost Abbey Isabelle Proximus

Year: 2008
ABV: 7 percent
Country: United States (California)
Style: Wild ale

In 2006, the so-called “Brett Pack” of American sour brewers from Lost Abbey, Russian River, Allagash, Dogfish Head and Avery toured Pajottenland, Belgium, to learn about lambic. When they returned to the U.S., they brewed their own attempt at the style. The 1,800-bottle release was a massive hit in an era when America had few examples of wild ales. “A bar in my neighborhood used to keep an empty bottle of Isabelle Proximus as a display in the bathroom,” recalls Siegel of BeerMenus.com. “And knowing I’d never actually taste it, I spent a lot more time admiring a beer bottle atop a toilet than I’m proud to admit.”

Närke Kaagen! Stormaktsporter

Year: 2005
ABV: 9 percent
Country: Sweden
Style: Imperial porter

Some of the top whales in the early aughts were beers only available at a specific location, often outside of America. This barrel-aged, heather honey-based porter from Närke Kulturbryggeri was almost exclusively available to drink at a Stockholm beer bar called Akkurat. For years, it was famous for perpetually topping RateBeer’s list of top 50 beers, even besting Westy 12. The beer is still occasionally brewed these days, but with a fairly low ABV by modern stout-drinker standards. Beer geeks have all but forgotten about it.

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