The Microdistilling Myth | Hacker News Reader

The Microdistilling Myth

theatlantic.com

34 pointsnkurz35 comments

This was such a cool little article. I even commented on it!

Something interesting you might not have realized before (I didn't!) --- virtually every American craft whiskey you can think of is owned by some huge company! To wit:

* Basil Hayden - Fortune Brands

* Knob Creek - Fortune Brands

* Eagle Rare - Sazerac

* Buffalo Trace - Sazerac

* Blantons - Sazerac

* Pappy Van Winkle - Sazerac

* Elijah Craig - Heaven Hill (Christian Bros)

* Black Maple - Heaven Hill

So one reason why it's apparently hard to be an indie whiskey distiller is that the major brands have owned up a lot of very high-quality craft distillers already; as the article points out, unlike with beer (where Coors really does suck), widely-available well-known brand whiskey does tend to be very good.

I think he overreaches with his argument by taking on all of distillery. Whiskey is particularly hard to do well. It's aged for many years before being brought to market, which makes it particularly capital-intensive to enter the market, but not as costly to sustain a proven brand. It's also a spirit with very well-defined parameters; unlike with gin, where a distinctive and interesting new take would be welcome, whiskey is more like wine: the market knows what it wants from quality product.

It clearly must be easy to outdo vodka distillers. Dave Arnold at the French Culinary managed to make extremely high-quality flavored vodka out of pure food-grade alcohol --- an industrial supply! --- for a couple bucks a gallon. So there's an easy counterexample.

Gin seems like another easy-to-enter market, and one where you can bring innovation to market without relying on novelty products. Just use different/better aromats.

I appreciate that Jim Beam is a quality product even though it's at the low end of the quality spectrum, but I don't think he did his argument any favors by saying that it was better than any indie craft whiskey he'd ever had, even if it's true.

It doesn't stop me (much) from enjoying this or that product, but unless I have solid evidence (i.e. the 3 microdistilleries within walking distance of my home), I assume all liquor brands are owned by a behemoth multi-national like Diageo and even if it says "since 1643" on the label that recipes/blends/ingredients are constantly tweaked to lower cost and cater to focus-grouped tested tastes.

If you read the comments on that post, there's a guy with a pretty credible condemnation of what Diageo did to the single malt market (buying distilleries, changing the techniques in ways that muddle the geographic terroir-style qualities of the spirit, bottling in China, laying off hundreds of people, even artificially coloring the product).

On the other hand, another commenter points out that the majors in America have resurrected distilleries on the verge of bankruptcy, so Fortune Brands may well be a force for good; Basil is probably my favorite bourbon (and Makers is my go-to).

As for vodka, you can make it from pretty much any source of alcohol and have the finished product almost completely neutral. A friend took a distilling class and their demo vodka was made from cheap boxed white wine.

It clearly must be easy to outdo vodka distillers. Dave Arnold at the French Culinary managed to make extremely high-quality flavored vodka out of pure food-grade alcohol --- an industrial supply! --- for a couple bucks a gallon.

East Europeans of all kinds have been making home-made vodka from food-grade alcohol, a bit of water and occasionally glycerine, for many, many years.

Mostly when the economy tanks and anti-freeze starts showing up in the street supply of vodka.

Who owns Maker's Mark? It remains one of my favorite bourbons for some reason. I think its one of the best for its price range. I think it beats Knob Creek (similar price) hands down.

I think doing bourbon right is kind of like doing wine right. It certainly takes more finesse than beer.

However the difficulty in mastering a craft seems orthogonal to whether its a corporation or a single guy doing it.

If anything... bourbon whiskey being brewed by guys who have been doing it forever implies that if you're a craft distillery... just keep distilling and perfecting your craft and you'll do just fine.

Fortune Brands.

Distilling my previous comment:

(1) The majors figured out how to buy craft distillers and keep the quality, so the majors are (largely) craft distillers.

(2) It takes half a decade to bring a new bourbon to market at Makers' level, if you get everything perfect. You're more likely to just go out of business.

Hence: very few strong indie whiskies.

I highly recommend taking the distillery tour at Maker's Mark. They put a lot of care into every aspect of the production process. They even let you dip your own bottle :)

Yep, I visited it on a drive through Kentucky once. Dipped my own bottle, got the t-shirt, didn't have time for the tour though (had 2 little kids with me).

It was definitely cool to see where & how its made (and aged!).

Bad beer seems to be an American problem. We have plenty of good beers you can buy in a normal supermarket in Belgium and Germany. Even England, the home of bad food, has good beer.

There are more good beers in America than there are in Europe; the problem is that there are also more bad ones. It's just how we roll.

This is very true. Beer in Europe is largely disappointing except for the obvious highlights from Belgium and Germany, which are pretty much all readily available from a good beer store in the US.

You can get some German and Belgian beers in a good beer store. But there are so many local varieties, you can't even get `pretty much all' of them in a beer shop in Germany or Belgium.

I can't speak for the whole of the US (heck, in many states you can't buy beer in the supermarket at all), but there's plenty of it where "normal supermarkets" do sell decent beer. Craft beer in the US was definitely set back quite a bit by Prohibition, which basically killed off all the small breweries for 40 or 50 years, but we've gotten over that by now.

| It clearly must be easy to outdo vodka distillers. Dave Arnold at the French Culinary managed to make extremely high-quality flavored vodka out of pure food-grade alcohol --- an industrial supply! --- for a couple bucks a gallon. So there's an easy counterexample.

In the US, by law, flavored alcohol is not "vodka". Vodka is a tasteless, colorless combination of ethanol and water. (Trace quantities of various things are allowed.) Furthermore, vodka with additives is illegal in many jurisdictions.

This necessarily leads to a shortage of distinctive vodkas.

Citation? Neither of these wikipedia articles makes such an assertion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vodka, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vodka_infusion. There's certainly no shortage of what I've always heard called 'flavored vodkas' on the shelves of any liquor store I've been to lately. What do you call them?

I have no particular knowledge, but this looks like an appropriate citation:

§ 5.22 The standards of identity.

Standards of identity for the several classes and types of distilled spirits set forth in this section shall be as follows (see also §5.35, class and type):

(a) Class 1; neutral spirits or alcohol. “Neutral spirits” or “alcohol” are distilled spirits produced from any material at or above 190° proof, and, if bottled, bottled at not less than 80° proof.

(1) “Vodka” is neutral spirits so distilled, or so treated after distillation with charcoal or other materials, as to be without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color.

This definition does not seem to preclude the existence of "flavored vodka":

(i) Class 9; flavored brandy, flavored gin, flavored rum, flavored vodka, and flavored whisky. “Flavored brandy, “flavored gin,” “flavored rum,” “flavored vodka,” and “flavored whisky,” are brandy, gin, rum vodka, and whisky, respectively, to which have been added natural flavoring materials, with or without the addition of sugar, and bottled at not less than 60° proof.

http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&rgn...

And Absolut Citron is what, then?

>vodka with additives is illegal in many jurisdictions.

Better not explain what gin really is then!

I have a fantastic micro-distillery down the street from my place in Columbus called Middle West Spirits (http://www.middlewestspirits.com/index.php/products/).

Not only are the micro-distilling amazing vodka (and now whiskey and more soon), but they are trying to make it the most sustainable and local based business I have ever seen. Soon the building will be completely solar powered, they are buying everything local (from the raw wheat from local farmers, honey from local beekeepers, to having bottles custom made in lancaster, ohio). The byproducts of the business are being sold/given to various places that can use them positively (acetone goes to a cleaning company, etc). And the price of everything is in the mid $30-range, so they aren't killing us for pricing either. And they are working to get local laws modernized in a positive way to support local distilling, which unfortunately those 'big business' distillers are massively again.

Oh, and the product is outright amazing. Most vodka is downright boring to me, and I prefer scotch, but this is really something that excites me.

Is the whiskey any good? Vodka should be very easy. Good indie whiskey would be a huge accomplishment.

The whiskey is rather good. I'm a scotch guy myself, otherwise I was considering even buying an entire small barrel of it for myself.

Their vodka seems to go above and beyond, and actually has flavor.

You know that unflavored vodka is specifically not supposed to have a flavor, right?

But if something is made of a product (say wheat, which this vodka is) then it also stands to reason that there should be some flavor imparted by the materials it is made with. The definition of vodka as having 'no flavor' is just silly because every vodka out there has a flavor (your tongue knows there's something there), but just generally that flavor is one of bad alcohols that have been poorly distilled.

Thanks for the heads up on Middle West Spirits! Between that and the happy hour at Bodega, coming back to Columbus to visit my parents just might be tolerable.

They do free tours/tastings quite a bit, so definitely give it a shot.

I enjoy micro-distilled liquor (mostly gin) not because it's necessarily better, but because it's different.

If I'm looking for a traditional gin, I don't think anyone's going to beat Tanqueray 10. It's solid, consistent, well-balanced, and smooth. It tastes like what traditional gin should taste like. If I'm looking for something more interesting, I might have some Sacred Gin (http://www.sacredspiritscompany.com/). It's equally as good as Tanqueray 10 (I derive a similar level of enjoyment out of drinking it), it just tastes different - and sometimes I'm in the mood for that.

Whereas major distillers are all working on perfecting a similar recipe (Tanqueray 10 tastes like a better Tanqueray, which takes like Beefeater, which tastes like Gordon's, etc.), small micro-distillers are often agile enough that they can take liberties with flavors that major producers can't.

You should add Hendrick's to your mix of gins!

It's difficult to compare brewers and distillers. It's easy to hide flaws in beer, but very difficult to do that in liquor.

The time to market is also very different in the two fields. With modern brewing equipment you can go grain to glass in as little as 2 weeks. With a whiskey you're talking at least a couple months of aging.

When making beer there are 23 major categories of beer. As a brewer you can make mist of those with just different ingredients. When distilling you're focus is usually on only one type of spirit. In that case it's all or nothing.

Very uninformed article. Big distillers, like big anything, exist to make a profit via broad appeal. Many micro distillers are trying to be more interesting than that.

Of course there are counter-examples on both sides. But Stranahan's (no longer micro) and Leopold Bros. are two examples of great micro-whiskeys from Colorado. If I were so inclined, I could recklessly extrapolate from that anecdote to reach the opposite conclusion as the article does.

Lindsay's Technical Books has several books, mostly late 19th century reprints, on distilling like this one, A Practical Treatise on the Raw Materials and the Distillation and Rectification of Alcohol, http://www.lindsaybks.com/bks9/brannt/index.html

I've had Old Potrero and Four Grain Bourbon and thought they were both fantastic.

But thats not inconsistent with the article. They were different and interesting but not necessarily better than the big distilleries.

Old Potrero isn't a bourbon; I wonder if the dynamics of rye are different from those of bourbon. Rye tends to be cheaper and less aged (I prefer it to bourbon, for what it's worth). Also: Old Potrero is Anchor Brewing. Not exactly a small company.

Woodford Reserve (Four Grain) is Jack Daniels. See what I mean about Big Whiskey? It's inescapable!

Do you have a recommendation for a good rye that's not too pricy? I'm fairly new to bourbon: the only one I've tried and enjoyed is Knob Creek.

The great thing about rye is that it isn't pricey. I like Russells on the low end; the "Makers" of rye seems to be Templeton these days; on the high end, I'm really liking Whistlepig.

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