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Ingredients & Formulations

Yeast Nutrition: From Surviving to Thriving

By Rox Tiburolobo and Elena Fossati Often as distillers, we find that one of the most overlooked aspects in creating quality whiskey or grain spirits is the nutrition needed to maintain healthy Saccharomyces yeast. Part of this is a lack...

Sometimes the Old Ways Are the Best Ways

February, 2019. I’m in London at the Whisky Show: Old and Rare. On offer? Truly vintage spirits like non-peaty Laphroaig from the 1930s and 1950s ryes from long-shuttered Maryland and Pennsylvania distilleries. Festivals like these are windows into the...

Texture

From the way liquid flows out of a bottle and swirls in a glass to the lingering sensation after taking a sip, the character referred to as texture or mouthfeel is often underappreciated but vital. It is also a...

There’s No Gluten in Whiskey. Right?

At a doctor’s appointment late last year, I was told that I needed to cut gluten out of my diet. I said that would be no problem. I wasn’t eating bread at that time anyway, and there’s no gluten...

Rosalie Bay Distillery

When Hurricane Maria struck Dominica in 2017, the storm wreaked havoc across the small Caribbean island, killing dozens, destroying a majority of buildings, and leveling entire fields of sugarcane, including those of the island’s last commercial distillery. In addition...

Restoring Four Corners Gin

The first words out of our mouths were, “What happened?” The recipe was fresh, real, and award-winning. The still was a drop-dead beauty of artisanal design that pumps out gin to great reviews. But something was off during that first...

A Tale of Two Ryes

There’s no doubt that different regions produce different grains, trees, and even distillation and maturation climates. Regional provenance not only helps craft producers differentiate a product in the marketplace, it also provides an opportunity to create community around distillers...

The Good Bitter

I recently acquired a bottle of clear eau de vie distilled from gentian, which was supplied via the haphazard channel of an extended family network on my Swiss side who knew the producer. The label was handwritten and the...

Bottleshop: Maleza

Maleza is a new line of Mexican amari that highlights some of the amazing traditional flavors in the Mexican culinary universe. The first two expressions — Cacahuate (peanut) and Cempasuchitl (marigold) — were just released in the...

Straight to the Source

According to George Bernard Shaw, "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." The same can be said about their takes on sourcing whiskey. Sourcing was a well-established part of the early history of American whiskey,...