Before the industrial revolution, wooden casks were the storage vessel of choice; lighter and less fragile than their clay pot cousins, they were produced virtually everywhere by skilled craftsmen known as coopers (obviously named after a popular barrel-colored distillery cat). They were a valuable commodity: they were costly to produce, and a barrel, properly maintained and cared for, could last for generations actually I’m not sure, but a very long time. The down side is that wood is porous, so if you stored your pickled herring in the family barrel, that flavor (and smell) would hang on to the wood for a while. The solution? Fill the emptied barrel with straw, and burn out all that delicious briny fish flavor.

Welcome to your new home, whiskey.

Eventually people discovered that burning the inside of the barrel not only got rid of last week’s catch, but it also altered the flavor of whatever went in to it next. Whiskey, wine, brandy – all of these liquids were carted around in barrels, stored and saved for a rainy day in them, and were accordingly transformed. Over time the color of the liquor changed, and more importantly, so did the flavor.

The question, then, is why? What happens inside the barrels?

Well, a lot of things.

First, and perhaps most importantly, oxygen is slowly introduced to the whiskey. Whiskey is a complex liquid, full of not only ethanol and water, but also phenols, amino acids, esters, aldehydes, and a whole litany of other chemicals (plus tannins, lignins, lactones, cellulose, and other compounds added from the wood – more on this below). Oxygen, well, oxidizes these chemicals, as oxygen is wont to do. This oxidation is what changes their flavor from the new make spirit. This is where the porous nature of the wood comes in to play, because it causes the barrels to “breathe” – as the liquid heats up during the day, it expands into the airy wood; when it cools at night, it withdraws into the barrel, creating a vacuum that draws air (which is about one fifth oxygen) in with it.

Second, and nearly as important, the charred wood itself has a number of effects on the whiskey. In addition to the aforementioned tannins and lignins that are added to the spirit, the expansion and contraction pulls other compounds from the wood. Wood sugars have been caramelized; vanillin has been created in the toasted wood behind the char. It’s important to note that some of these are water soluble, and others are alcohol soluble, so it’s essential to reduce the strength of the distillate between the still and the barrel.* As the liquid flows in and out of the charred oak, the porous char acts like activated charcoal: a high surface area replete with greedy carbon molecules, ready to grab and filter out whatever contaminants they can get their dirty little bonds on.

There are other factors in the aging process, most notably time and barrel size. Regarding the former, a quick glance at any shelf of whiskey will reveal a broad range of ages: zero years, four years, twelve years, thirty years, a billion years, and so on. The reason for this, quite simply, is because taste is subjective. There is no ideal age; there are just differences. Regarding size, most of those bottles are full of whiskey aged in large barrels – 53 gallons or larger (hundreds of gallons or more). Smaller barrels affect the whiskey in a different way. But both of those topics will be addressed at length in a different post.

*higher alcohol is more cost-effective; nobody is interested in bottles of barrel-aged water. As such, the major distilleries tried to get the laws changed to allow a higher proof be put in barrels – 190 or so. In a refreshing turn of events, the government did not allow these huge corporations to sacrifice quality and consumer experience in the interest of profit, and capped the allowed proof at 125 – which most of them use. We, however, use 110-118 proof; slightly less cost-effective, but yielding better results.

It’s a pretty apt description. If you came here looking for a fascinating story to start your day, you might find this post a bit dry. Instead, check out these guys who built a secret apartment inside a mall. Enjoy!
On the other hand, for those of you who are like “hey fellas, that’s enough with the chit-chat, let’s just cut to the chase,” here is the actual boring legal stuff. But wait! Before you go, the pertinent Albany Distilling facts are: our whiskey is made with 100% New York State farm and food products (“predominantly” means 75%) and the rum is made with 100% Caribbean molasses (i.e. 0% New York State; well below the threshold).

So that’s a bit of a spoiler, but it addresses the rough details: on premises, we are only allowed to sell spirits made predominantly with farm and food products sourced from within our fine state. This is because in that case, they fall under our class D, or farm distillery license. This category was created in 2002 (essentially due to the hard work and diligence of one man, Ralph Erenzo, our friend and neighbor down at Tuthilltown Spirits) and updated in 2007. It stripped away many of the restrictions on operating a distillery in New York, allowed spirits to be sold directly to individual customers, provided for tastings, and so on. Most notably, it lowered the $50,000 licensing fee to a scant $150. Feel free to double check the math on this one, but that’s something like a 97.7% discount. The intention was to promote New York State agriculture, which it did; it also led to a proliferation of fantastic small distilleries all over the place, both upstate and in New York City (this site has…a tiny smattering of them, but hopefully they’ll all be on there soon).

And in fact, although it may not look like it, legally we are actually two distilleries. In addition to the class D license, we also have a class A-1 license. This is what allows us to make rum. At present, there are exactly zero sugar plantations in New York; as a result, locally sourced molasses are a bit tricky to come by. Our class A-1 license is more of a standard distillery license; it allows us to distill whatever we want, with ingredients from wherever – but it is clear that our facility under this license is a manufacturing site only, not a retailer. This obviously makes things a little tricky for us; it is much more convenient if we can sell bottles both out the front door of the distillery and out of the back seat of our cars. Fortunately, it’s just the rum; not our entire product line.
Some other distilleries aren’t as lucky. Industry City and The Noble Experiment, both of which are located in Brooklyn, produce distillates entirely from materials sourced out of state: beets and molasses, respectively. As a result, they can sell to bars and liquor stores only.

This post is so boring that it doesn’t even get a picture attached to it. Hey, you were warned!

…alright, fine. Everyone knows what you really came here for. Have some Cooper.

This image is now available as a special edition print on your office printer.

Rum was an important commodity in the colonies, produced in a variety of important cities, and Albany was no exception. The Quackenbush Still House made rum in what was then Rensselaerswyck, which today encompasses much of downtown Albany. The distillery stood not far from our current front door, just south of us, where a parking garage now resides.  Before construction started on the garage, the site was excavated in 2002 (much, much more information can be found here). The original Quackenbush distillery operated from around 1758 to 1810, when the popularity of rum (in Albany, not elsewhere) declined in favor of other spirits (whiskey, most notably).

On the topic of whiskey, I’ve covered the extensive federal regulations regarding the production of bourbon and rye, for example: it must be made from all grain, and one of those grains must be over 50% of the mash bill; it can be distilled to no higher than 160 proof; it must be aged in new, charred, American white oak barrels; it can be aged at no higher than 125 proof; it must be bottled at no less than 80 proof.
Regulations for rum are a bit more flexible: made from molasses.

The term “molasses” itself encompasses a broad range of products. It can be made from sugar cane or beets, in a range of grades from from fancy (no sugar removed) to blackstrap (stripped of sugar as far as commercially viable). We opted for the former on both counts: fancy molasses made from sugar cane. In order go be as authentic as possible, we found one of the few sources of actual Caribbean fancy molasses out there (and as far as we know, we’re the only American distillery making rum with it). Although on the expensive side, it preserves the most flavor and is closest to what was being used in colonial Albany. Likewise, the recipe we found from that era was pretty straightforward: put an (uncracked) egg in water. Add molasses until the egg floats. Ferment. Distill. Bottle. Drink. And so on.

An egg floating in molasses wash, for the curious.

Back then, fermentation was done by magic; or rather, huge open wooden vats lay exposed to the elements, and wild yeasts found their way into the wash – which is magic in a time before microscopes were easy to come by. Over time, the wild yeast became somewhat domesticated. The wild strains most adapted to molasses fermentation reproduced and propagated in and around the Quackenbush Still House over countless generations (which for yeast are not very long). We use a yeast which is a distant relative of these wild strains, captured in rum distilleries and bred in captivity to be perfect for rum. It’s much more efficient, and much, much more sanitary.

We’ve also upgraded from Hudson River water.

Pick up a bottle this weekend!

Our Original Albany Rum will be available to the public this Saturday, March 23rd. Since it’s not made from New York State produce, we can’t sell it at the distillery (more on that in the next post) – but call one of these fine retailers and reserve a bottle today, and then come down on Saturday to help us celebrate!

This was Cooper’s first day with the company. Obviously this was before his OSHA training; now he wears a helmet when he’s climbing through equipment that could easily crush him.

He immediately solved our giant felt mouse problem in an adorable fashion.

Part of his orientation involved a specific list of places he was expressly forbidden to sleep. He failed the orientation exam.

His first assignment was equipment inspection, part of which involves each instrument being thoroughly smelled to ensure quality. This one passed.

Have you had a chance to check out this box? It’s amazing.

Don’t worry, folks. That’s water. Cooper doesn’t drink whiskey (unless it’s straight from the bottle).

Hey! Hey guys! Guess who it is! It’s Cooper! You guys! It’s me! Pet me, you guys! It’s me, Cooper! Hey! Seriously, you guys! Hey!

Let’s just paws for a minute.

Hello, ladies. Did somebody order their heart being stolen?

If you leave your coat on the ground, it will be subject to invasion and sleeping in.

No, you can’t have your chair back. Now let’s get moving; my chin isn’t going to scratch itself.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
…you may now return to work.

Alright, alright. So we’re a little remiss. I can’t promise it won’t happen again, but we’ve got a good excuse: we’ve been busy. Very, ridiculously busy.

Allow me to elaborate.

Shortly after the last post, we turned our attention to the twelve small barrels quietly aging on the floor of the distillery. They were on the small side; ten gallons each. We had filled them nearly three months earlier with our second, third, and fourth batches of bourbon (our first batch is tucked away in the corner, waiting patiently until an as-yet-undetermined date when we can no longer stand to wait). Honestly, we had no idea what to expect – we’re new to this. We were confident that the whiskey we had filled the barrels with was fantastic; we just didn’t know what the wood would do to it over the course of 90 days.

As it turns out, we had nothing to worry about.
The bourbon, while young, was a rich, dark amber. The small barrel size ensured a high ratio of surface area to liquid, which meant the whiskey was very thoroughly exposed to the charred wood. A lot goes on inside the barrel: the charred oak acts as a filtering agent, the toasted wood behind the char adds all sorts of interesting flavors, the liquid slowly evaporates and concentrates the flavors, and some other magic happens. The result was, well, phenomenal, if we may say so.

Just a few inches into the tank, and it’s already almost too dark to see the bottom.

Granted, we’re a bit biased; but you don’t have to take our word for it. We had well over seven hundred bottles, and they were gone in a week. We had a lot of happy customers, but we also had a lot of less-than-happy folks who couldn’t get their hands on a bottle. Well, after our we were out of stock and the phone calls didn’t stop, we decided we should probably ramp up production a bit. So we ordered a whole bunch of grain, stocked up on malt, and started hitting the mill. After we sold out in December, we worked literally every day but Christmas, and there hasn’t been a day since where we haven’t been milling, mashing, fermenting, distilling, barreling, or bottling. We got another order of barrels, started to pull down and rehydrate the empty barrels that had been decorating our walls, and started filling them. So, fortunately for the disappointed people who didn’t get a bottle, there will be more Ironweed Bourbon in April (but if you’re dying to try it in the meantime, I believe they still have it in stock at Capital City Gastropub, New World Bistro, and our neighbors The Albany Pump Station and dp: an American Brasserie). We also barreled a good amount of the rye I mentioned in the last post. We put the rye in 25-gallon barrels (as opposed to 10-gallon), mostly in December; after we get the bourbon released, we’ll start checking on it periodically to see when it’s ready to be harvested and bottled. We’re hoping to have Ironweed Rye on the shelves by the end of the summer.

Our second round of bourbon barrels, filled last month.

In the meantime, our ambitious schedule has produced two other things we’re very happy about. In addition to a healthy stock of barreled whiskey, we also have a rye mash Coal Yard New Make. We’re currently sold out at the distillery (we have some stock we need to bottle), but it is available at nearly all the retailers listed on our website.

We also made rum. We’ll be releasing it in the next month or so. More to come on that in a later post. Which will be soon, I promise.

We’re really excited about it.

As mentioned in an earlier post, this is part of our campaign to start filling all these beautiful, empty barrels: we feel like we’ve got a decent handle on the bourbon (because, well, it’s ludicrously good, if we may say so), so we’re ready to expand our repertoire a bit.

As huge rye fans, we already put a healthy punch of it into the bourbon mash – we really like how the pepper notes balance out the sweetness of the corn. However, we didn’t want to reciprocate that relationship; in fact, we wanted to make something that was a bit of a dramatic departure from the bourbon. So, not only is there no corn in it, but there’s also no barley (or malted rye). Instead, we use 75% rye, and the remaining 25% is malted red winter wheat – both for taste and starch conversion.

The result is…well, delicious. It’s light and peppery with a strong honey overtone. Very strong honey, actually, and it’s incredibly aromatic as it comes off the still. We’re (planning on – and we know how our plans have worked out for us historically) putting batches one through four in 25-gallon barrels for six months or a year (it’s up to the barrels, really, and how cooperative they are), and we’re really excited about how the aged rye is going to come out. Don’t worry, though; in the spring, we’ll have the “unaged” Coal Yard Rye, and shortly thereafter, three-month-old from smaller barrels, which are due to arrive in December.

As a side note, even though we’ve only done eight runs of bourbon, we’d already forgotten how frustratingly slow it was when we started; the initial run of rye (without tails to fortify it) slowly trickled out for a very,very long time. After the hearts were finished lollygagging their way out of the still, we sat around watching it for another few hours – but still only got about 15 liters of tails, a few paltry drops at a time, and they were pretty weak (probably 10% alcohol); after a couple runs, we had almost 100 liters at around 30%. It really does make a huge difference.

At any rate, we will be sure to keep you posted on the barreling, bottling, and availability!

This is what it looks like before you drink it.

We made batches five and six virtually identical – since we were planning on just bottling them (as opposed to barreling), we went with an organic yellow dent corn instead of the Wapsie Valley corn we had been using. We liked the flavor of batch five, but it was a little more potent than some of our customers liked, so we toned it down a bit for batch six. Batch six came out extremely well, but being a craft distillery and not wanting to just rest on our laurels, we decided to change things up a bit: for batch seven, we kept the yellow corn used a different strain of yeast.

It is similar to what we had been using (a distillers’ yeast, made by the same manufacturer), but one that was used more often for neutral spirits and tequila. Since tequila is in spirit (no pun intended) the closest product on the market to what we’re making (direct from plant to mash to still to bottle), and we’ve gotten some feedback to that end, we figured we’d give it a shot. It didn’t turn out terribly different, to be honest – just a few very subtle hints, and since the new yeast is much more expensive…well, it was interesting to try. For the seasoned Coal Yard drinkers out there, you can experience the difference for yourselves; it is really very subtle.

At any rate, batch seven is sitting in a tank waiting to be bottled.
With that ready to go, and eight cases of batch six left, we’ve finally given ourselves enough breathing room (and I use that term very loosely; if anything, we’re ramping production up in order to have year-old products for the next holiday season) to start filling barrels. Our expensive oak decorations will – very soon – be transformed into magical oak treasure chests.

In the meantime, they just sit there, silently mocking us with their hollowness.

The idea behind this plan is that it would give us a little “wiggle room” in a few respects. First, it would allow us to sell something while the bourbon & rye were aging, thus keeping the lights on. Second, since the barrels would have a significant effect on the flavor of the whiskey, it would smooth over any rough edges or slight recipe variations that were otherwise present. Third, we figured we’d have a nice unaged stock of each batch, so we could take them out of storage when we harvested the barrels and do a side-by-side comparison: batch one new make vs. bourbon, batch nine* new make vs. rye, and so on.

Then, along comes October 5th. Grand opening insanity.
As I mentioned here, it was a bit of a scramble just to get the bottles in order – and on top of that, the printing company made a slight error (for those of you with the early bottles, the black ink on the “coal” detail isn’t glossy like it is now), so they just sent over a little roll of 200 to get us through the week. The company anticipated some rips and printing errors, so 200 actually meant closer to 225, and we were pretty careful (aside from the wasted labels on the original bottles). All told, we had about 18 cases ready to sell.

Our goal was to sell 8 cases. Instead, we completely sold out in a matter of hours.

Fortunately, we had another couple hundred bottles all ready to go for when the remaining labels showed up a few days later – but they, too, went pretty quickly. In about a week, pretty much everything from batches 1-4 that wasn’t in a barrel was gone.

Needless to say, we had not anticipated this demand. Not that we’re complaining; we’re thrilled that we’ve had such a positive reception. However, it’s interfered with step 2 of our master plan – we don’t have enough to put in barrels and still supply everybody. So, we started batch five knowing full well that our poor, lonely barrels would have to wait. So they are. The only barrel getting any action is our used one, being constantly filled and emptied every 30 minutes.

This is the barrel we’ll be using for the foreseeable future.

Still, it hasn’t slowed us down, nor prevented us from trying new things.

Batch five is the first run (to be followed by batch six, which is identical to batch five) that we are putting exclusively into bottles. We bottled it a week ago, and we have about five cases left – so it turns out exclusively bottling was a good idea. We used a different variety of corn (though still organic, and still New York State) to give a slightly more mellow flavor and allow the rye to come through a little more. We really like rye, and this is the same grain that we’ll be milling next week to turn into rye whiskey. But that’s a different post.

*this does not exist yet.

If you look carefully at the photos of the bottles we had on the website and the various media coverage before Thursday, and then compare them to the newer photos (or the bottles some of you lucky folks have next to you right now!), you may notice a slight difference. It looks as though we took the original bottles and squished them a little bit. Not a lot; I mean, it’s glass, and it would break! So like I said, we just squeezed them a little. Enough to flatten them a bit.

Alright, maybe that isn’t quite what happened. The real story is a lot more…aggravating.

It all begins way back in July, when the good, talented folks at id29 brought us a number of prototype labels to browse through. There were six of them; three each for Ironweed and Coal Yard. We browsed through them, picked our favorites, scrutinized the details, and sent the team back to the drawing board to work on a second draft with our feedback (which was pretty specific, and id29 did a fantastic job every step of the way. You should hire them!).

Along with the labels themselves, we had a bunch of sample bottles we sourced from a variety of bottle suppliers. We picked something that looked a bit like a vodka bottle; tall, sleek, with sharp edges. We passed up on the oblong bottle (you know, the one we now use) because a cylinder goes through a labeling machine pretty easily. It was a great bottle, but not as practical. The cylinder, we were convinced, would make our lives a lot easier.

As it turns out, we were wrong.

Our labels arrived on Wednesday afternoon, less than two days before our opening. Eventually, amidst all the other things we were doing, we got around to sticking a label on one of the bottles.
It didn’t fit.

The bottles were a tiny, TINY bit concave. Hardly noticeable to us, but pretty obvious to the machine. The labels were too wide for the bottles, and we were stuck with a roll holding just over 200 of them – with another thousand on the way.

We panicked. Then, in between fainting spells, we remembered plan B: the bottles we had considered originally. “Difficult to apply labels” was clearly better than “impossible to apply labels”. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any; luckily, there were several thousand located a short three hour drive away. The guys at Waterloo Container were incredibly accommodating and understanding; they were more than willing to let us trade in our useless bottles for new ones. We rented a truck the next morning, and seven hours later had returned from Waterloo without incident.* Once we had them in the distillery, we could then fill and label them. Which we did. For several hours. Late into the night. Right before our grand opening.

Still, they turned out great. The labels seem almost designed for the bottle. We like them much better.

*not true. I dropped the first full case of empty bottles I picked up and they shattered spectacularly on the loading dock floor.

So, I will say it again: bourbon does not have to come from Kentucky. This is not something new, as a result of all these upstart nascent distilleries popping up everywhere; this dates back well over a hundred years. If you don’t want to take my word for it, you can purchase memorabilia from pre-Prohibition bourbon distilleries outside of Kentucky and own a primary source. Bourbon was recognized by Congress in 1964 as a “distinctive product of the United States” – the entire Union, not just Kentucky.

Let’s run through some heavily condensed history, here. First of all, up until the end of the 18th century, Kentucky was part of Virginia – and large parts of both states were part of Old Bourbon County, named to honor the French and their assistance during the Revolutionary War. The United States was newly formed and it was an exciting time, rife with people striking out away from the east coast to seek their fortune. Whiskey was a popular commodity back then, especially for poor farmers the further west you went – it was a sensible product to make from surplus grain. A lot of it had to be shipped east to sell, often over rough terrain, and whiskey didn’t take up a lot of space and wouldn’t spoil or freeze in transit. In fact, its production was so common and widespread throughout the young nation that when Uncle Sam was strapped for cash, a whiskey tax was introduced in 1791. This eventually led to the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 – in Pennsylvania, not Kentucky.

In the meantime, all these poor Appalachian farmers who were being taxed out of house and home were offered a pretty sweet deal. This new state called Kentucky had just been formed, and if you went there and grew corn for a couple years: free land! Hooray! So, being the sensible distillers that they were, the new residents of Kentucky began to turn their surplus grain – which was now mostly corn – into whiskey, a practice which was occurring even when Kentucky was Virginia. The influx of these farmers simply boosted production.

Enter mythology. The popular legend is that a man named Reverend Elijah Craig just up and invented bourbon one day in 1789; there is, however, no evidence to support this – but it makes for a fun story and a great marketing tool. In fact, it’s patently false (and only dubiously alluded to for the first time in 1874); bourbon wasn’t “invented” at all – it was just a catch-all term to describe corn-heavy whiskey, as opposed to the rye-heavy whiskey more commonly produced further east. Remember that Bourbon was a huge corn-growing region, full of imported farmers who were no strangers to distillation. When whiskey barrels were loaded onto boats on the Ohio River, they were marked “Old Bourbon” to indicate their origin point and therefore make this distinction. And remember: Old Bourbon = Virginia.

This is from shortly after Prohibition, before the Kentucky contingent convinced us they had the exclusive claim. How quickly we forget.

As a final point of irony: Bourbon County, Kentucky is actually a dry county. So they don’t have any whiskey there, bourbon or otherwise, and they certainly don’t produce any.

Bourbon is currently produced in the following states: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York (that’s us!), Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Also Tennessee, even if they insist on calling it “Tennessee whiskey” instead of bourbon. Oh, and Kentucky.

Overall, there are nearly 130 distilleries in the United States right now – more than Scotland! – and while only some of them are making bourbon (let alone whiskey), bourbon’s place as “America’s native spirit” (those are the words of the U.S. Congress, not mine) is becoming increasingly more accurate.

For more specific information about how bourbon is defined now, see this post.