Author: Richard Murff

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Brown Water Weather

Whiskey, a neat way to keep warm (Photo: Richard Murff)

It’s still cold and wet, and you’re still broke. The romantics and better halves may call it “snuggle weather,” but you and I know better. You’re possibly on the end of a Dry January, but now those bills are starting to show up and, well, you need a bracer. This, my friend, is “whiskey weather.”

When is it not? We are living in a golden age of bourbon: Distillers have elevated America’s spirit from rotgut to an art form, and they should be proud of themselves. And to look at the price point of some of these artisan products, they really are. To wit: Here are some exceptional whiskeys for the enthusiast whose credit limit isn’t quite what it was on Black Friday:

Old Forester’s flagship bourbon retails for about $19 and is not rotgut, but it is your grandfather’s bourbon. When my friend Tom Morris became master distiller (he started working for the former master distiller in high school), he wanted to up the brand’s game. And he has. Old Forester has several expressions in the $55 to $65 range, and some higher. Every bottle I’ve ever had has been worth the money (assuming that you have it). Hidden among these boozy gems is Old Forester Signature — which will cost you about $26. A friend of mine and I had a side by side with Old Forester’s Signature and the coveted Birthday expression, which was about $55 at the time. We both agreed that the Birthday was the better whiskey, but was it twice as good? What we decided was that Signature was one of the best bourbons for the price.

If you are angling for a local favorite, Blue Note has a couple of expressions that won’t break the bank: Juke Joint comes in at $29. Like Old Forester, Blue Note has some bourbons at a higher price point, and they’ve been worth the money. While Juke Joint has a touch of heat, it really is a great value. Blue Note’s Crossroads comes in at $39, is finished in French oak barrels, and, at 100 proof, I don’t guess you need that much to forget your problems. Either will warm your cockles when you start getting miserly about the thermostat.

If you want to try something a little outside that classic bourbon taste profile, a favorite that I’ve written about before is Old Dominick’s Bourbon Whiskey at $39. What gets me excited is the high rye content, which gives it wonderful spice pepper notes. For a whiskey to be legally called bourbon, it must have at least 51 percent corn — so there is that round sweetness from the corn, but at 44 percent rye, the sweet is balanced with spice.

If you were carousing at a Bobby Burns dinner last week, you might be thinking that you want to give Scotch whiskey a whirl. (Do it for me!) If nothing else, it will wash the taste of haggis out of your mouth. A word of caution — if you love those peaty Islay whiskeys, sadly, you are just going to have to pay up. Going cheap here is awful. If you are looking for a solid drinkable Scotch, stick to Speyside and Highland whiskeys. Without all the peat and smoke, there is a lot less to go horribly wrong. Besides, there is also less to freak the seasoned bourbon drinker out.

Tomatin has a 12-year-old single malt finished in a cherry cask that will cost only $39. It’s a Highland Scotch, but light enough to where I’d initially thought it was Speyside. It is soft, with some notes of crème brûlée, and if you are looking for a single malt under $40 these days, this is about the best you are going to get.

At any rate, cheer up: Warm weather is around the corner, and they just might raise your credit limit.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

A Tale of Two Punches

Photo: Anjelagr | Dreamstime.com

The holidays were made for the closet bartender. A parade of special gatherings of family and friends where you can show off the skills you painstakingly honed in fits of alcoholic Covid boredom. Which is fine for the intimate gathering where people are likely to put up with your tedious mixology theatrics. If you’re dealing with a mob of friends, none of whom are going to settle down until after New Year’s, you’ll need something bigger. And you could do worse than the holiday punch.

I don’t mean the undergrad party-in-a-garbage-can stuff. You want something with style. If you approach it with the right spirit, a good holiday punch is actually like a great craft cocktail played out on a much larger stage … or bowl. It is something different that you can make your own with a clever twist. By that I mean that if you screw it up, just dump in some more champagne. So, with Christmas behind us but the show not quite over, I give you a tale of two holiday punches — but I can only share the recipe for one of them.

A lot of people around town have received and sampled some Fortuné Jaubert Christmas Punch — an old New Orleans concoction of my great-grandfather’s consisting of fruit, wine and whiskey, and, inconveniently, time. You really do need about a week to make it correctly. I only got the recipe by arguing birthright with my grandmother, so I can’t give you the recipe without getting disowned by my Jaubert relatives. Honestly, you don’t have the time to make it anyway, so I guess that we’re even.

The same grandmother also produced a New Year’s Day punch that is not nearly so mysterious and much less involved. You don’t have to keep it to New Year’s Day, but if you are old-school enough to actually have a party on “the day after,” it is the perfect punch. Gran was a very social creature so her recipe was for 40 guests:

• 5 gallons of French vanilla ice cream
• 12 cups of dark roast coffee
• A fifth of bourbon

Put the ice cream in the bowl first — and here you want to get French vanilla, not just the plain stuff — then the bourbon, followed by the java. The hot coffee melts the ice cream pretty quickly so you only need to give it a stir or two of a long spoon to get the right consistency. The beauty of this one is that you can whip up a punch for 40 people with about three minutes of prep time.

Granted, twoscore wildly hungover people pummeling what’s left of your holiday cheer on New Year’s Day isn’t for everyone. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a five-gallon drum of ice cream and, let’s face it, sometime about a year ago we seem to have lost the ability to interact on a grand scale. If you buy one gallon of ice cream, just divide everything by five. Hint: a gallon and a pint of ice cream matches a pint of bourbon. Tweak to taste.

Apart from being hella easy to make, the New Year’s Day punch has the benefit of being a hangover cure that would make our man Jeeves proud. The ice cream is a nice coating for a stomach lining ravaged by merry excess, the bourbon is a smallish nip of hair of the dog without too much bite, and the coffee is a wake-me-up that pushes it all through the system. It’s a great day-drinker in the bargain because it doesn’t really pack too much of a wallop, and as you’ve been hitting the sauce pretty hard since November, you really might want to settle down, Spanky.

Although, admittedly, it is not going to do that Holiday Seven you’ve gained any favors.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Drinking Writers’ Tears

Photo: Atomazul | Dreamstime.com

I have always liked Irish whiskey, but have never been overly wowed by it. Being a Scotch guy — and specifically an Islay whisky (note that the Scots leave off the “e”) — I go for peat and seawater. To me, Irish whiskey tastes like Scotch with the corners sanded off. Not a bad description because the Irish stuff is traditionally distilled three times as opposed to the two passes they make in Scotland. The extra loop makes a lighter finished product and doesn’t have that peaty aspect that puts the cowardly modern drinker off. The notable exception to this is Auchentoshan, the only triple-distilled single malt Scotch. Honestly, it tastes like Irish whiskey to me.

Monks first brought distillation to Ireland in the early Dark Ages, and supposedly thanks are owed to St. Patrick himself. Understand that Patrick gets the dubious credit for nearly everything good in Ireland, but the whiskey claim is a lot more plausible than that business with the snakes. It would be another century before another Irish monk would cross the North Sea and bring the art to Scotland. Because practice makes perfect, they got very good at it.

Then they stopped practicing.

It’s a misconception that Prohibition was strictly an American thing. The truth is that the early 20th century temperance movement was a global phenomenon: Finland, Iceland, and Russia(!) all toyed with Prohibition in the decade before the U.S. finally enacted it. Believe it or not, it was a powerful movement in Ireland as well — the upshot being that demand dropped and so did production, meaning that in turn quality also suffered. True, sales picked up in the Great Depression, but that was more about quantity than quality. The consequence to all this was that by 1950 there were only four distilleries in Ireland, and they were just barely hanging on. A further consolidation in 1966 left just three, but this was a tactical retreat. The distilleries teamed up with the goal of focusing on making a superior product, not just surviving. They started practicing again. Throughout the 1970s the quality attracted more investment, and that led to a revival boom in Irish whiskey through the ’90s.

When I saw Writers’ Tears Irish Whiskey, well, I had to give it a whirl. (To be clear, I’m not Irish; I spell my name Murff, not Murph. It is Swiss German, and yet I have no firm opinion on fondue.) I hoped that the whiskey’s name, clever as it is, was just a marketing gimmick. Being a prolific producer of writers’ tears myself, I know that they have a bitter and lonely aftertaste.

I can assure you that there is nothing bitter about this stuff. Writers’ Tears Double Oak was a 2019 Top 20 pick from Whisky Advocate magazine and has been called the most premium Irish blend. It may well be. It’s made the traditional way and finished in American white oak bourbon barrels, then French oak cognac casks. All of which gives a depth and complexity to Writers’ Tears that I don’t normally associate with Irish whiskey.

Pour a dram and you get a deep color that you might mistake for cognac or bourbon. There, the similarities end. It’s got a nose that gives you dark, rich fruit; dark chocolate; and spices. There is oak on the front end. I’ve heard other reviewers talk about a honey blond sweetness — but I think that I’m picking up the same quality as an almost cosmic smoothness of a dark, mellow vanilla. You don’t get much heat, just a finish that’s peppery with a hint of a little green apple.

To give full scope to these whiskeys would require me to go full Irish writer on you, but my handlers refused to up my allotted word count to 25,000. So I’ll sum it up: Writers’ Tears Double Oak is a whiskey that has not had its corners sanded off.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Sloshed on the River: A Taste of O.H. Ingram

Photo: Richard Murff

Whiskey barrels, when full, are very hard to move. The shape of the things makes you think you can roll them, and you can. But stopping a barrel once it gets moving can be tricky. Overall, it’s a cumbersome business and few distilleries take the trouble to do it — although they won’t admit it. Which is a shame, because rolling a barrel while the white lightning slowly ages inside does a whiskey a world of good.

What separates moonshine from a good whiskey is largely contact between the unfinished spirit and — in the case of bourbon — those charred white oak staves of the whiskey barrel. You probably already knew that, but it does raise the question: What about the spirits in the center of the barrel? The stuff that doesn’t come in contact with the wood? Part of the answer is heat cycling — either naturally with the passing of the seasons or via forced climate control — the liquid expands and contracts creating a (very) slow movement of liquid in the barrel. But it doesn’t move that much. Rolling is better, but tedious.

Enter Hank Ingram, founder of Brown Water Spirits in Ballard County, Kentucky, and the mind behind the O.H. Ingram River Aged Series of whiskeys. Hank is a connoisseur of the brown water but lacks an old whiskey family pedigree. His people were barge people, and that’s what led to one of the more clever — albeit brilliantly simple — innovations in whiskey-making that I’ve read about in a long time.

Rollin’ on the river — O.H. Ingram River Aged Whiskey (Photo: Richard Murff)

When we spoke, Hank was on the road to one of the company’s floating rickhouses on the nearby Mississippi River. Hank explained the process to me with the language of an involved and excited engineer, but the bottom line is this: He lets the natural movement of the river do the sloshing for him. (In Hank’s defense, “sloshing” was my word. His had more syllables.)

The effect of all this is a whiskey being aged in the humid climate of the Mississippi, with river legs wobbling beneath it. Hank admits it’s experimental, but that’s the adventure. What appears to be happening is something of dog years in whiskey aging, where one year of the slow but constant movement of spirits in the barrel is equal to about two or three in a rickhouse.

But innovations, however clever, are only as good as their results.

I opened a bottle of O.H. Ingram River Aged. Jamming a nose into the tasting glass with that dark-gold pour, you get some honey. At 96 proof, there was some ethanol as well. It’s nothing a few drops of water and a swirl won’t fix. After that, the heat dissipates, leaving an almost creamy sensation. The honey is still there — but not sweet, because you get some nutmeg spice as well. It’s not terribly malty, but if you have any inclination toward wheated bourbons, you’ll love this. It’s rich and very smooth and has got a nice, long finish.

Ingram is one of those whiskeys that goes well with a little water or a cube of ice, but I wouldn’t be offended with something more — soda or branch water. The spice would lend itself to an excellent Old Fashioned if you don’t like them too sweet.

If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because it only hit the shelves in west Tennessee in March, but you can find it around town fairly readily. It’s nothing we’d call a value brand; it will set you back around $75 dollars. Still, as cheap as I am, at no point was I wondering why I’d spent the money. That’s saying something.

Hank wouldn’t tell me exactly how old it was — and it’s not on the bottle — but I suppose that’s the point. The rules of terra firma don’t really apply here. It tastes like it’s spent all the time it jolly well needs in the barrel, and beyond that, you really shouldn’t care too much.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Old Dominick’s Gin: A Memphis Original

Richard Murff

Alex Castle grew up in Kentucky, so she knew bourbon when she jumped into the boys’ club of professional distillers. Now, as the master distiller at Memphis’ Old Dominick Distillery, she’s president of the Tennessee Distillers Guild. As the father of a daughter, I think the image of a lady hurling a whiskey bottle through a glass ceiling is pretty groovy.

Her approach to gin is refreshing, as well, and with spring upon us, I have opinions. Alex told me that when developing Old Dominick’s No. 10, what she wanted was a balanced gin. Which is not as obvious as it sounds. Hendrick’s Gin was probably the first out of the gate with its botanical-forward approach, then came Junipero, and then a flood of others. It was a good time for gin because people were paying more attention to it. But as tends to happen when something gets fashionable — things go too far. Innovation slips easily into parody. Enter the age of a new artisanal gin hitting the market every week, each trying to outdo the other. If a little more botanicals are good, then a lot more must be better.

Alex had another vision: “I didn’t want a gin that tasted like a Christmas tree,” she says.

Which is what I like about Old Dominick’s No. 10. It’s got some interesting angles to it, but not at the expense of just being refreshing. Mrs. M, who never liked Hendrick’s or its army of imitators, approves. She lets the gin sit in the ice for a bit. Then it sparkles.

Old Dominick No. 10
(Photo: Richard Murff)

What about the other side of the G & T equation? What’s the tonic of choice? Alex admitted — in something akin to embarrassment — that she drinks her gin with soda. And maybe that’s why I liked No. 10; it doesn’t need tonic to work.

Years ago, back when Mrs. M went by Ms. C, she introduced me to the gin and soda. I’d never heard of it before, and thought she was just being quirky (you know what it’s like when you first start dating). At any rate, I quickly found that I couldn’t go back to the old standard gin and tonic — it was too cloying and made me want to suck the enamel off my teeth. Plenty of higher-end tonics have come out since, but I’ve never warmed to them. Except …

I was pretty excited about Old Dominick’s box promotion with Jack Rudy’s tonic syrup. Pour your gin over ice, add the tonic, top off with soda water and a slice of citrus. The thing I really love about Jack Rudy is that while the bottle suggests using .75 ounce of syrup to 2 ounces of gin, you can modify that. If, for example, the charming Mrs. M has ruined the standard G & T for you — or perhaps you know Alex Castle and she’s doing the ruining — you have options. The new math: The recommended .75 ounce is equal to 4.5 teaspoons. I use one teaspoon (or 0.1666 oz.) and leave it at that.

Which brings us back to the concept of balance; you find whatever works for you. For me, that’s a well-balanced gin that is interesting but doesn’t make itself obvious, with a tonic that is however you like it. Give it a twirl in the ice and let it sit before diving in, so the botanicals open up and soften.

The weather is getting warmer, the tweed has gone away, and the seersucker is calling me from the closet. It’s gin season, and with a little tinkering on your part, a gin and tonic — perfectly blended for you — is waiting.

On a final note, tonic is made with quinine, which supposedly retards malaria. Intrigued, I tested its impact on COVID and I didn’t get the plague, but I understand that the test sample — me — was statistically insignificant. So go get your shot.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink Food Reviews

Blue Note: A Memphis Whiskey to Savor

Photo: Richard Murff

Cutting quickly to the chase, Blue Note Straight Bourbon Whiskey Single Barrel Reserve is a great whiskey. It hits the right note, if you will. In fact, it hits a lot of them. Produced here in Memphis, I found this particular bottle — from a barrel hand-selected by the team at Buster’s — when one of said team, Kathrine Fultz, stuck it in my hand. I have a keen grasp of the obvious, you see.

These hand-picked barrels are more than just a gimmick. There is a lot of blending that goes into commercial production, which isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s how producers ensure a uniform product. No one expects their go-to bottle of bourbon to vary from batch to batch, like wine. Whiskey bottled from a single barrel, on the other hand, is something unique. Assuming that the people doing the picking know what they are doing, it’s a great way to enjoy a one-of-a-kind bottle. What Kathrine handed me was bottle #34 from the anointed barrel. I suppose that knowing exactly which bottle I was holding was a bit of a gimmick, but it’s a pretty cool one.

So, I opened up bottle #34 at nine years and, taking myself entirely too seriously, poured out a dram in a snifter. The color was beautiful. When cramming your nose into a tasting glass, remember to part your lips and breathe. That way you get to the whiskey and don’t just get a honker overwhelmed by ethyl alcohol. It’s deep caramel, with some oak spice to let you know it’s there. Then add a few drops of that pure, no-longer-needs-to-be-boiled, Memphis water. On the palate, there is also some citrus, but at 122.4 proof, there is some heat to it. At that proof there would have to be, but the feel isn’t raw.

Photo: Richard Murff

The truth is that those tasting glasses are small and I don’t suggest whipping one out in public unless you just want to look like an insufferable ass. I think that it’s important to try a whiskey out in what we might call “real world conditions,” so I poured what we might call a “real drink” into a rocks glass, along with a cube or two of ice — like an actual human. After giving it a swirl or two, I let it sit for a bit.

If you follow booze twitter or Instagram while pretending to be at work, you get a lot of whiskey-purists barking about not putting water in whiskey. What bugs me about this isn’t that it’s bad advice, but that someone with the handle “Supreme_Bourbon_Buddha,” or some such nonsense, is broadcasting such an obvious rookie mistake. I suppose we all need a code to live by, but the laws of both physiology and chemistry still stand: The tongue and nasopharynx can only process so much ethyl alcohol. At 122.4 proof, you are only getting about half of what you bought. A little water will do both you and your whiskey a tremendous service.

After a swirl, the Blue Note really opens up and hits some different notes. That heat mellowed out into a deeper caramel with hints of orange, and with that oak spice still moving along the palate. The body — or mouthfeel — is richer than you’d expect for proof in this neighborhood, and it all thankfully lingers in a good, long finish.

The downside to a selected single barrel is that there is only one of them, and so by their very nature supplies are limited. Which is as good a reason as any to get to know your local liquor store. You just never know what they are going to stick in your hand.