Tag: Pyramid Vodka

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Pyramid (Vodka) Dream

Pyramid Vodka, the “grain to glass” distillery located just a stone’s throw from CC Blues Club on Thomas Street, uses Delta-grown corn and Memphis artesian water to produce its vodka, which won the platinum, or “best in class” award, at the 2015 Spirits International Prestige, an international consumer-tasting competition.

“These are superior ingredients,” CEO Alexander Folk told me in Pyramid’s tasting room one afternoon last week. “The Delta is the most fertile farmland in the world, and Memphis water is one of the best. We’re getting really pure flavors here.”

Corn is milled, cooked, and fermented in the 25,000-square-foot building, originally built to service the New Chicago neighborhood’s long-gone Firestone plant. “It was once an adhesive factory,” Folk explained. “This area is historically very industrial, and the building, with its 20-foot ceilings and floor drains, is perfect for us.”

Even the waste goes to use. During my visit to the distillery, farmer Tim Ammons of Oleo Acres in Stanton arrived to pick up the recycling — two tubs of mash that he will use to feed his pigs. Other farmers reuse the methane produced at the distillery to keep their greenhouses warm.

Out on the distillery floor, Carson Duffy and Jacob Reed walked me through the vodka-making process. First, corn is run through a gristmill three times — to be exact. Reed, the production manager, processes 30,000 pounds of corn every six weeks. After cooking the mash for six hours, yeast is added. Reed ferments “on the grain” instead of separating the starches from the liquid. It’s like using pasta water to flavor your sauce instead of water from the tap. “The longer the water sits in the grain, the more flavorful it is,” Reed says. From here, it’s all science: Starches break down into sugars, enyzmes are added, and the sugars are transformed into alcohol. Once cooled, everything is dumped into a feeder tank and pumped through a stripping column, where the alcohol is pulled from the mash.

The distilled alcohol is weighed, and Memphis water, stripped of chlorine and fluoride, is added to get the product to 80 proof. Finally, it’s filtered, 250 gallons at a time, through burnt coconut shells no fewer than five times.

Then all six staff members do a blind taste test. If everyone agrees it’s on target, it’s bottled and shipped off to market.

A brand-new still, designed, built, and installed last month by Montana-based Headframe Stills, brought the continuous distillation process to Pyramid. That means that instead of cooking in 500-gallon batches, Reed can cook two gallons per minute. Continuous distillation requires a smaller footprint than batch distillation, it’s more energy efficient, and it cuts the production time from six weeks to two weeks.

Previously, Reed had to monitor the process by smell and taste; now, he can track the boiling points of the unwanted “bottoms” and “heads,” and the valuable ethanol, which makes up 95 percent of Pyramid Vodka, via a computer screen. The old batch still, which will be sold, produced 5,000 cases of vodka a year. The new still has the capacity to produce 160,000 cases annually, which could launch Pyramid beyond the regional market.

You can find Pyramid Vodka at dozens of liquor stores and restaurants in Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and across the state of Arkansas. Better yet, stop by the distillery yourself for a free tour. They’re offered Wednesday through Friday at 10 a.m., 11 a.m., noon, and at 1 p.m. on Saturdays. Tours run about 45 minutes and include a tasting for visitors over 21. For more information, go to pyramidvodka.com.

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Margarita Festival Champ, and More Memphis Winners

CREDIT: Kendrea Collins

The winner of the first-ever Memphis Margarita Festival was the Blue Monkey. 

Kendrea Collins

Congrats!

The day not only included margarita-swigging but also the cupid shuffle. So, in other words, it was perfect.

• Pyramid Vodka has won yet another award. They recently took home the platinum in the vodka category at the 2015 SIP Awards. 

This is the third award that Pyramid has taken home in the less-than-a-year they’ve been in operation. Impressive. 

Pyramid scored silver at both the Denver International Spirits Competition and the Los Angeles International Spirits Competition, both in the vodka category. 

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• Phillip Ashley Chocolates won the gold for “Most Unique for Best White Chocolate” at the International Chocolate Salon by TasteTV.

In other chocolate-covered news, Phillip Ashley just launched its 2015 Summer Collection inspired by cake and ice cream. Flavors include Red Velvet and carrot cakes and such ice creams as rum butter pecan and salted caramel gelato. 

Clearly, the best way to eat these chocolates is on top of cake a la mode. 

• Finally, a shout out to Celtic Crossing, which marked its 10th year anniversary weekend. They spruced up the place (new barstools, a re-done bar, and new furniture, etc.) for the occasion and went non-smoking. 

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Pyramid Vodka’s Tasting Room and Tour

Guests who enter the tasting room at Pyramid Vodka are enveloped in the aroma of freshly baking bread and then led through a fascinating lesson on distilling involving corn, Indiana, grist mills, stripping runs, something called a dephlegmator, mash, and taxes. 

The star of the tour is the gorgeous still, which was built specifically for Pyramid in China. 

From start to finish, it takes about 10 days to make Pyramid Vodka.

And speaking of finishes, the tour ends with a tasting. This is a substantial vodka, with a note of fruit. 

  
It’s a great tour. Go check it out. Takes about half an hour. And, yep, the vodka is available for purchase. 

Tasting room is open Tuesdays-Fridays, 2-6 p.m. and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Now open: City and State and Pyramid Vodka

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

City and State is a shop full of things that demand to be touched. Waxed canvas bags and creamy porcelain bowls; Navajo blankets and end grain butcher blocks. Founder Lisa Toro says she planned it that way.

“We’ve gone so far into digital, but we need the tactile,” says Toro. “When you’re online, you’ve got four senses that you’re not using.”

Toro ought to know. In 2007, she co-founded Rocket Fuel, a Memphis-based web development and design firm. For almost their whole professional lives, she and Luis Toro, her husband and business partner, have been sitting in front of computers.

While we talk, Toro makes me a cup of coffee. City and State is half café, half dry-goods store. She’s using the pour-over method, which involves carefully weighing your ingredients and brewing by hand over a period of five minutes.

Folgers, it ain’t. But when she serves me a cup ($4) — presented on a silver tray with a pretty glass carafe — I suddenly don’t mind the wait. The coffee, a Colombian Tres Santos from Intelligentsia, is fragrant and well balanced. It’s naturally sweet, and if you squint, it kind of tastes like cranberries.

“I think we’re living through a shift in consumerism,” says Toro, blowing on her coffee to cool it. “Increasingly, it’s about craftsmanship. It’s about knowing who made this – where, with what, and how.”

City and State represents a new direction for the digitally inclined Toros. Both the name and logo are meant to evoke a frontier trading post, a place you go to get things you otherwise couldn’t. That lines up pretty well with City and State’s mission: to take artisan goods that are local to other cities and give them visibility here.

On the food side, that includes things like paleo chocolate bars from Hu Kitchen in New York and hand-crafted nut butters from Big Spoon Roasters in Durham, North Carolina. There are also local offerings like Memphis-based Shotwell Candy and Paper & Clay ceramics.

Although City and State plans to launch an e-commerce site next month, I recommend that you visit the store. The aesthetic is appealingly Instagrammable: spare and modern, littered with interesting trinkets, warmed by natural light. And anyway, you’ve got five senses — why not use them?

Justin Fox Burks

Pyramid Vodka: robust and smooth

Most people conceive of craft brewing and distilling as passion projects. They think of beer nerds in garages, boiling malt in smelly kettles. So it’s interesting that brothers Alexander and Winston Folk, scions of Folk’s Folly and founders of Pyramid Vodka, say they never set out to make booze.

They set out to start a business.

“We wanted to create jobs,” says Winston. “We wanted to do something that would bring young people back to the city and get them excited about living in Memphis.”

What drew them to vodka was the way it features fresh, local ingredients — things like field corn from Wilson, Arkansas, and fresh water from the Memphis Sand Aquifer. Because vodka is not barrel-aged or otherwise flavored, it allows the sweetness of the corn to come through in the finished product.

Last week, the Folks cut the ribbon on their production facility in North Memphis. In an emotional speech, Alexander acknowledged that getting here has been a long and difficult journey.

But the fledgling distillery is off to a promising start. Since its launch in November, Pyramid has gone from two full-time employees to five. It is currently carried by about 75 liquor stores and 100 bars and restaurants, including the Pyramid Vodka Studio in FedExForum.

The Folks credit their success to fresh ingredients and a craft distilling technique they learned from “an old moonshiner in Walnut, Mississippi.” The corn for Pyramid vodka is ground and fermented in-house. It is then distilled 51 times and filtered through at least 24 feet of activated charcoal.

You’ve heard of farm to table? Well, this is grain to glass. Pyramid turns out just 160 cases a week, and there’s a person involved in every step. In a moving demonstration, Winston showed the assembled crowd how a bottle gets labeled: A human being pulls a sticker off a sheet and carefully applies it.

So how does it taste? Really good, actually. Robust and smooth, with a hint of vanilla in the nose and a nice, clean finish. The kind of vodka that you could drink straight or with a splash of soda. Other people seemed to agree.

“In the beginning,” said Schuyler Dalton, who attended the ribbon cutting, “I wanted to support Pyramid because they’re local. But now I can support them because it tastes good. It tastes really expensive and nice.”

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

The things we ate in 2014.

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Last winter, Holly Whitfield of the I Love Memphis Blog announced that Memphis is in the midst of a spectacular “Foodnado.” How apt! My cursory count of restaurants, breweries, and sundry food-related places that opened in 2014 adds up to 40, and not all of them in Overton Square.

But, then again, a lot of them are in Overton Square. Babalu Tacos & Tapas opened in June, offering tableside-prepared guacamole and lots of sharing plates. The place has been packed since. In August came Jimmy Ishii’s Robata Ramen & Yakitori Bar with a fine menu of ramen noodle bowls and skewers. Lafayette’s Music Room, an homage to the original much-loved, circa-’70s Overton Square bar named for the recently passed away ace bartender Lafayette Draper, opened in September and features wood-fired pizzas and a music schedule set at palatable hours. Schweinehaus, a cheeky Memphis take on German food, also opened in September. There’s beer, brats, and the occasional lederhosen sighting — what’s not to like? If you need olive oil, there’s the Square Olive, and there’s more music and fun at the Chicago-based Zebra Lounge.

Justin Fox Burks

Robata Ramen & Yakitori Bar

The most recent addition to Overton Square is Belly Acres, a farm-to-table burger restaurant, the latest of three burger-centric places to open in Memphis. This trend has our full endorsement. Belly Acres has a fantasyland interior and a menu that demands to be gone through one burger at a time. Down the street, there’s LBOE (Last Burger on Earth). Its menu raises the bar with such burgers as the super spicy Lava Me or Lava Me Not and the garlic-laden Love Stinks. Oshi Burger Bar downtown has something for everyone — beef burgers, tuna burgers, vegetarian burgers, gluten-free buns. They also have great milkshakes.

Justin Fox Burks

Oshi Burger Bar on South Main

Plenty of glasses have been raised at the taprooms opened in 2014 at High Cotton Brewing Co. and Memphis Made Brewing Co., and Memphis promises to get buzzier still in the new year with Pyramid Vodka. Wine in grocery stores finally passed, and while that doesn’t happen until 2016, local liquor stores are making the best of it with growler stations and more.

In grocery-store news: Whole Foods opened its expanded store in East Memphis, which includes a site-specific barbecue restaurant and a growler station. There’s the new Fresh Market in Midtown, and Kroger continues to show its commitment to Memphis in updating its stores, most recently the one at Cleveland and Poplar. Plus, there’s been some buzz about a Trader Joe’s opening sometime somewhere. We shall see.

In coffee news: Everybody freaked out when Muddy’s Bake Shop announced a new Midtown store in August 2013. Muddy’s Grind House opened this fall and offers a little of everything, from coffee to breakfast eats and yoga. The Avenue, near the University of Memphis, has great coffee and treats with Christian fellowship. There’s also Cafe Keough downtown in a gorgeous setting with a great cafe Americano. Tart offers quiches and more — a great go-to place when expectations are high. Ugly Mug took over the Poplar Perk’n space, and Jimmy Lewis, who founded Squash Blossom, returned to the scene with Relevant Roasters, selling wholesale, environmentally sound, and worker-friendly coffee with the motto “Every Cup Matters.”

After a few false starts, the Riverfront Development Corporation came through with Riverfront Grill. It serves a sophisticated but not too syrupy Southern menu and also has some of the best views in Memphis. Also new this year to downtown are the Kwik Chek spinoff Nacho’s, Marie’s Eatery in the old Rizzo’s Diner spot, and Cafe Pontotoc. Rizzo’s moved into the old Cafe Soul site, and there’s the Love Pop Soda Shop, a nifty craft soda shop.

In East Memphis, Skewer, serving Yakitori and ramen, opened in January. 4 Dumplings opened around the same time, and, as its name suggests, the menu is built around four dumplings. The vegan dumpling with tofu is not to be missed.

Since at least four people mentioned to me that Jackson Kramer’s Bounty on Broad is “secretly” gluten-free, I’m guessing it’s not really a secret. The dishes at this lovely farm-to-table spot are thoughtfully done and a delight to look at. The menu changes frequently, but at a recent dinner, there were mussels in fragrant coconut milk, charred broccolini, and creamed kale served over polenta. Also gluten-free is the Hawaiian import Maui Brick Oven, serving brick-oven pizzas and grain bowls.

Justin Fox Burks

Bounty on Broad’s Jackson Kramer

At Ecco on Overton Park, Sabine Bachmann’s cozy neighborhood restaurant, there are heaping dishes of pork chops, delicate pasta dishes, and artful cheese plates — something for every appetite. Strano Sicilian Kitchen & Bar serves a great roasted carrot soup and Italian classics from meatballs to pizza.

At press time, Porcellino’s, Andrew Ticer and Michael Hudman’s latest venture, was due to open “any minute now.” File this one under “This Should Be Interesting.” This is a butcher shop/sundry/coffee spot/wine bar offering grab-and-go sandwiches, fresh pastas, cured meats, house-made pastries, and more.