Cornell University, Department of Food Technology is offering distillation workshop-please, see pdf.file
http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/fst/faculty/henick/events.html
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GIN SPIN
From C magazine.

DEAN & DELUCA owner and winemaker Leslie Rudd has a new project: The 209 Gin Distillery in San Francisco. Some gin connoisseurs drink it with chilled with a mist of dry vermouth or a drop of orange bitters. 209 gin is elegant, light and suffused with Calabrian bergamot, Ecuadorian cardamom, French coriander, Tuscan juniper berries and Chinese cassia bark.
209 Gin has been causing a sensation since its September launch.

209gin.com
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Next Distillation Workshop

The next Bavarian-Hostein workshop is planned for the 17th and 18th of November and will be hosted by the Mogollon Brewing Company, also known as the High Spirits Distillery, in Flagstaff, Arizona.

We will be joined by staff from the Southwest Missouri State University, one of Holstein's expert engineers and a legal professional.

To sign up please send a check for $485.00 made payable to:

Bavarian Breweries & Distilleries
5041 Coolidge Avenue
Culver City, CA 90230

If you would like to be added to our list, please send us an email with your name and phone number.

Email: andrea@potstills.com
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The 2005 Kentucky Bourbon Festival was a resounding success. With people from 34 states and 13 countries attending the festivities over 5 days, the total attendance was estimated to be around 50,000.

The festival started with a new event Racing with the Spirits sponsored by the Kentucky Distillers Association. This incorporated the best of Kentucky including the great Bourbons and horse racing. There were simulcast races for each distillery (they named their race and horses) with betting to win only. We also enjoyed races on wheeled horses between the master distillers and representatives of the distilleries and related companies. The winner for the master distillers was Greg Davis of Barton Brands barely edging out Jim Rutledge of Four Roses. A variety of Kentucky style appetizers were served and live music was enjoyed by all. Members of the Kentucky Distillers Association served their Bourbons.

On Thursday night the Culinary Arts Bourbon Style sponsored by Jim Beam was a joy to the sold out crowd. Chef Chris Howerton of Louisville wooed the guests with a four course meal and two unique drinks.

Boots and Bourbon sponsored by Wild Turkey was also sold out Thursday night and the guests enjoyed dancing to live music, a buffet including deep fried turkey and barbecue, a chance to ride the mechanical bull and rope a calf. The décor was like going into a Western town that included cactus, tumbleweeds, stagecoaches and a barrel fountain.

Friday started with Let’s Talk Bourbon at Four Roses which was also sold out. This detailed seminar on Bourbon in Kentucky was enjoyed by the many that attended. The guests also enjoyed breakfast and a tour of the distillery.

The Press Party and Hall of Fame was held at the Heaven Hill Bourbon Heritage Center Friday afternoon. Seven were inducted into the Hall of Fame including T. Jeremiah Beam, Co. Albert Bacon Blanton, Dale DeGroff, Pamela Wood Gover, John Hansell, Damian Riley-Smith and the Elmore Sherman Family. Bourbon Cigars and Jazz sponsored by Heaven Hill Distilleries Inc. was held Friday evening with another sold out crowd enjoying Cajun style food, live music, cigars from CAO and Heaven Hill Bourbons. It was like being on Bourbon Street with Kentucky flair.

The lawn activities began Friday night and ended Sunday afternoon. Included were: a car show, Kentucky arts and crafts, a variety of unique foods, the US Army interactive games, booths from a number of distilleries and sponsors, family fun area, a Kentucky Bourbon Breakfast, World Championship Bourbon Barrel Relay, an auction of vintage and new Bourbon related items, and live music which included the largest crowd ever (est. 15,000) watching the Kentucky HeadHunters sponsored by Four Roses Distillery perform Saturday night.

The KBF Golf Tournament was held Saturday morning with two divisions, corporate and distillery. A total of 148 golfers participated with the best team score shooting an 18 under 54.

The Great Kentucky Bourbon Tasting and Gala held Saturday night was the best yet with 10 distillery/brand booths in the tasting area, great appetizers and meal and live music to dance the night away. This black tie affair was sold out.

On Sunday the Mixed Drink Challenge was held with the grand champion being Chris Howerton of Bourbons Bistro in Louisville with his drink Weller’s Island Mango Slush. All drinks this year were a variation of the traditional Kentucky Mint Julep.

Our Poker Run was enjoyed by many riders touring the Kentucky countryside and partaking of a meal in our Food Court. People won money and merchandise.

Now the planning for 2006 begins. On April 29 the Sampler will be held in Bardstown and on June 17 the Sampler will be held in Frankfort.
The festival will be September 13-17.
Visit our website for future updates

www.kybourbonfestival.com
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The 3rd. annual distilling conference will be hosted at St. George Spirits in Alameda, CA The dates are April 6,7 & 8th 2006.
Registration wll be posted at www.distilling.com in late December.
Bill Owens
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A great beer New Zealand beer ad
http://www.bigad.com.au/
cut and paste into your browser.

The Mystery of the Green Menace

It's been celebrated as a muse and banned as a poison. Now an obsessed microbiologist has cracked the code for absinthe - and distilled his own.

By Brian Ashcraft, Wired Magazine

At first, Ted Breaux dismissed the urgent warnings on TV and radio. He even ignored the sirens that started blaring Saturday afternoon. "The last two times they evacuated the city, I stayed," says Breaux, 39, a chemist and environmental microbiologist. But when he woke up on Sunday, August 28, the hurricane had become a Category 5 and was still bearing down on New Orleans. He decided it was time to get out of his house on the floodplain just south of Lake Pontchartrain. He packed his Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution with all the essentials: clothes, toiletries, a laptop, some World War II rifles, ammo, and $15,000 worth of absinthe.

It took Breaux six hours to go 20 miles, and a full day to reach refuge in Huntsville, Alabama. He spent the next week watching Fox News, looking at aerial photos of New Orleans on his laptop, wondering if his friends had made it out, and cursing himself for not remembering to grab his original 1908 copy of Aux Pays d'Absinthe.

Raised in New Orleans, a city once dubbed the Absinthe Capital of the World, Breaux has long been fascinated with the drink. Absinthe is a 140-proof green liqueur made from herbs like fennel, anise, and the exceptionally bitter leaves of Artemisia absinthium. That last ingredient, also known as wormwood, gives the drink its name - and its sinister reputation. For a century, absinthe has been demonized and outlawed, based on the belief that it leads to absinthism - far worse than mere alcoholism. Drinking it supposedly causes epilepsy and "criminal dementia."

Breaux has made understanding the drink his life's work. He has pored over hundred-year-old texts, few of them in English. He has corresponded with other amateur liquor historians. The more he's learned, the more he's felt compelled to use his knowledge of chemistry to crack the absinthe code, figure out exactly what's in it, puncture the myths surrounding it - and maybe even drink a glass or two.

Dressed in a black muscle T-shirt, blue jeans, and a Dolce & Gabbana belt, Breaux looks as if he'd be more at home on Bourbon Street than in a research lab. It's a humid summer morning in July, about a month before Hurricane Katrina will strike, and he's showing me around Environmental Analytical Solutions Inc., a chemical testing facility among the warehouses and body shops near Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.

On the outside, EASI is classic New Orleans: red brick, white pillars. But inside it's more like a set from War Games: dot matrix printers, ancient PCs, and nine Hewlett-Packard gas chromatography-mass spectrometer machines attached to large blue tanks of helium and hydrogen. This is where Breaux does his lab work, testing water samples for pollution and pesticides. In his downtime, he studies absinthe here.

Using the GCMS apparatus, he's able to break the liqueur down into its component molecules. "It's like forensics," Breaux says, gesturing toward the machines. "Give me one microliter of absinthe and I know exactly what it's going to taste like."

Breaux explains how the testing works. He takes a bottle of the liqueur, inserts a syringe through the cork (absinthe oxidizes like wine once the bottle is open), and extracts a few milliliters. He transfers the sample into a vial, which is lifted by a robotic arm into the gas chromatography tower. There it is separated into its components. Then the mass spectrometer identifies them and measures their relative quantities.

One of the ingredients is thujone, a compound in wormwood that is toxic if it's ingested, capable of causing violent seizures and kidney failure. Breaux hands me a bottle of pure liquid thujone. "Take a whiff," he says with an evil grin. I recoil at the odor - it's like menthol laced with napalm. This is the noxious chemical compound responsible for absinthe's bad reputation. The question that's been debated for years is, Just how much thujone is there in absinthe?

Breaux became a connoisseur at a young age. He was shelling out a hundred bucks for cognac and mystifying his college buddies by bringing Martell Cordon Bleu to parties. So it's no wonder that, a decade later, immersed in the history and makeup of absinthe, he was eager to taste the stuff. But it was nearly impossible to find. He had to content himself with its paraphernalia. While walking through the French Quarter one Saturday morning a decade ago, he spotted an absinthe spoon in the window of an antique shop. The slotted, sieve-like device was an essential part of the ritual of preparing the drink: You placed a sugar cube on the spoon and slowly poured cold water through it to dilute the strong liqueur. Breaux started stockpiling absinthe accessories, but this proved to be a frustrating tease. "It was like having a pipe but nothing to smoke."

So Breaux decided to make some himself. He found a French-language history book with "pre-ban protocols," a vague description of how absinthe was made back before it was outlawed. Armed with the protocols, he prepared a batch in the lab. The result? "Not very good," he concedes. "I couldn't imagine that being the most popular liqueur in France."

He got his chance to taste the real thing in 1996, when a friend spotted a bottle marked "old French liquor" at an estate sale. They were asking $300, and Breaux, seeing it was a vintage Spanish Pernod Tarragona absinthe, immediately wrote a check. When he got it to his lab, he plunged a syringe through the cork, extracted one precious sip, and downed it. "It had a honeyed texture, distinct herbal and floral notes, and a gentle roundness uncharacteristic of such a strong liquor," he says. "Those protocols were crap."

Breaux wasn't the only one rediscovering the long-banned beverage. In Europe, food regulations adopted by the EU in 1988 had neglected to mention absinthe, and when they superseded national laws, the drink was effectively re-legalized. New distilleries were popping up all over Europe, selling what Breaux dismisses as "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil." Absinthe had disappeared so completely for so long that no one knew how to make it anymore. Including Breaux, who continued trying to reverse engineer it in his lab.

The new absinthes became popular among hipsters, just as the drink had been 125 years before. But now the presence of thujone was a selling point. Marilyn Manson boasted of recording an album while "on" absinthe. Johnny Depp compared its effects to marijuana. "Drink too much," he said, "and you suddenly realize why Van Gogh cut off his ear."

This wasn't just idle celebrity conjecture. In a 1989 Scientific American article, an American biochemist named Wilfred Arnold hypothesized that Van Gogh's insanity (acute intermittent porphyria, he speculated) was caused by the thujone in absinthe. Based on the description of raw materials used to make the liqueur, Arnold calculated that the thujone content was a dangerous 250 parts per million. "I would advise not drinking it," he says.

Breaux rejects Arnold's methodology. "He didn't take the effects of the distillation process into account," Breaux says. "He made a WAG - a wild-assed guess." Breaux wanted to settle the thujone question once and for all. And he was uniquely positioned to do so. "Back when the original was around, they didn't have any decent analytical chemistry. And when Arnold performed his research, he didn't have any samples of the original liqueur. I have both," he says.

At the EASI lab, Breaux ran tests on the pre-ban absinthe samples, as well as on samples spiked with thujone (from the very bottle I had sniffed). This allowed him to isolate the toxic compound. He spent his free time studying the test results, and late one night in June 2000 he had his answer. "I was stunned. Everything that I had been told was complete nonsense." In the antique absinthes he had collected, the thujone content was an order of magnitude smaller than Arnold's predictions. In many instances, it was a homeopathically minuscule 5 parts per million.

Breaux went public with his findings, but not in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. "Here I am with just a bachelor's in microbiology. I knew I could be tarred and feathered." Instead, he posted his test results in the discussion threads at La Fee Verte, an online gathering place for absinthe geeks. Flame wars erupted, and Breaux cited his research to buttress his point about thujone concentrations. The site's moderator eventually dubbed him "elite absinthe enforcer."

Breaux's conclusions were vindicated in early 2005, when a food-safety group working for the German government tested pre-ban absinthe. Dirk Lachenmeier, who ran the study (called "Thujone - Cause of Absinthism?") concluded that absinthe is not any more harmful than other spirit drinks. But the biggest vindication came at the Absinth des Jahres contest in 2004, for which expert judges sampled newly distilled absinthes from all over the world. A little-known candidate, Nouvelle-Orléans, garnered perfect scores and won a gold medal. "Without doubt, the release of Nouvelle-Orléans was a milestone in the history of modern absinthe," says Arthur Frayn, one of the judges. The distiller? Ted Breaux.

"You can read a paragraph or two on how to make wine, but that doesn't mean you're going to make Chateau Latour," says Breaux. "What I've done is, I've made a Chateau Latour." In the process of proving that absinthe wasn't insanity-inducing poison, he had cracked its code. He'd sourced the concentrations of all the herbs it contained and even traced them to their original regions of cultivation. He knew precisely which classes of wine spirits those herbs were combined with. Making and marketing his own brand was the next logical step. "Nouvelle-Orléans is part vintage absinthe, part Ted Breaux, and part New Orleans flair," he says.

Nouvelle-Orléans is just one absinthe formulation Breaux has mastered. He also makes re-creations of pre-ban bottles. He shows me one that he just distilled, based on an Edouard Pernod absinthe, and I'm dying to taste it. Breaux begins to prepare it in the traditional French manner, a process as intricate as a tea ceremony. First he decants a couple of ounces into two widemouthed glasses specially made for the drink. A strong licorice aroma wafts across the table. Then he adds 5 or 6 ounces of ice-cold water, letting it trickle through a silver dripper into the glass. "Pour it slowly," he says. "That's the secret to making it taste good. If the water's too warm, it will taste like donkey piss."

The drink turns milky, and a condensate floats to the top. This is called the louche, a word that's come to mean "disreputable." Breaux hands it to me and tells me there's no need to stir away the louche or add sugar to an absinthe this fine. I take a sip. The flavor is subtle, dry, complex. It makes my tongue feel a little numb.

"It's like an herbal speedball," he says. "Some of the compounds are excitatory, some are sedative. That's the real reason artists liked it. Drink two or three glasses and you can feel the effects of the alcohol, but your mind stays clear - you can still work."

Breaux is on his second glass, and I'm still finishing my first as he brings me up to speed on the latest developments in his ongoing absinthe detective story - if most of the thujone isn't present in the drink, where has it gone? "My initial estimation was that it's left behind in the distillation process. But now, I think it probably evaporates out of the Artemisia absinthium when it dries," he says.

I take a few swallows from my second glass of the 140-proof liquor with increasingly unsteady hands. "Americans drink to get drunk," observes Breaux. "Whereas in France, getting drunk is just a consequence of sampling too much wine you really like." I'm starting to feel very, very French.

In between hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Ted Breaux went back to New Orleans. He snuck past two police checkpoints and into the Gentilly Terrace neighborhood to survey the damage to his home. Its contents were destroyed, and it reeked of sewage and rot. The house will need to be bulldozed. Breaux says he won't rebuild on that spot, which is 8 feet below sea level. But neither will he flee the city where his family has lived for 200 years. "I just don't know what's going to happen next."

One thing Breaux knows is that his work with absinthe will go on. Nouvelle-Orléans is distilled in France and sold only in Europe. Absinthe is still illegal in the US under FDA regulations. ("But American connoisseurs are able to find it," he says cryptically.) Breaux supervises its production in the small Loire Valley town of Saumur, at a beautiful old distillery with ironwork by Gustave Eiffel and 125-year-old absinthe-making equipment. He struck a deal with the Combier family, which owns the factory. "I said, let me distill here, and I'll help you create new liqueurs," Breaux says.

Later this year, the partners will release their latest innovation - a liqueur made from tobacco. Specifically, a strong, spicy strain of tobacco called Perique, which Breaux claims is the world's rarest commercial crop. "It's grown on one 15-acre plot in south Louisiana, near Convent." Tobacco beverages are tricky to prepare - and even more scarce than absinthe. After all, as Breaux explains, "nicotine is toxic if it's ingested."

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Members
The TTB has tolerances that all spirits in 750 ML bottles be determined of alcohol content within .15% ABV or .3 proof. I am usuing a .10 proof hydrometer, but feel that the temp. adjustment may throw off my reading by more than .3 proof. I don't want to risk a fine. Short of investing in a gas chromatograph, can you ask the micodistilling community how they address this compliance issue? It's a low cost solution of intrest to all.

Best regards,

"Donald R. Outterson" Woodstone Creek Distillery, Cincinnati, OH"Donald R. Outterson"
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