A Good Drink

In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits

Shanna Farrell

• Editore: Island Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642831443
• Argomento: Ciencias sociales
• Categoria: Sociología

"Insightful tour de force… Farrell's writing is as informative as it is intoxicating" -- Publishers Weekly

Shanna Farrell loves a good drink. As a bartender, she not only poured spirits, but learned their stories—who made them and how. Living in San Francisco, surrounded by farm-to-table restaurants and high-end bars, she wondered why the eco-consciousness devoted to food didn't extend to drinks. The short answer is that we don't think of spirits as food. But whether it's rum, brandy, whiskey, or tequila, drinks are distilled from the same crops that end up on our tables. Most are grown with chemicals that cause pesticide resistance and pollute waterways, and distilling itself requires huge volumes of water. Even bars are notorious for generating mountains of trash. The good news is that while the good drink movement is far behind the good food movement, it is emerging.In A Good Drink, Farrell goes in search of the bars, distillers, and farmers who are driving a transformation to sustainable spirits. She meets mezcaleros in Guadalajara who are working to preserve traditional ways of producing mezcal, for the health of the local land, the wallets of the local farmers, and the culture of the community. She visits distillers in South Carolina who are bringing a rare variety of corn back from near extinction to make one of the most sought-after bourbons in the world. She meets a London bar owner who has eliminated individual bottles and ice, acculturating drinkers to a new definition of luxury.These individuals are part of a growing trend to recognize spirits for what they are—part of our food system. For readers who have ever wondered who grew the pears that went into their brandy or why their cocktail is an unnatural shade of red, A Good Drink will be an eye-opening tour of the spirits industry. For anyone who cares about the future of the planet, it offers a hopeful vision of change, one pour at a time.

CHAPTER 1

Whiskey

“I brought bourbon to the marriage,” Ann Marshall tells me from across the table where she is seated next to her husband, Scott Blackwell. It’s 2017, roughly a year after I heard Ann speak at the BevCon meeting about using local organic grains to make whiskey. We are on the second floor of their distillery, a former Studebaker car dealership in Charleston, South Carolina, overlooking a chiseled fermentation tank, a tall copper still, a short bottling line, and tiered rows of barrels where their bourbon is aging.

When she was a child, Ann’s father would come home at the end of each day and make an Old Fashioned for himself and one for her mother. They’d steal off into the study, cocktails in hand, and talk for an hour before dinner. It was a family tradition that Ann remembers as the most peaceful time of day, one that marked the beginning of her relationship with bourbon. As she got older, she adopted this as her own evening ritual. “There is something so settling about coming home and having a dram of whiskey,” she says. When she and Scott were first dating, she would invite him over for a pre-dinner drink. It was these moments that turned him into a card-carrying whiskey enthusiast and that built the foundation of High Wire Distilling Co.

Before they had whiskey, the couple had cookies. They met at Immaculate Baking, which holds the Guinness World Record for making the largest chocolate-chip cookie in the world. The bakery was the latest of Scott’s business ventures; after selling pies out of his garage in college, he started several restaurants and a coffee roastery. Straight out of Duke University, Ann began working as the head of marketing before moving on to another natural-foods company. Immaculate Baking did so well that it caught the eye of General Mills, and selling the bakery gave Ann and Scott the funds to break into the spirits industry. In 2013, they opened High Wire in a gentrifying section of downtown Charleston, a few blocks from the bars and restaurants that now identify as Upper King Street.

Ann and Scott are part of a Southern farm-to-table culinary scene that promotes local, seasonal, and traditional growing methods and includes not only chefs, but also artisanal producers, historians, brewers, seed collectors, and farmers. They often say that they are food people first, and their network of friends reflects this assertion.

Yet despite this community, Ann and Scott didn’t initially see the connection between distilling and the good food movement. Sustainability wasn’t their focus, and they didn’t realize that they could source their raw ingredients from nearby farmers.

“My family has been in the farming business for centuries, and all they grow now are row crops, things you can’t eat, like ethanol corn or soybeans for oil and cotton,” Ann says. “We just weren’t sure if we were actually going to use local grains. We didn’t know that they were available or that we could orchestrate a contract farming situation. It was not really something we felt was very possible.”

While Ann knew that many chefs and restaurants work closely with farms and are able to order specific products from them (contracting with them for produce or protein), this isn’t common in the spirits industry. Most distillers buy their grain in bulk from distributors who are effectively intermediaries, leaving Ann no reason to think that sourcing could happen another way.

Those distributors buy from commodity farmers, who live and die by supply and demand. To keep up a steady supply of their crop, the farmers grow monocultures of a single plant, such as the corn used to make whiskey. Mono-cropping, currently practiced on more than half of all US farmland, strips the soil of nutrients, leaves crops vulnerable to disease, and typically relies on pesticides and chemical fertilizers. It’s part of a broken industrial system that damages the land and keeps farmers beholden to giant agribusinesses, relying on government subsidies in order to stay afloat. Farmers must plant, plant, plant and grow, grow, grow in a never-ending race to keep ahead of the weeds and creditors.

Distillers are just beginning to recognize their role in that system. In late 2020, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States formed a new environmental sustainability working group to share best practices on issues including land stewardship, responsible water use, and waste reduction. The president of the industry group, Chris Swonger, spoke in tones similar to Ann’s: “Distilled spirits are agriculturally based products. . . . Efficiency matters, and from field to bottle, every drop counts.”

But in 2013, when Ann and Scott were getting High Wire off the ground, sustainability was a lonely row to hoe.

There are a few things to know about whiskey. First, whiskey is an umbrella term for a few types of liquors, including bourbon, scotch, and single malt. Next, it has to be made from grain, such as corn, barley, rye, and wheat. Lastly, it’s usually aged in wooden barrels.

Bourbon has its own set of rules that go beyond those few basic qualifications (as does scotch, which has to be made in Scotland, otherwise it’s called a single malt). Bourbon, which is produced only in the United States, has to be made with mostly corn—that is, at least 51 percent of its mash bill, or recipe. The other 49 percent can be any other type of grain, but the mix usually includes barley to help with the fermentation process, which turns sugar into alcohol. Bourbon has to be aged in new charred-oak barrels. Straight bourbon—a subcategory of the spirit—must be aged for at least two years and no more than four.

The list continues. When bourbon is distilled, it can’t be higher than 160 proof, or 80 percent alcohol by volume (commonly referred to as ABV, which is always half the proof). When it goes into a barrel to be aged, water must be added, reducing the proof to 125, or 62.5 percent ABV. When it’s bottled, it must be at least 80 proof, or 40 percent ABV. The bottle must have an age statement on it, indicating how much time it spent inside an oak barrel. If a spirit doesn’t meet these requirements, it’s just called whiskey (and may be a blended whiskey or a single malt, each of which has another set of rules).

Bourbon’s roots are in the South—Kentucky, to be exact. While the precise origin of bourbon is up for debate, it’s believed that an early form of the whiskey was brought over to America by the Scots. There are several bourbon companies that claim to have invented it, but without proof this remains a myth. Though its origin is enigmatic, a few things are certain: it became popular during the American Revolution; corn grows well in Kentucky; and the spirit officially began to be called “bourbon” in the 1850s. And, like many things, much of it was produced by slave labor before the Civil War and by formerly enslaved people after the war ended.

Though the connection between distilling and slave labor hasn’t been discussed much until recently, tax records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveal that distillers claimed enslaved people as property. Auction rolls reveal that white men claimed enslaved people’s knowledge of making alcohol as an asset, with ads marketing slaves as “skilled whiskey distillers.” Just as enslaved people were forced to work in fields, building the foundation of our food system, and in kitchens, cooking food for white families, they were also put to work making whiskey and rum, the two most popular spirits of the time.

But this aspect of history, like many others, was largely swept under the rug, with many white distillers preferring to take credit for this work, and in the twentieth century, to wipe this history from their company’s collective memory.

Distilleries are only now making their role in the slave economy public, trying to control the narrative with over 150 years of distance. In 2016, Jack Daniel’s opened up about how their founder, Jack himself, had learned to make whiskey from Nathan “Nearest” Green, a man enslaved by local preacher Dan Call, who, since 1866, had been credited by the company as the person who taught Jack to distill. This confession came in the form of a 2016 New York Times article written by Clay Risen, who asserted: “Enslaved men not only made up the bulk of the distilling labor force, but they often played crucial skilled roles in the whiskey-making process.”

Since then, companies including Jacob Spears, Elijah Craig, and Henry McKenna have come clean about using slave labor in their early days. University professors such as Wiggins Gilliam have begun to research historic documents and photographs, dusty after years of being buried in archives, of enslaved Black men who helped shape the whiskey industry. A 2019 exhibition in the Frazier History Museum in Louisville featured the stories of enslaved people who were forced to work in distilleries. That same year, the Kentucky Black Bourbon Guild was founded in Lexington. And many of us might have heard that George Washington used slave labor at his Mount Vernon distillery, a history that is becoming common knowledge.

Over the years, as bourbon grew in popularity and more distilleries opened, the industry needed to keep up with demand. Many companies scaled up. This meant that they started making bourbon in larger and larger batches, and with an eye toward their bottom line, using cheaper ingredients. Enter yellow dent, a type of corn that is uniform in size and has a high soft starch content, making the sugars perfect for fermentation. Its flavor is quite consistent, which works well for industrial uses like animal feed, ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup, cooking oil—and bourbon.

Yellow dent corn gets its name from a small indentation that marks the crown of each kernel. It’s a hybrid corn that was created in 1846. James L. Reid, a farmer who made his way to Illinois from Ohio, crossed Johnny Hopkins—a red corn—with flint corn and floury corn. The result was yellow dent. The new variety became popular with farmers because it was easy to grow, and it won a prize at the 1893 World’s Fair. Today, most hybrid corns and cultivars are offshoots of it, including popcorn, flour corn, and sweet corn.

Much of the industry began using yellow dent after World War II, when many farms started adopting industrial practices. Yellow dent, a commodity crop, is inexpensive to grow and can be produced in mass quantities. It is bought, sold, and traded on the open market, its value fluctuating with supply and demand. It’s usually farmed with the use of pesticides, these chemicals blanketing fields and seeping into groundwater. Yellow dent is also frequently overplanted, causing the soil to lose nutrients, and farmers seldom rotate it with cover crops, so fields can’t recover their health.

There is never a shortage of yellow dent. Distillers never have to worry about their supply of corn. Because it’s cheap and always available, it’s basically ubiquitous. As a result, many bourbons have a similar, consistent flavor. Distillers try to distinguish the taste of their products through the little details they can control, such as the yeast strands they use, how long they age their bourbon, and the char levels on the oak barrels—but not the quality of the raw ingredients.

And because so many whiskey producers started using yellow corn, many of them lost connection to the farms where their crops are grown. More often than not, they don’t even know which state the grain comes from. A few years ago, I went to Kentucky and Tennessee to travel the Bourbon Trail, bouncing from one distillery to the next over the course of five days. I’d often ask the tour guide where they got their grain and invariably the answer would be “the Midwest.” Sometimes, if I was feeling bold, I’d keep asking about it.

“Do you know where in the Midwest?” I’d ask.

“Either Illinois or Indiana” was their response.

Or “I’m not sure.”

Or “I’d have to ask the distiller.”

Or “One of the square states.”

Perhaps this is why most distillers don’t focus on ingredients. Perhaps this is why they’d rather talk about yeast, or aging, or char. Perhaps this is why we don’t treat alcohol as an agricultural product.

We lose a lot when we forget that spirits are food. We don’t see the people or places that shape the American spirits industry. We don’t understand the consequences of production. We don’t realize that chemicals many of us don’t tolerate in our foods—like red dye no. 40 and high-fructose corn syrup—end up in our cocktails. We don’t know which products to vote for with our consumer dollars. We’re not seeing whiskey for what it is, and what it could be.

While it took some time for Ann and Scott to realize their role in the good food movement, their culinary past was never far behind them. And certainly not in South Carolina, where heirloom foods were having a moment and consumers were beginning to question industrial farming. John T. Edge, executive director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, part of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and a longtime friend of Ann and Scott, told them about a farm in Tennessee that was growing sorghum, a drought-resistant cereal grain known for its sweetness.

The farm, Muddy Pond, is run by a Mennonite family. They do much of the work to grow and harvest their sorghum by hand, including cutting the cane. They don’t use any additives for color or flavor. They mill and press the cane at the farm, where they bottle the juice. In every way, their process is a rejection of industrial farming. At John T.’s urging, Ann and Scott gave it a try, thinking it might make for an interesting whiskey.

“We ordered a fifty-gallon drum of sorghum syrup, which is just the richest, most phenomenal syrup you’ve ever eaten. It’s replaced all cane-based syrup in our house,” Ann tells me. “We distilled it and it smelled like apples. It had this beautiful nose.”

“That was really when the lightbulb went off,” Scott adds. “Like when you put this ingredient in and you leave it alone, just add yeast and do as little to it as possible, and when it comes off the still it tastes completely different than other ingredients. It’s not just alcohol.”

“That was really the biggest ‘aha’ moment,” Ann says. “The taste is of that farm. Like, what’s around it? Is there an apple orchard next to it? And what’s contributing to this? They have a very specialized process. It’s a Mennonite farm. They plow the fields with draft horses. They do most of their harvesting with a tractor. They incorporate the grain in the syrup, so it’s the whole plant.”

Ann describes the flavor as malty and nutty and sweet. It’s a symphony of flavors that creates complexity, especially when the whole plant is used, which is what technically qualifies it as whiskey. “It’s got these beautiful protein strands in the syrup that translate straight through the distillate.”

This experience changed everything. It was the first time the couple had used a single farm for ingredients, and the whiskey’s terroir could be traced to an exact location. They appreciated the environmentally friendly approach that the family took to growing sorghum, even if they did it more for tradition than for the planet. Their sorghum whiskey is now one of High Wire’s staples.

On the heels of the sorghum whiskey came the watermelon brandy, distilled from the Bradford melon, one of the three oldest surviving watermelon varieties in North America. Like many plants and spices, this melon has its origins in the West Indies, its predecessor traveling by boat—a British prison ship, to be exact—during the final months of the Revolutionary War in 1783. The seeds were collected, saved, and planted in Georgia by an American soldier who had been captured by the British. In about 1840, a South Carolinian named Nathaniel Napoleon Bradford crossed that melon with another, the Mountain Sweet. With that the Bradford watermelon was born.

The Bradford watermelon became known for its sweet, fragrant flesh. Its level of sweetness rates a 12.5 on the Brix scale, which measures soluble solids in liquid. Most melons rate a 10. The Bradford’s juice was used for molasses, made into syrup, and distilled into brandy. By 1860, it was the most popular late-season melon in the South. But by 1922, the last commercial crop was planted as farmers began to prefer melons with a harder exterior. After that, Nathaniel Bradford’s descendants saved the seeds and planted them in their backyards.

Enter Dr. David Shields, a historian, professor at the University of South Carolina, and writer who authored Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine (2015). In 2003, he began working with Glenn Roberts, founder of Anson Mills, a company dedicated to preserving food heritage through native seed collecting. Glenn’s interest in antebellum heirloom crops began with rice and, later, corn. He would drive down rural roads looking for pre–Civil War corn varietals. In 1997, this search led him to a bootlegger’s field in South Carolina, where he learned about the potential for commercial distilling of landrace grains—ancient pre-hybridized varietials, such as Jimmy Red corn, with distinctive characteristics that have developed over time as plants have adapted to the conditions of a localized region. Together, the two men studied the history of these grains and how they might be preserved. Dr. Shields took an academic approach while Glenn was the boots on the ground, enlisting farmers who would help him grow landrace grains.

In 2005, Dr. Shields became interested in the Bradford watermelon. He began to ask around to see if anyone was holding onto seeds of the melon, then thought to be extinct. Nothing came of his inquiries until 2012, when he tracked down Nat Bradford, t...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits
• Chapter 1: Whiskey
• Chapter 2: Agave
• Chapter 3: Gin and Vodka
• Chapter 4: Rum
• Chapter 5: Brandy
• Chapter 6: Bartenders
• Chapter 7: Scale
• Conclusion: This Is Not the End
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index