Hot Honey

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Twitter… man… what the fuck happened to Twitter, amirite? We need more stories illustrating Twitter can be good sometimes, when they’re not giving a platform to some of the dumbest muthafuckas on earth.

So a random stranger on Twitter told me about hot honey the other day. If you’re like me and had never considered it before, well, it’s going to change your life. Especially, if you still have a freezer full of the summer’s hot pepper harvest.

Slather it on your barbecue like a sauce, glaze roasted chickens with it, powder it and sprinkle it on buttered popcorn, use it to blind your enemies (your now deliciously spicy enemies, mmmmmm). The possibilities are… well… they end somewhere, I’m sure of that.

I added a splash of whisky in the mix because I think the guy forgot to mention it. His recount of the recipe was kind of like, “guys! boil your peppers in honey!” so he left a few things to the reader’s sensibilities. I chose this perky 1792 High Rye, to add a tannic depth and round out some of the sweetness with some spice, but I’m pretty sure this would be great even without the whisky.

At the end of the recipe, I also recommend straining the peppers out because you can let them dry on a parchment and make dastardly, candied habaneros that when chopped will change your ham sandwich from blech to holy bleFTHFTHFTHISISFUCKINGAWESOOOOOOOME!!!!!!!

Please note: I’m not a food scientist. The honey should preserve the peppers, assuming they dried out enough during the steeping process, but I like to err on the side of caution here and just take them out. Some people leave them in to be fancy. If you feel like being fancy, I say hot glue that fanciness to the outside of the bottle where it can’t ferment into noxious flavors!

HOT HONEY

Ingredients
~2 cups mild honey
2-6 hot peppers
A splash of whisky
A pinch of salt

1.) De-stem and de-seed 2-6 habanero peppers. You can chop them if you like, but it really doesn’t impact the flavor much. You can use more peppers, as well, or a mix of any chili types you’d like. I actually used a bunch of different peppers from my garden.

2.) In a small saucepan, add the peppers, liquor, salt, and enough honey to cover (about 2 cups). Heat over medium-high heat until peppers just start to let little bubbles out. Immediately turn the heat down to low and gently steep without boiling for about 90 minutes.

3.) Strain the peppers out and reserve on a sheet of parchment paper until dry. If still goeey, dry in oven at 200*F for a few minutes. Move the honey to a clean jar and if not using within a week, store in refrigerator.

4.) Enjoy!!!

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Westland – Peated Whiskey (46%)

Westland – American Whiskey (46%)

Mortlach – Rare Old (43.4%)

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Losing loved ones sucks. It can shut down parts of your brain, parts of your personality… your blog, if you’re vain enough to have one. If you also suffer from depression, like me, it can get a little more complicated.

Depression can trick you into thinking you’ve always felt that way, that nothing will ever change, or if it does, it’ll only get worse. You can feel it physically. I feel like I can even see it when I close my eyes sometimes, so when terrible things happen in life, it can be hard to distinguish them from the every day, usual terror of being depressed. Life simultaneously becomes inescapably surreal yet increasingly difficult to be a part of. That seems like a normal part of losing someone, but for most people there’s an arc to the misery and a circumstantial reason for the suffering. When I think of depression’s impact on me, I measure it in confused lifetimes.

So a few lifetimes ago I lost my grandmother. I could write a book about when I was a teenager how I came to be legally emancipated from my mother. It would be long and angry, and probably the most boring thing you’ve ever read, but the story ends with my grandmother taking me in and offering me a place to stay. In short, she saved my life, so when she first went to the hospital for that last round of visits, well, you can see where my posts first get a lot less frequent; I can’t remember if that’s when she first went into the hospital or a little bit after it all started to go to hell, but either way it was a long, arduous journey once she was there and it wore me out.

It felt like I was already in the middle of a lifelong existential crisis, and losing her like that reminded me what it felt like to be completely empty again. Like a lost child. It’s easy to use alcohol to numb that away. I won’t lie and say I didn’t drink a few glasses to her on a few different nights, but that’s a dangerous place to be for too long, especially in a stumbling city like Hartford CT. It’s easy to lose pieces of yourself to that. I started to feel pressured to drink more and began questioning whether blogging about alcohol was healthy for me. For a bit it was tough to justify, but I kept it online. In the end, I just needed some time… and sertraline. Mostly sertraline.

Hartford CT! Come for the empty stadiums, stay for the omnipresent fart smell!

Is writing like this good for my depression? I don’t know. I feel like maybe it’s more of an indicator that I’m doing okay than the reason I am. On that note, whether focused or rambling, whether it’s good or bad writing in good or bad times, good or bad for me, writing this blog feels good so I’m going to start doing it again when I can.

Today, let’s talk about Mortlach, more specifically, their first widely available, official bottling in recent history, the Rare Old. Mortlach has traditionally only been available mixed in Johnnie Walker blends, as occasional releases by Diageo’s Flora and Fauna series, or from independent bottlers. They never really had a widely available bottling for the public so I was excited when this distillery, known for their bold and meaty whiskies, announced a new line of bottles back in 2014. Mortlach has a cult following, so asking more than $100 for the entry level, no age statement release, kind of tickled my bullshit meter, but I was still excited.

Nose: What nose? This isn’t at all like other Mortlachs. I’m used to finding some kind of beast in the glass, but this is a whimpering puppy compared to what I was expecting.

Palate: The low proof is damning… why am I even drinking this?! I’m suddenly angry. My dog is scared and wondering why I’m yelling at my computer. Rrrrrraaaaahhhhh!!! I feel like somebody just smothered one of my friends. Aaaaaand now I’m sad again… damn.

Rating: Risky It’s not offensive, exactly, but if I wanted to spend upwards of $100 on a flavorless bottle of pedigree, I’d shell out the cash for some Johnnie Walker Blue Label. At least people know what Johnnie Blue is. Well, I guess in that respect it is offensive. Fuck this Mortlach!

Save your money, especially because there are plenty of delicious Mortlach bottles from independent bottlers still sitting on shelves at lower prices and better ABVs. This new bottle, which is neither rare nor old, definitely won’t please the esoteric tastes of the distillery’s current fanbase.

High West – Valley Tan batch 3 (43.5%)

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highwestvalleytan There’s an arms race going on in the world of hot peppers. Most people have heard of the ghost pepper by now, the former hottest pepper in the world according to the Guinness Book of World Records, but since 2007 four others have taken the title, the latest contender winning the title in 2013… the Carolina Reaper.

What makes the Reaper so hot? Well, in normal chili peppers most of the yellow capsaicin is in the white, fleshy “fins,” otherwise known as the placenta. In superhots such as the reaper, the veins that hold the capsaicin grow all over the inside of the flesh and not just the placenta. The flesh is also rolled around and folded so the actual size of the pepper is misleading. In a normal pepper, when you remove the seeds, you take out most of the spice, but there’s no such shortcut with the Reaper. It’s everywhere.

I can tell you… this shit is HOT! Worse, it tricks you. Once you start chewing, the unreasonable amount of oily capsaicin takes a few seconds to settle and connect with your wet mouth flesh, so at first you say to yourself, “Naw, this isn’t that bad. It’s actually kind of good!” Then it makes you look like a complete idiot. It slurred my speech, destroyed my concentration, and the morning after it proved something I never really believed in all my years of loving spicy food: hot in, hot out.

So, now that you just learned something really cool, let’s talk about something really dumb: this whisky. This whisky is dumb. Really, really dumb. I would rather try to eat an entire Carolina Reaper than cough up another $60 for a bottle of this garbage. I’m kind of sad that somebody burned a shitload of fossil fuel to bring this to me.

Inside the Carolina Reaper Having tried a lot of fantastic whisky from the Utah based distillery, I can’t see how any sane employee there would think selling this was a good idea. It’s not like they have terrible taste in whisky. On the contrary, their rye whiskies are some of my favorites. How did this happen?! I can’t even bring myself to repeat the bogus story they sell this crap with so I’m going to truncate it.

The Mormons who settled Utah had all kinds of crazy ideas: like how men should have as many wives as they can manage; Native Americans were from Israel; magic underwear; black people are cursed by god; and Mormon whisky, if it tastes anything like this, was delicious. I could go on… but I won’t.

Nose: Oof! Wood. Like a freshly sanded floor in a house made, finished, and furnished entirely of wood. Even adding bitters and citrus-y syrups can’t overcome the stomach wrenching wood. It smells like someone took a whisky that wasn’t quite ready and then cut it with a whisky that definitely wasn’t ready.

Palate: I wasn’t sure it was possible, but it tastes woodier than it smells. It kind of reminds me of Kansas Spirit whisky, except, you know, more terrible and not nearly as sweet. I kind of wish they advertised with a similarly douchey campaign as Kansas, because at least then I would have had a laugh, too. If you can choke down the wood, there’s some buiscut-y flavor… like a biscuit made with sawdust. If you really dig, there’s an indiscernible fruitiness I can’t quite put my finger on.

Rating: Risky In one sense, this whisky has a lot in common with the Reaper. There isn’t a whole lot you can do with it that everyone will love. In fact, only a certain subset of people who like chili peppers or whisky will try to grow or acquire them, and an even smaller set will actually enjoy them more than their less infernal cousins. In a historical sense, this whisky was interesting for about ten seconds while I thought about how this was designed to taste like the booze of antiquated Utahn society. As a repeatable commodity, both seem kind of dumb, with the chili being a little less so. The rest of my Reapers will be mixed in with friendlier peppers and enjoyed in moderation, while the Valley Tan will sit on a shelf undisturbed.

I’ve read rumors about the next hottest pepper coming up… the HP56 aka Death Strain, roughly 50% hotter than the Reaper or almost 1,200 times hotter than a mild jalapeno. I can’t imagine how much hotter that is any more easily than I can imagine how much worse High West’s next dumbest whisky will be. I don’t plan on trying either… but then again, if I know anything about myself it’s that I’m curious to the point of extreme stupidity.

Rational Spirits – Santería Rum (46%)

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santeria_rum Wait, what the hell is this?!? Rum??? I thought this was How to Drink Whisky?! What’s next? How to Drink Mezcal? How to Drink Vodka? How to Drink Shit Mixed with Redbull? Well okay, How to Drink Mezcal sounds pretty awesome. I definitely wish I paid better attention in Spanish class so I could pursue it. Que lastima! Maybe it’s not too late to learn.

To summarize a hundred bloggers who wrote about this before me last year, in 2015 Bryan Davis of Lost Spirits fame announced that he was waiting for a patent. Studying a 20 year old rum, he claimed to have made a machine that could take a spirit, fresh off the still, and combine it with oak in a way that would create a cocktail of chemicals with a similar composition to the older spirit.

Every serious whisky drinker anywhere collectively rolled their eyes at the announcement. We’ve all heard that story a hundred times. Sure you can change that spirit dramatically by boiling it in a pressure cooker, spiking it with sawdust, or shaking it violently, but it will always taste at least a little but like mulched goat piss… and those sad, New York hipsters will love it just the same.

I’ll admit, I was as jaded and skeptical as the rest. At first, I secretly hoped it wasn’t true, that whisky-arsonist and friend of the blog Davis hadn’t just committed the ultimate whisky maker’s faux pas. Now he’s got a waiting list of spirits companies in line to lease his machine. The first to sign up, Rational Spirits, just released their flagship rum, Santería. Looks (and tastes) like success to me.

Discussing it with Davis, he’s clear that he’s not selling a machine. It’s more like he’s selling a mad scientist starter kit with warranty and consultation with an actual mad scientist… and there are good reasons why he has a waiting list now. Analog maturation’s main drawbacks are that it takes lots of time and then there’s usually a high degree of variability in each individual cask. Davis’ digital setup makes the best effort yet to control that variability and make a product extremely uniform on a much faster pace. The implications for the spirits business are exciting… and certainly a bit terrifying.

Jeffeesons Aged at Pug Small Batch

It’s not a box you pour liquor into, press a button and after a period of time it spits out 20 year old brandy. At the same time, this specificity seems to be one of it’s most desirable assets; with Davis’ reactor, the product will be exactly what you craft it to be, and once you set it up, it will produce consistent results over and over. You like that honey barrel you found by the rickhouse window? Analyze it in the spectrometer and imitate it. If you know what you want in a whisky and can provide a sample for analysis, you can probably make it.

In the end none of this written chatter really means anything if the product doesn’t taste real. I was expecting an uncanny valley of sorts, where the spirit would be close to old rum but something wouldn’t seem quite right in an almost imperceptible way. Not the case. Santería is undeniably delicious. For $36 a bottle, too? Get the fuck out!!! Now, I can afford to drink mai tais all night long! Does it taste exactly like the 20 year old rum they tried to imitate? I can’t say, but it’s damn tasty and if you told me blind that it was an honest 20 year old, I would believe it.

So how does his machine work? Well, there are a few different processes that happen in different parts of the setup. Once you have a snapshot of your target spirit’s profile, your own spirit as it came off the still, and snapshots of all the components, you juggle these four processes, analyzing it along the way to create the final spirit.

I won’t bore you with too many details but one process holds wood suspended in spirit at a precise temperature which seems to extract a catalyst from the oak. The spirit is held at other temperatures which are tuned in to expedite reactions between the various carboxylic acids, phenolic acids and alcohols created or extracted in the other processes, speeding up the creation of precious, targeted esters that typically take long periods of time to form. Another process utilizes photocatalytic science. Pondering the way the sun was breaking down the surface of his deck, Bryan realized wood degrades in sunlight and unleashes a lot of the same components unleashed when wood breaks down in alcohol, most importantly lots of precursor acids. So another stage employs an extremely powerful light, powerful enough to give you a sunburn in under a minute, shining it at the wood suspended in alcohol to accelerate the break down of the wood. One process bubbles measured amounts of oxygen into the spirit to convert certain acids into aldehydes. The last process is another temperature process that utilizes bacteria from the wood to create new carboxylic acids which would usually be breathed in by the barrel and later converted to esters. Wash, rinse, esterify, and repeat.

Rating: Highly Recommend So is this the end of barrel aged spirits? It could be. At the very least, it’s changing the landscape and understanding of the aged spirits industry. I knew this guy was going to do great things.

Thank you to Bryan and Joanne for the bottle. Cheers!