Scary Stuff for Halloween!

Happy Halloween! Here now, some scary stuff from the archives. Warning: Not for the faint of heart.










Boo!

Recent Reads: Life on the Line by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas

Chicago chef Grant Achatz has, in a very short time, become one of the most lauded chefs in the United States. Making his name at Trio in Evanston and then opening his own restaurant, Alinea, the French Laundry veteran has become the American spokesperson for modern cuisine (aka molecular gastronomy) and an advocate of the dining room as theater, the plate as stage.

Achatz's autobiography, Life on the Line, written jointly with his business partner Nick Kokonas, traces his rise to legendary status in a career in which it seemed nothing could go wrong, then turns to his highly publicized battle with cancer of the tongue and the treatments which left this chef without the one sensation he valued above all others: taste.

It's a fascinating story, and a more jarringly real one than most cooking memoirs: the standard cooking memoir turned nearly tragic. Achatz isn't an emotional guy and his take on his own cancer is refreshingly handled without outsized sentimentality. If anything, Achatz' writing seems a bit too emotionally detached when dealing with his relationship with his children and his first marriage. Overall though, he strikes the right balance and comes up with a memoir worth reading.

My biggest complaint about Life on the Line is that about half way through, co-author Nick Kokonas joins as a co-narrator. From that point, the narration switches without warning between Achatz and Kokonas, and while having the second perspective can occasionally be enlightening, more often it's redundant and a bit confusing to boot. While they usually tip you off in the first sentence as to who the narrator is, I found myself losing track in the narration ping pong that plays out between different sections. The muddled narrator-switching, though, is a small blemish on a worthwhile read.

Devil or Angel: Angel's Envy

Released earlier this year, Angel's Envy has been on of the most touted new bourbons of the year. The brainchild of Lincoln Henderson, formerly of Brown-Forman's Woodford Reserve, Angel's Envy is a Kentucky Bourbon from an unnamed distillery finished in port casks.

Wine finishing is huge in Scotch but still relatively rare in bourbon. Jim Beam tried it about ten years ago with a few, very expensive special releases, Woodford Reserve finished one of their Master's Collection bourbons in chardonnay casks, a few of the Buffalo Trace Experimental Collections have included wine finishes, and the upcoming annual release of Heaven Hill's Parker's Heritage Collection will be a Cognac finished bourbon. As far as I know, though, Angel's Envy is the first bourbon to be finished in port pipes since the Beam releases a decade ago (independent bottler Big Bottom now also appears to have a port finished bourbon). How does port interact with bourbon? Let's see.

Angel's Envy, 43% abv ($42)

The nose is full of sweet, floral notes. It's like a rose garden. The palate is also very floral and perfumy. There's a very light character to it. The port is most evident in the late palate and into the finish, which is where it really shows, so much so that the finish recalls port finished Scotch.

This is a decent enough bourbon, but I don't think it lives up to the hype. I should admit that light and floral are not my favorite notes, so in part, this just isn't my style of bourbon. Beyond that though, it's not particularly complex. If you like light, floral and sweet, give it a try.

Scotch & Ice Cream

No, Scotch & Ice Cream is not a new Ben & Jerry's flavor nor is it some combination ice cream parlor/speakeasy that just opened downtown. It's a new whiskey blog, and one you should read. Founded by my pal and regular commenter Regular Chumpington, Scotch & Ice Cream is his place to document his tastings. I always love to read RC's notes because he has a real gift for doing the whole flavor analogy thing (something that's never been my strong point). His reviews are helpful, entertaining and unpretentious.

And there's more than Scotch, including plenty of bourbon and some really interesting musings. So far though, the site is sorely lacking in ice cream. Come on RC, time to live up to your title.

Check it out!

Important Customer Notice: Buffalo Trace Antique & Pappy Van Winkle Distribution

Dear Valued Customer,

We at Sku's Great Big House of Liquor do our level best to try and please each and every customer. In fact, our spirits directors, the Steves, will be travelling to Mexico next month to procure a specially selected, single barrel, cask strength, unfiltered, port-finished Tia Maria, even though we wrote in our blog last week that not everything should be cask strengh and unfiltered, and aren't we losing some amount of whiskey tradition by placing these demands on our spirits, and what is the purpose of drinking in our culture, and do we prove our importance or even our existence through drinking certain whiskeys and what are the sociological implications of that anyway, isn't drinking, like language itself, a mere construct? But I digress...

Unfortunately, it is simply not always possible to please the neurotic, OCD, border line paranoid-schitzophrenics who make up our dedicated customer base. We already have 10.5 million people on our standby list for the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection and the fall releases of Pappy Van Winkle. We have just been notified by Buffalo Trace that we will only be getting one bottle of each of these, so there will, unfortunately, not be enough for everyone. Therefore, we have come up with what we think is a fair way to distribute these very coveted bottles.


Step 1: Lottery. We will pick 150,000 names out of a hat. This will involve the procurement of a very large hat.

Step 2: Quiz. Each of the people who are picked out of a hat will be sent a detailed quiz about these bourbons. Please be familiar with the mashbills, provenance, romantic histories of the various brand ambassadors and other characteristics of these whiskeys.

Step 3: Triatholon. The 10,258 best scorers on the quiz will compete in a triatholon.

Step 4: Cage Match. The top two competitors in the triatholon will engage in a cage match. The winner of the cage match will get the bottle. If it is a tie, the tie will be broken by a game of backgammon.

Remember, you can sign up for more than one bottle, but you will have to participate in each step for every bottle you sign up for, even Eagle Rare 17.

The good news is that everyone who participates gets a free bottle of Rain Vodka!

Good luck and let the games begin. And thank you for choosing Sku's Great Big House of Liquor.

The Devil You Know: Jim Beam Devil's Cut

By now, I think most people know the back story of Jim Beam Devil's Cut, which was released earlier this year, but if not, here's the short version: When bourbon is aged, some of the liquid gets trapped in the barrel. After it is dumped, you can sweat the bourbon out, usually by adding water and agitating the barrel. This can reportedly produce liters of whiskey. Beam extracts the trapped whiskey and then blends it with a six year old bourbon. The result is Devil's Cut. The name is, of course, a play on the "angel's share," that proportion of whiskey that evaporates during aging.

I've never been a huge Beam fan, but it's nice to see some new product coming out of them. After years of pretty much nothing new in the whiskey world (excluding flavored whiskey), they've given us Knob Creek Single Barrel, Maker's 46 and now this.

Jim Beam Devil's Cut, 45% abv ($22)

The nose on this is quite nice and very Beam with sweet corn syrup, maybe a bit of cough syrup as well and some fruit candy notes. The palate starts with some nice fruit notes, turns vanilla and then goes flat pretty quickly, becoming thin and watery. It's one of those where you try to hold on to the first taste on the tip of your tongue but inevitably lose it. It's inoffensive but not at all interesting.

It always bugs me when a distillery comes out with an innovation and then blends it with their regular whiskey (see also Ardbeg Alligator). We never know how much of the innovative whiskey is in the bottle or what it would taste like on its own. I'd be interested to taste what the actual "devil's cut" extracted from the barrel, pre-blending, tasted like, but then again, maybe the devil we know is better than the devil we don't.

We All Scream for Sweet Cream

People who are obsessive about coffee insist on drinking only straight espresso or drip coffee. In their view, milk obscures the fragrances and flavors that make the coffee distinct and exceptional. Whiskey lovers are the same way...ice numbs the palate, and while a little water is acceptable, neat is preferred. Yet in the world of great ice cream, the trend seems to be to create the most bizarre flavor combinations. Everyone wants you to try their new bacon-wasabi-cheddar ice cream.

Well, when it comes to ice cream, I like fun flavors as much of the next person, but I also like to taste it in its purest form, and that means sweet cream. Sweet cream is the basis of all ice cream. A creme anglaise (a custard of milk, eggs and sugar) with heavy cream. Creme anglaise itself is one of the wonders of the world and I am totally happy to eat it straight, but when you add cream and freeze it, it's sublime. Tasting the core ingredients stripped of any additives makes you understand that all ice cream really is "frozen custard."

When I lived in New England, sweet cream was on offered at all the great ice cream places. I've seen it occasionally since then, but recently it seems to have dropped off menus, or maybe it was just never as big in California.

So now, I make it myself in a little ice cream make I recieved as a wedding present many years ago. My only addition is a few teaspoons of maple syrup which adds to the depth of the sweet element but isn't enough to give a maple flavor.

After 40 minutes in the machine, it's soft, white, fluffy and pure. Ice cream at its most basic and wonderful form. Long live the sweet cream!