lifestyle //GOMmelier
È The delicious taste of Bourbon ages
much faster than Scotch, needing only
to be barrelled for four to eight years.
All-American
Whiskey
Bourbon: corny, delectable
and a toast to the French.
By Keith Hoffman
B
eer and whiskey have a lot in common.
Both start with the malting of grain,
which simply means that grain is soaked
in enough water, for a long enough time, for
the seed to assume that it is finally fulfilling its
evolutionary reason to exist. A bud is hastened
out in an attempt to sprout forth from a hopefully
nutrient-rich soil. At this very moment, the
expectant grain is heavily endowed with a useful
content of enzymes, for both growth, and, as it
turns out, brewing. The evil brew master, primed
with this knowledge, cuts short the life and
dreams of this young malt by heat-blasting it,
milling it into a powder, and finally drowning
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it in a bath of hot water. Life is over, but the
fun has just begun.
If it’s beer you want, one generally: 1) keeps
that soup on the kettle, 2) adds some yeast (which
converts much of the sugar content into ethanol),
3) soaks some flowers in it (hops) and, 4) does
some filtering. If it’s whisky you desire, you simply
don’t use the hops, and once you’re done filtering,
you boil the swill over and over to collect and
amplify the alcohol content.
If you are in Scotland, especially on Islay, the
process to kill the malt growth is accomplished via
burning a hot, stink-filled, peat fire underneath the
grain, the smoke of which imparts a distinctively
Whisky, Whiskey and
tennessee vs. kentucky
Seems the Scots like to denote their distilled
beer with just a ‘y’, while the Irish and
Americans prefer ‘ey’. That is all there
is to that mystery.
Tennessee whiskey is just like Bourbon
except, prior to barrel aging, the precious
liquid is ever so slowly leeched through
over three metres of charcoal derived
from maple trees. This “Lincoln County
Process” is responsible for the mellowing
and sweeter undertones of brands like
Jack Daniels and Gorge Dickle. Charcoal
is quite good at latching on to impurities
and, so the theory goes, produces a purer,
more drinkable product. If you live in
Tennessee you swear by such. If you live
in Kentucky, you equally pontificate that
all that charcoal strips the soul from the
swill and you don’t touch the stuff.

È The infamous Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Certainly not as smooth and easy going as the name suggests.
È Better than it looks: The sour-mash process uses mushy leftovers from previous production batches.
burnt taste. In Ireland, one can use either malted
or unmalted grain, but the curing technique
doesn’t include peaty smoke—it’s accomplished
with direct heat.
For bourbon, the rules are a bit different.
True, bourbon uses malt in the same fashion as
Scotch and Irish whiskey, but malt only makes
up about 15 percent of the used grain. By law,
51 percent of the content that goes into the brew
soup has to be corn (most modern efforts use
about 70 percent), the rest is rye and/or wheat
and that malted grain (again, for those enzymes).
No peat fires are used. Corn imparts the resultant
whiskey with a round mouth feel and a sweet
taste. Interestingly, the different grains used in
bourbon trigger the need for sequential milling
and cooking steps as corn needs to cook at a
temperature that would burn rye, and the malt
needs the lowest temperature setting of all.
Bourbon further differs from other whiskies
in the fact that one hallmark production step is
È Bourbon’s ‘sour mash’ method is a proud tradition.
akin to sourdough bread making. The sour-
mash process (noted proudly on most bottles
of bourbon) involves taking some “spent”
leftover mush from an earlier production run
and unceremoniously dumping it into a nice
new soup of freshly milled grain. The spent stuff
is devoid of alcohol and acidic in nature, and
therefore sour in flavour, hence the name. Some
modern day bourbons start a new batch with up
to 25 percent sour mash.
The name is Bourbon
In the 1700s, Bourbon, the French Royal House,
assisted the budding and appreciative US of A in
their fight against the British for independence.
(Some might say that this sort of brotherly
cooperation still represents modern-day Franco
UK relations.) In gratitude, the young government
of America named one of their vast plots of land
‘Bourbon County’. Certainly no one in 1700s
America could have imagined that the small
GOMmelier // lifestyle
Barrel Roles
Bourbon is always aged in fresh American
white oak barrels. The barrels, however, are
charred deeply at the cooperage before any
liquid is allowed to rest in them. The char
produces some of the same effects as seen
with charcoal filtering in Tennessee whiskey,
but the long soak for bourbon also adds
multiple flavour and colouring chemicals.
After four to eight years, the barrels are
emptied and shipped off to the UK as
Scotch and Irish whiskies are often aged in
them—sometimes for decades more.
The oak is what gives whiskeys their
colour, and a lot of their taste. In all barrel
aging the process is the same—in warm
seasons the liquid expands and forces some
of itself into the meat of the wood where
it marinates and leeches out numerous
chemical compounds like tannins, while
in cold seasons the liquid contracts back
into the main barrel and thereby enriches
the brew with woody goodness.
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lifestyle //GOMmelier
naming honour bestowed on the members of
the House of Bourbon could have created such a
powerful legacy. The French don’t seem to know
it, but the enduring muscle of the Bourbon name
comes directly from the amenability of corn to
the art of distillation.
No one describes how the name Bourbon
became synonymous with American whiskey any
better than the true bourbonophile that is Charles
K Cowdery. He writes: “When American pioneers
pushed west of the Allegheny Mountains following
the Revolution, the first counties they founded
covered vast regions. One of these original, huge
counties was Bourbon, established in 1785 and
named after the French royal family. While this
vast county was being carved into many smaller
ones, early in the 19th century, many people
continued to call the region ‘Old Bourbon’. Located
within Old Bourbon was the principal Ohio River
port from which whiskey and other products were
shipped to market. ‘Old Bourbon’ was stenciled
on the barrels to indicate their port of origin. Old
Bourbon whiskey was different because it was the
first corn whiskey most people had ever tasted, and
they liked it. In time, ‘bourbon’ became the name
for any corn-based whiskey.”
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È Anglo-Franco relations in LA: something to celebrate.
Finally, bourbon ages in barrels at a much
faster rate than Scotch. Scotch believers drool,
myself included, over whisky that has been
resting in a dingy barrel for 15 years or more.
For bourbon, the goodness gained from a barrel
terminates in less than a decade. Therefore, most
bourbon is barrel aged for four to eight years.
Next time you raise a glass of bourbon
be sure to toast the American frontier spirit,
thank the first cheapskate who decided to recycle
the sour mash, and salute the tastes, colours
and smells imparted by an extended soak
in charred oak.
Í The steamers that cruised on Old
Man River (that’s the Mississippi)
always had a stash of Bourbon.
‘old recipe’ silliness
Don’t be fooled by all the marketing gibberish
of ‘oldest registered distillery’, ‘same recipe
since the 1700s’, ‘handed down across a
17-and-one-half generations’ nonsense.
The bourbon of the late 1700s was nothing
like it is today. For one, the early bourbons
were made in pot, not column stills, like has
been practiced for the last 160 years or so.
Second, the ‘sour mash’ technique was not
yet invented, which meant the lot-to-lot
variability was quite high, and the product
inconsistent at best. Thirdly, it was likely not
until about the 1840s that the charring of the
inside of the oak barrels was introduced, and
this innovation alone produces a dramatically
different taste and colour experience. In
short, the result of some marketing focus
group must have indicated that the ‘old
recipe’ claptrap would sell more bottles,
so we are stuck with countless references
to such. You now know better.