Tag: Elijah Craig

Quarantine Bottle Kill #9: Elijah Craig 12 Year (From Long Ago In The Before Time)

There’s a sense of static in the air these past few weeks of quarantine. Not of any sense of normal but certainly of familiarity. A sense of sameness and of the world outside the familiar walls drifting away. But also there’s that electrical charge like anything can and could happen at any moment.

The world seems to be looking for answers and I’m sitting here working my way through old booze and writing about it.

It is a way to help keep my sanity. Beyond it being something from the Great Before that I enjoyed it’s also been an avenue for self reflection and rumination.

It’s mental travel.

Placing myself in the place, time, and person that I was when this bottle joined the collection. No spirit allows me to check in with myself and chart my trajectory more than Elijah Craig.

Elijah Craig 12 Year Bourbon was my first true Bourbon love. I’m not going to say that it “got me into whiskey” but it certainly helped expand my understanding of what good Bourbon could be. When I started buying barrels for my program Elijah Craig was the first barrel I bought. And I kept buying barrels. Even after the aged statement was dropped. It is a benchmark Bourbon and the numerous barrels arriving over the years have given me an excuse to examine the years as they pass.

But as time goes on and the age has changed and after so many barrel selections I forgot what old school Elijah tasted like. Was it inflated in my mind? Was the memory of who I was when I discovered it altering the actual liquid? Am I drinking nostalgia flavored whiskey?

So how fortunate was I to discover a bottle of standard issue  Elijah Craig 12 Year Old from 2012 hiding in my closet. This bottle is from when my career shifted from being a bartender to a Bar Manager and when so many of my early influences and opinions crystallized. Here is a liquid opportunity to examine the past.

NOSE: Caramel, Oak, Apricot, Tilled Soil
PALETE: Toffee, Vanilla, Baked Apples, Baking Spices, Earthy and Deep
FINISH: Long, clean, spicy with a hint of white pepper. Drying to a lingering woodyness

This dram is deep and powerful. It is what I have idolized for years. While the NAS Elijah Craig is a very good Bourbon this old 12 Year has a maturity, for lack of a better word, that its descendant does not. 

And while the Elijah Craig Barrel Proof releases are still 12 Years old the much higher proof gives an edge that here is softer and more nuanced.

This is a dram for deep thoughts and late night conversations. It’s also a perfect example that things don’t stay static forever. Eventually all things change.

Drinking Poetic (On A Christmas Wednesday): The Nutcracker

I’ve always felt disconnected from the Holiday season. While I grew up Catholic it has had been many a solstice since I identified as such. I’ve also spent the past 10+ years living 2,500+ miles from the family and friends I grew up with. As such when the holidays roll around I often find myself latching on to the traditions and celebrations of my friends. Which is why the one tradition that I do have from my childhood is so fascinating to me. 

When I was about 5 my grandfather gave me a nutcracker for Christmas. My siblings were so jealous that the next year he gave all four of us our own nutcrackers. It was a few more years, and arguments about which nutcracker belong to who, before we started putting our names on this ever-expanding collection. So while they ostensibly belonged to someone they were really just collectively ours. When my grandfather passed away my grandmother took up the tradition and it took on new meaning.  If you enter my family’s house at Christmas a veritable army of wooden soldiers, drummers, cobblers, and pirates stand ready to perform their ceremonial duty. 

Like all terrifying dolls the nutcrackers eventually escaped their Christmassy confines and spilled over into the rest of life. Currently sitting on my desk in the 70 degree California sunshine is a board short wearing, hipster beard sporting, surfer bro nutcracker that marked my first full year on the West Coast. It’s a touchstone that exists beyond its original conception. 

It also led to the creation of the Nutcracker Cocktail. 

The Nutcracker was originally conceived as a drink for the Heaven Hill Bartender of the Year competition a few years ago. I drew on all of the above thoughts about tradition and threw them into a glass. I wanted a drink that was very evocative of a time and place but that also existed outside of its “seasonality” just like the Nutcracker resting on my desk. 

I knew I wanted the drink to be based around Elijah Craig Bourbon. Not simply because it was one of the options for the competition but because it is an actual touchstone whiskey for me. The very first private barrel of whiskey I ever picked out was a barrel of Elijah Craig. It’s a whiskey that’s been my companion through my journeys behind bar since the very beginning. It carries a weight, a depth, a tannin, and an earthiness that makes it a classic backbone for a whiskey focused drink. 

Next, I wanted a solid bitter base to enhance the earthiness while also adding in an extra dry component to balance the sweet components I knew would inevitably make their way into the glass. The Clemanti China provided a suitable Manhattan-esque build while adding in a beautiful shock of the bitter. 

Next were the seasonal elements. You can’t call a drink “The Nutcracker” without any nuts so a touch of Nux Alpina Walnut Liqueur added in a discernable nuttiness to play off the base of the Elijah Craig. This Made the drink Nutty but still dry, too dry. To balance this a hint of Tempus Fugit Crème de Cacao added in both the Christmas sweetness and memories as well as a balance for the dry, dry, dry components. 

To tie it all together, and to add a hint of fruit to brighten up all of these dark nutty elements, a few finishing dashes of angostura orange bitters went into the mix. 

Now, this drink was fine. However, it didn’t evoke anything larger than itself to me. It was a wintery sipper that was Mostly just a slightly esoteric Manhattan. It needed something to pull it out of its time and place.  

I briefly considered making it a warm drink but that would have turned it into a drink that I had no interest in drinking. I almost universally hate hot beverages, from coffee to tea and everything in between. So, instead I turned to other childhood memories as well as my local Japanese grocery store. In both of those places I found chestnuts. 

Growing up there were several horse chestnut trees in my yard which when the chestnuts would fall I would end up chucking at my siblings as children do. And in the Japanese market there were wonderfully proportioned bags of roasted, soft chestnuts for the holidays. This was the missing factor for this drink. 

I pulled out the Spinzall and infused the chestnuts into the Elijah Craig, stirred everything together and expressed an orange zest over the drink tying in the underlying orange bitters. Now the drink sang. It was complex, fruity, dry with an intriguing sweetness, and was no longer simply a “Christmas Drink.” 

The Nutcracker:

1.5 oz Chestnut Infused Elijah Craig Bourbon
.5 oz Clemanti China Antique
.25 oz Hau Alperine Nux Walnut
.25 oz Tempus Fugit Crème de Cacao
2 Dash Angostura Orange Bitters

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass.
Stir with Kold Draft Ice.
Strain into a punch glass.
Garnish with an orange twist studded with clove. 

Revisiting this drink years later there are a few changes I would make. I might add a splash of Verjus to add in more acidity to the heavy nature of the ingredients. Or I might add in a touch of Oloroso Sherry to length the drink while staying rich and stirred. 

But then again, some traditions shouldn’t be over thought. 

Whiskey Wednesday: Elijah Craig: NoMad Edition

I sat down and did this almost exactly a year ago and it’s time again for the annual arrival of a privately selected Elijah Craig Barrel. This one, like all of them, is special because it is a 100% unique bottling but it’s also the culmination of an insane year.

Elijah Craig is the whiskey I’ve probably written about the most so I’ll skip the folklore and brand history, you can read about those here. Instead I want to get personal and talk about the time since the last barrel rolled into my hands.

I started buying single barrels of whiskey years ago.  Elijah Craig was the first barrel I bought and it lit a fever in me. It was pretty easy to track where I had been working using this as a metric. As time went on as the list of “House Single Barrels” would balloon seemingly overnight. Last year was full of first for me. This year has been about constant change.

20180102_170727
Training Tome

When the last barrel of Elijah Craig showed up to Faith & Flower I already new that in a few months I would be leaving it behind and traveling blocks away to the corner of 7th and Olive as one of the opening bar managers for NoMad Los Angeles. What I didn’t know was what that really meant.

I knew that I was joining a well-established,well-regarded, restaurant and bar team. I knew Leo Robitschek mostly by reputation and I knew the program; Pietro Collina, Nathan O’Neil and the rest of the team in NYC had built one of the most impressive bar programs not just in the country but the world. I knew it was going to be a lot of pressure and an immeasurable amount of work. What I didn’t know was how I fit into the equation.

My partner-in-bar Dave Purcell had already been a part of the team for months before I was brought on and given my crash course in everything NoMad. Three weeks after I started training I had pivoted learning to teaching. We were now training a barstaff that was 55 people large on an opening cocktail menu that was nearly 60+ drinks (not counting house specs on classic drinks) spread across four bars and not enough back bar space.

Every single member of that opening team was a goddamn rockstar and every member of our team, nearly a year later, is a member of that opening squad. It speaks to their professionalism and skill that they have risen above and beyond as the restaurant has constantly changed around them. Constant Reinvention is one of our guiding principles after all.

IMG_20180122_021945_794.jpg
A lot of late night exits.

Our Head Bartenders, who moved across the country from to be a part of this project, are some of the hardest working, most dedicated hospitality professionals I have ever met and I couldn’t imagine a better crew to get this beast off the ground with.

But even after opening I still didn’t know where I fit in. I wasn’t behind the bar and the Head Bartenders embodied the program and the culture so much more deeply than I felt that I did. They had simply been living with it for longer then I had. As far as I could tell I was here to herd a pack of wild bartenders and to help make the NoMad more LA. The first inkling of what that might actually mean happened when the team at Heaven Hill approached me about buying another barrel this year.

I immediately leapt at the idea and pitched it to Dave and Leo. After some debate, and extended tasting sessions, we settled on this bottle that now sits before me. An Eight Year Old Elijah Craig Single Barrel aged on the 6th Floor of Rickhouse “S” outside the Heaven Hill bottling plant in Bardstown, KY.

It has a heavy caramel nose and an upfront sweetness yet also a delightful earthiness and tannic finish that allows it to be sipped on it’s own but also to be built into cocktails which are surely the lifeblood of any NoMad bar.

Elijah Craig has been an integral part of the history of NoMad. The only drink to have never left the menu at NoMad is the Start Me Up, a Whiskey Sour variation with ginger, honey, Strega, rum and of course Elijah Craig. Using this barrel really drives home those whiskey notes in this drink. Here was something that I could contribute to the NoMad lexicon that was still wholly the NoMad and also intrinsically me.

This year also had it’s fair amount of travel, back to Pennsylvania for my Grandmother’s 90th birthday, a trip to the Cook Island’s (look it up it’s a real place) and a chance to return to France with my always more intelligent than me girlfriend.

There were less competitions, opening four bars in less than three months eats up a lot of free time, but I now have a rotovap as part of my tool set and know more about working with sherry than I could have ever imagined. As I sit here sipping this whiskey I am incredibly proud to see the NoMad symbol on its label.

Last year I declared I hate change and this year I find myself wondering if the new norm is constant change. I don’t have an answer to the question but I do look forward to what next year’s barrel of Elijah Craig brings.

IMG_20180706_210048_991.jpg
NoMad Los Angeles

Whiskey Wednesday: Elijah Craig Check In

Another year and another barrel of Elijah Craig. The very first single barrel I ever picked out for a bar was a barrel of Elijah Craig for Areal a good five years ago. I’ve been fortunate enough to select an Elijah Craig barrel every year since so its arrival is usually a great touchstone for me to reflect on the previous year. A Bourbon New Year as it were. And it’s been a hell of a year.

I left a bar that I ran for nearly five years that promptly closed six months later. I started a new job at Faith and Flower in Downtown LA, competed in the National finals of three major cocktail competitions, traveled to Tokyo, started this wordy blog, and picked out another barrel of Elijah Craig.

Elijah Craig is often the answer to the inevitable question, “What do you drink?’ I’ve talked about it at length here, and here, and during innumerable shifts behind the bar. The basic gist though is that Elijah Craig is one of the semi-mythical early Bourbon distillers that sometime after his death was decreed to be “the Father of bourbon” after he became the first person to char his barrels before aging his whiskey. It’s a completely unsubstantiated claim that makes a good story. So, we all tell the story and then acknowledge that it’s complete nonsense.

The current Elijah Craig brand was introduced by Heaven Hill in 1986 and has gone through multiple changes in its 30-year history but the past year was quite striking. The iconic 12-year old age statement was dropped from the label with the whiskey instead becoming a blend of 8-12 year old. The old school squat bottle was also replaced with a sleeker, taller, more streamlined bottle that I’m personally not a fan of but does actually fit a pour spout .

If you can’t tell, I don’t like change. And that’s not to say anything against the whiskey. It’s still an earthy, massively tanic, barrel forward whiskey that is one of the few bottles that I think works equally well in both mixed drinks and as a neat sipper. Most of these changes were made because there’s not enough whiskey to go around. Especially not old whiskey. Part of me feels like saying so what? Let there not be enough for everyone, don’t change this bottle that I love. Yet, that view is selfish.

Part of the joy of bartending, and indeed the joy of this very blog, is getting to share things that I love with other people. In the end, these changes aren’t for me. I clearly jumped on the train years ago. These changes are for the people seeing Elijah Craig for the first time on a billboard, or a sports arena, or even hearing about it on its recent NPR advertisements. The old Preacher is growing and hanging out with a younger crowd these days and I’m glad to see it.

In the end change isn’t good or bad. How we react to it, how we deal with it, that’s where the emotion comes in. Sometimes, change is just change. And I look forward to seeing what the Preacher and I have to talk about the next time we see each other.

Whiskey Wednesday: The Preacher Just Keeps Getting Younger

Hey it’s time to talk about two of my favorite things again. Privately selected single barrels and, less enthusiastically, change!

Let’s take this arrival of a brand new 10 year old single barrel of Elijah Craig to look at just how much things have, or haven’t changed.

First things that clearly haven’t.

A bit of history:

Elijah Craig was a fascinating man. Born in 1738 in Virginia, he was a Baptist preacher arrested at least twice for preaching without a license from the Anglican Church. The Baptists at the time were given a bit of a hard time for their stance on slavery (they were against it) and he worked with James Madison and Patrick Henry to help preserve the right of religious freedom at a federal level after the Revolutionary War.

imgres-1.jpg            After the war he helped lay out and plan the city of Lebanon, Virginia which eventually became Georgetown, Kentucky as the state lines and city names changed to reflect a growing country and their pride in their first President. Our Preacher founded some of the first mills west of the Appalachian Mountains that produced cloth and paper. He was also a big proponent of education. Founding the first classical school in Kentucky in 1787, which was than linked to the Rittenhouse Academy in 1798 with the help of land donated by Craig. Rittenhouse eventually morphed into Georgetown College, not to be confused with Georgetown University. He also happened to found a distillery.

“If virtue consists in being useful to our fellow citizens, perhaps there were few more virtuous men than Mr. Craig”

In 1789…ish, Elijah Craig founded a distillery which, despite all his other accomplishments, is the reason any of us are talking about him today. According to almost all whiskey historians, and there are a surprising number of them, there is no reason to believe the Preacher was making anything other that the typical style of corn-based spirit being made by 100’s of other farmers at the time. By the time Bourbon County was formed in 1785, two years after the first registered distillery in Kentucky, people were already trying to find a way to distinguish between the corn based Kentucky style and the rye based style that predominated on the other side of the mountains.

Despite lack of evidence, Elijah Craig is first mentioned without citation as the inventor of Bourbon in 1874, nearly 70 years after his death. And most Bourbon aficionados can tell you the charming tale of his magical discovery of charring barrels to create Bourbon. After a lightning bolt set fire to one of his farm houses the good Preacher was too frugal to throw away some burnt barrels that he deemed perfectly suitable and the whiskey stored in these barrels emerged from “a process that gives the bourbon its reddish color and unique taste.” This story completely ignores the fact that barrels have been used for storage for millennia and they were valuable. Being reused to store anything from fish, to hardware, to whiskey. And they only way to truly clean out a wooden container after it’s stored salted fish: setting it on fire. Charring the inside. Bourbon was an evolution, not an invention.

So why are we still talking about the “Father of Bourbon”

Enter Heaven Hill. Founded as soon as the money could be pulled together after the end of Prohibition, Heaven Hill is the only remaining family owned distillery in Kentucky, The largest family owned and operated producer and distributer of distilled spirits in the US, the seventh largest alcohol supplier in the US and the second largest holder of Bourbon in the world. They’re lagging slightly behind Jim Beam, which almost feels appropriate with the number of Beam they’ve had as Master Distiller. Their very first distiller was Jim Beams 1st Cousin, he was eventually followed by Jim Beam’s nephew and even the current Master distiller’s, Parker and Craig, carry the Beam family name. There is history everywhere. And in 1986 Heaven Hill first released the Elijah Craig 12 Year Small Batch Straight Bourbon.

Nimgres-2.jpgamed and marketed after the dubious claim of our good Preacher as the Father of Bourbon, the whiskey was nevertheless damn good. While “small batch” has never been a regulated term Heaven Hill has always stood by the fact that their Elijah Craig brand is never more than a 200 barrel dump per batch, which is more than most distilleries can actually distill but at least there is a number to the claim. It was also always 12 years old, which put it actual years ahead of most of it’s premium competitors.

But times change.

Due to the success of the super-aged version of Elijah Craig, the Barrel Proof Editions, a massive, debilitating fire in the mid 90’s that literally destroyed a distillery, and a massive uptick in the call for good bourbon this stalwart brand has had to make some interesting calls in the past few years.

The biggest being the fact that it’s dropped it’s age statement. For nearly 30 years Elijah Craig has been the benchmark for old bourbon. images.jpg12 years blasted out large on the label gave it a gravitas and a certain definitiveness in what the benchmark of flavor should be. Heaven Hill insists that the new “Small Batch” Elijah will always be a blend of 8-12 year old bourbon and that the change allows them to maintain the Barrel Proof at 12 years old and eventually increase supply of the highly lucrative and delicious 18 and 23 year old single barrel variations, but it still feels like a loss.

We in the bourbon world are sometimes overly obsessed with the idea of “the past” and “tradition” so much so that the marketing stories overtake the liquid even when they’re pretty blatantly misleading. The old tales of the Preacher Elijah Craig are mild compared to most brands. We resist change. But especially with the new, and in my opinion terrible, bottle redesign I can’t help but feel like something is being lost in translation.

Part of what always stood out for me with Elijah Craig was that it was an introduction to the wider world. It wasn’t a well whiskey, it wasn’t a call and it certainly wasn’t expected. It had all the right ingredients: amazing quality, an age statement that puts almost anything to shame, and a price point that let you experience something new without stress. It was the key that turned the lock on your palette. It’s bourbon and had all those necessary parts but added up to so much more. And as so many parts move, so rapidly, I can’t help but feel they might not be getting the combination to the lock right any more.

But maybe I’m just getting old.

I certainly wouldn’t have bought a barrel of it if I didn’t think it was worth it. This 10 year is the third generation in my personal selections of the Preacher and it is more lively and kicking than most standard issues I’ve had, with a deep oak backbone supporting a brighter stone fruit and peach note before finishing dry and tannic.

The future is wedded to the past and after all that Elijah Craig has been to me both personally and as something to share with customers I feel the need to do something we should all do more of, challenge our preconceptions and keep an open mind.

Elijah Craig had,been and is, one of my stalwart companions,- but I can’t help but feel there might be something subtly gleaned from the preacher’s actual obituary, “He possessed a mind extremely active and, as his whole property was expended in attempts to carry his plans to execution, he consequently died poor. If virtue consists in being useful to our fellow citizens, perhaps there were few more virtuous men than Mr. Craig”

Son of a Preacher Man: Elijah Craig 18 Year Single Barrel

People always ask, “What is your favorite whiskey?” and I always respond, “That’s like asking a parent to pick their favorite child.” It’s flippant but also kind of true. A parent will tell you they love all their children, but there’s always one that the spend more time with. In the bourbon world that child for me is the Preacher: Elijah Craig. But as the Nobel Laureate once said, “The times they are a-changin’.”

It’s gotten incredibly obvious over the past year with the old standard 12 year dropping its age statement and a major bottle design overhaul, but the first sign of change came nearly 5 years ago when they discontinued the original iteration of the Elijah Craig 18 Year Old Single Barrel.

As the Nobel Laureate once said, “The times they are a-changin’.”

The Bourbon was, without a doubt, one of my favorite things I’ve ever put in my mouth. Massive, oaky, creamy and not overpowering. It’s a prime example of the quality of the older whiskies that fed into and eventually led to the Pappy Van Winkle craze, and at $45 bucks a bottle it was something everyone could enjoy. It was an entry point into the bigger, wider world of Bourbon. And they had to take it away from us for two reasons: 1) We drank all of it. 2) The Heaven Hill fire.bourbon.jpg

In the mid 90s a fire started at on of the Heaven Hill distillery rickhouses, most likely from a lightning strike. Ironic in light of the old marketing story that Elijah Craig became the father of Bourbon when a lightning strike burned his barn to the ground, but being a frugal man he saved the barrels stored there and used them to store whiskey, becoming the first to use charred barrels and thus the first to make modern bourbon. The story is complete myth of course.

But this actual fire spread through the warehouses like, well like fire through alcohol. It followed the wind and the terrain and set fire to the distillery itself. Other distilleries banded together to help them continue production until they purchased the Bernheim distillery a few years later but with the loss of stock and production ability sacrifices had to be made and the 18 year was put on that altar.

368291375969919360.jpgAs a consimgres.jpgolation prize in the following years Heaven Hill released a 20, 21, 22 and 23 year old version of the single barrel. Some with varying success but as the age on the bottles ticked up so did the price on the bottles, riding right along the crest of the Bourbon Craze. Then the 18 Year came flaming back last year.

 

Still a Single Barrel, but now a once a year release, I was excited to taste it and felt warm inside as it slid down my throat just like I remembered. Rich, deep, dark yet still lively. But with a price tag 3.5 times what it used to be the entry point was gone. No longer was this something to share with newcomers and aficionados alike. Now this was for the connoisseur. And yes, now this means that you actually might have a chance of finding a bottle on the shelf. Of having something to share in those special moments, but with the bottle change and the loss of the 12 year age statement from the Preacher’s Small Batch bottles I’m left wondering where that entry point is going. So, tonight I’m going to raise a glass because I want to. And because I can. For now.