Good Morning! To start off our newsletter this week we are going to tell you about a New England distillery that is hosting a super cool cocktail competition next month. Our favorite online (and irl) bartender will be there to compete! We’re also talking about science and innovation in alcohol and the latest hot bourbon release.

Anyway, onto this weeks newsletter!

Who’s Competing and a Little About the Host

Boston area cocktail enthusiasts: clear your calendars. Bully Boy Distillers is hosting their first ever Amaro Sakura cocktail competition and guess who’s competing? None other than our own, Lui Fernandes! The event takes place Wednesday April 8 at the distillery in Boston and tickets are still available.

So let’s talk a little bit about the host distillery and the spirits they make. Bully Boy was started in 2011 by brothers Dave and Will Willis. The duo grew up on their family cattle farm and learned to love all aspects of farming from a young age. As they grew up, their love of making cider evolved into making hard cider and from there - brandy. Finding they actually had a knack for distilling they started thinking about how they could utilize other crops on their family farm. The brothers came upon their grandfather’s prohibition era booze cellar and inspiration struck. Along with the dusty bootleg bottles stood a framed horseshoe with a eulogy to family draft horse, Bully Boy.

Since the family farm was dedicated mostly to cattle, corn was a major crop. This set the wheels into motion to use corn for distillation. Their vodka and of course their whiskeys all feature the staple crop. Now the brand has expanded into all kinds of spirits and continues to explore new flavors. Their Amaro Sakura, the focal point of the upcoming cocktail competition, is a fresh take on a classic. Amaro is an herbal liqueur of Italian origin often referred to as a digestif. The combination of herbs was originally thought to aid in digestion and so was often consumed as an after-dinner sip. This iteration is inspired by Japanese Cherry Blossoms, light and floral. Their website describes it as such: “Notes of cherry blossom and ume plum lead, layered with ginger spice, oolong tea, and a backbone of gentian root. The result is elegant yet complex—lightly perfumed on the nose with a lingering, balanced finish.”

The competition features 11 New England bartenders and is designed to also be an opportunity for guests to mingle with the competitors. Each guest gets two votes for people’s choice and winners will be announced shortly before the event ends. I know that Lui is very excited for this competition and if I know him he’s going to be bringing something absolutely incredible.

Low- and No-Alcohol Wine Tastes Better Than Ever

No- and low-alcohol wines are not new, they have been around for quite a while now, but they don’t always hit that true wine craving. That is in part because the methods used to remove the alcohol from the wine often remove key flavor and texture elements in the final product. So naturally technology is attempting to compensate however possible.

So how are they achieving this goal? Yeast. Among other things.

Yeast is key in most alcohol production. Different strains achieve different end results and even different flavor elements. Wine makers are now experimenting with yeast strains that produce less ethanol but still produce the must that gives necessary dryness to the wine. This is often partnered with other methods like early harvest and reverse osmosis.

Another way alcohol is being reduced in wine is by disrupting the yeast activity. This is done by dropping the temperature of the wine during fermentation to halt the activity of the yeast. Yeast requires specific temperatures in order to thrive so cutting the heat at key moments can help reduce alcohol content while still building out flavor.

These methods are being developed because the technology that has been widely used to remove the ethanol from wine is also credited for removing all of the flavor with it. Since so much of the essential flavor elements in wine are linked to the ethanol directly, removing it really removes what makes wine, wine. One company, Solos, with a patented process claims that it has discovered how to separate the flavor from the ethanol and then reintroduce it to the wine in order to give wine drinkers all of the enjoyment without the alcohol.

Buffalo Trace Just Dropped Their Second Daniel Weller Whiskey - And It’s Not Cheap

None of these special releases are ever really inexpensive, but Weller’s latest release started at $550. The first iteration is already almost $3000 on the secondary market. I had written about how many collectors found the Weller line to be overrated and insanely expensive back in September. I talked about how I thought Weller was a great alternative to Pappy (if you could get it in stores at it’s retail price) but also admitted I am not generally a fan of wheated bourbon in general. When I was sent an article about the release of this latest Weller I was pretty shocked by the sticker price. Maybe I have no real justification for shock but a ten year wheated bourbon for $550 seems a little hard to reconcile with for me.

Let me try to explain my reasoning, maybe you’ll agree or maybe you can enlighten me on why I’m wrong. This release is the second in a limited line of whiskeys made in tribute to Daniel Weller, the grandfather of William Larue Weller. The line is focusing on experimenting with different wheat varietals in order to influence flavor. The barrels used were not any different than normal bourbon barrels and the time in the barrel is not particularly long, although it is a solid age statement. To me the name and the “limited” status is all that drives the high price of this whiskey. There are plenty of 10 year offerings that range from $50 to $150 and although they don’t carry the prestige of Weller (using the same coveted juice as Pappy Van Winkle) it is a crazy price jump when you consider that the cost to make it is not inherently higher for the producer.

Maybe I’m not cut out for the collector league of bourbon enthusiasts, I truly can’t justify more than a couple hundred on a single bottle, but knowing how many barrels are currently sitting in rickhouses in overstock really makes these prices seem insane. What do you think? Let’s chat over on discord, maybe you can change my mind.

I’m really geeking out on cocktail and alcohol science lately. I love the ways in which bartenders and cocktail creators are constantly innovating the balance and flavor of their drinks. Acid adjusting is so cool because you really can’t get the same flavor balance with certain types of citrus and adding lime to something like mandarin doesn’t achieve that same final flavor you imagine when trying to highlight it. I also love when a creator makes something that could be intimidating seem super approachable.

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