Stephen Shellenberger, the Bostonapothecary, is announcing 2018 as the year of the distillery analysis lab and is committed to bringing 10 years of paper research to life.
This has always been a rickety blog, but hopefully I can polish it up and make it increasingly useful to distillers and other beverage professionals that pass through. Somehow the Bostonapothecary has become a leading source of advanced educational material for distillers.
Currently, the big project is bringing Rafael Arroyo’s beloved birectifier glass laboratory still to life. I found a very old engineers drawing of it and contracted a glass company to build a prototype. I found a great local glass workshop and we are also reviving glassware used by Seagrams for gin analysis. All of these apparatuses will eventually be available as kits in the Bostonapothecary store as well as backed by supporting material including video.
I just came across your blog while attempting to discover some reference materials to feed my aspirations of being a success at botanical cocktails. I bartend in Philadelphia, but was trained at the bare minimum and have been making my own way ever since. I have the natural tendency to make drinks well– and to experiment when the bar is slow. But what I really want is to fully understand how apothecary and herbal ingredients function with liqueurs. Can you suggest any method/reference book/etc.? I want to learn as much as I can so that I qualify for bars like Apothecary Lounge. Thanks!
And Love your blog, by the way.
I sat across the bar from you at Drink the other night. Will hipped me to your blog. I like what I’ve read so far!! Which Cape Verdean rums are you into? We have a bunch of them at Clio — a nova, an aged, and a ponche, all from Santo Antao. Come by sometime and have a drink.
Hi Randy.
Thanks for checking out the blog. Please forgive the horrible default WordPress setup I use.
I like all the cape verdean rums but I’ve become good friends with the owner of vale d’paul in santo antao so that is more or less all I drink now. I’m trying to go over there soon and check out their setup. For a while I had been trying to get them picked up by mswalker or the importer domain select so they would be easier to get on the shelves in bars.
What nights do you work at clio?
WOW! I feel like I have just uncovered a priceless gem!
I am a mechanical engineer living on a farm in a sub-tropical, cane-growing area of South Africa. About 5 years ago I decided to try making what I at that stage (for lack of knowledge) called a “Single Malt Whisky style spirit” made from sugarcane juice.
I have since built several revisions of my own stills and cane presses to extract juice from our own cane and produce an Agricole-style “Pure Single Rum”.
I have performed hundreds of rum related searches over the last few years but have only now found this blog. I have just begun looking through your content but I feel there are going to be many pearls of rum and spirit making wisdom on here. I very much look forward to finding them!
Thank you very much for sharing all this info with us!!!