Contact

11 thoughts on “Contact”

1. 

   Peter May 29, 2009 — 1:37 pm

   Hi,
   Great site!
   I really enjoy reading it. I haven’t read everything yet, but would like to aks you a question.
   What do you think of freezing wine in order to extract the unfrozen part containing the higher alcohol %?
   Personally, I use it to make my own vermouth, because the one I could buy is very typical=limited choices.

   I couldn’t find much about this (freezing wine)on the web, and would greatly apreciate your comments.

   Thanks,
   Peter
2. (Post author)

   sjs May 29, 2009 — 2:23 pm

   hi peter,

   i’ve never really experimented with freeze concentrating finished wines and i think the reason its not a big practice post fermentation is because of legal methanol limits.

   if you freeze concentrate a wine as a base for your vermouth as opposed to just adding a high proof spirit besides methanol, you’d be gaining acidity, and extract. perhaps more moscat like flavor? but you’re also losing control of your alcohol level.

   the technique in vermouth may never have been experimented with because it isn’t exactly economically viable. amerine’s bibliography makes it seems that vermouth was about economically bringing flavors to the masses that they craved while respecting organoleptics. if early producers had the industrial capacity to freeze separate wine, they could probably have made the natural wines of their dreams (they needed temperature control to not stress yeasts or so i think) without aromatization or fortification and vermouth would never have been relevant.
3. 

   SFsourDoh September 22, 2010 — 2:39 pm

   I found an old post where you mention using a recipe for Dr. Harter’s Wild Cherry Bitters (less the sugar). My wife and I have been experimenting with making our own bitters and we would love the recipe. There is an ad for Dr. Harter’s in the Anchor Brewing Company’s reprint of “American bartender”, by Cocktail Boothby. We thought it would be fun to make.

   Thanks for all the good info, enjoying your site.
4. (Post author)

   sjs September 23, 2010 — 4:03 pm

   wow, that was a long time ago.

   HARTER’S WILD CHERRY BITTERS.

   Wild Cherry Bark 1 ounce
   Yellow Cinchona Bark 1 dram
   Orange Peel 2 drams
   Cardamon Seed 1 dram
   Wild Ginger 1/2 dram
   Alcohol Dilute 12 ounces
   Honey 2 ounces
   Syrup 2 ounces

   Percolate the drugs in moderately fine powder, with the dilute alcohol and
   when six pints are obtained add the honey and syrup.

   this recipe would need to be abstracted to become a cocktail bitter. basically more dissolved aroma. most homemade bitters and new commercial entries suffer from not being intense enough aromatically.

   good luck!
5. 

   Frank Hronek January 8, 2012 — 4:02 pm

   We have emailed before. Today I have a 2 questions about msg infused tequila: How much msg do you use to infuse what amount of blanco tequila. Also, is it worth the effort to infuse the tequila—– is the perfect tequila gibson that good?

   ciao
6. (Post author)

   sjs January 8, 2012 — 5:19 pm

   hi Frank, nice to hear from you.

   when i wrote the super stimuli post, the msg tequila was just an idea. i did try it out and it wasn’t very good. umami has a spectrum just like the acids (acetic, ascorbic, citric, malic, tartaric, phosphate, etc.), MSG is from a part of the spectrum that didn’t seem to align with the tequila aroma. i’m not sure if there are any other options to find out if something would align better.

   the results really conjured up fish sauce, which felt negative and unharmonic. i think the theory still stands but i could not show it off in a beautiful context.
7. 

   Michelle Morby November 23, 2014 — 3:43 am

   I came across something that I thought you would enjoy:

   http://www.ginfoundry.com/feature/ginvent-calendars-2013/
8. 

   Lucy June 21, 2015 — 5:08 pm

   Dear Boston Apothecary,
   Fascinated to read about your marmite rye. Am a Brit and soon to be Bostonian. Is there anywhere my best friend/fellow marmite fiend and I can try this? Are you serving this anywhere? Excited to learn.
   Lucy
9. (Post author)

   sjs June 25, 2015 — 2:24 pm

   Hi Lucy. The marmite rye was especially fun but something I won’t be producing for a while until I can find a better legal framework to operate under. However, I think you can still get a version of it at Peg + Patriot in London which does a very cool martini-esque homage.

   cheers! -Stephen
10. 

    Reuben April 17, 2018 — 1:39 am

    Hi

    First just have to say what an amazing body of research you have here.

    I thought this may be of interest to you if you have not all ready come across it, It is a short paper on yeast types isolated from sugarcane production in Brazil in the 1950s

    Yeasts Isolated from Sugar Cane and Its Juice During the Production of Aguardente de Cana
    http://aem.asm.org/content/8/2/73.full.pdf
11. (Post author)

    sjs April 18, 2018 — 7:48 pm

    Thanks for the link! I remember reading it a few years ago, but never got around to sharing it up. When you look at the most cutting edge research on yeast, its all in Brazil. There are some very interesting anecdotes on how yeasts move from distillery to distillery and how they restart things when processes go awry.