Episode 188

Reviving Ancient Stills with Dr. Eric Stroud

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Reviving Ancient Stills with Dr. Eric Stroud

Episode 188

What’s shakin, cocktail fans?

Welcome to episode 188 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast!

This time around, we have a fascinating nerd-out session with Dr. Eric Stroud of Mohawk Spirits Distillery and nanodistilling.com. He’s here to talk about an innovative research program he’s undertaken that involves resurrecting and reimagining ancient still designs and testing them in a modern laboratory setting.

In this stimulating still dialogue with Dr. Eric Stroud, some of the topics we discuss include:

The differences between traditional and vacuum distillation – that is, distillation that takes place in the presence of high heat vs. distillation that takes place at room temperature but under very low pressure.
How Dr. Stroud secured a grant from the American Distilling Institute that allowed him to fabricate and test ancient still designs found in alchemical and medical texts from the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
What it’s like to test glass stills with zig-zags and coils and chambers that seem to be in all the wrong places.
The implications of Dr. Stroud’s compelling test results for the craft distilling community, as well as what new experiments are on the horizon.
The virtues of working with native North American fruits and berries,
What to drink with a late Renaissance alchemist,
And much, much more.

This ambitious project has really exciting implications for distillers all over the world, and Dr. Stroud invites other distillers to join him in testing stills and recording data so that we can continue to develop a better understanding of how still design impacts process and product. You can learn more about his farm distillery by visiting mohawkspirits.com, and you can follow along with his distilling experiments over at nanodistilling.com.

FEATURED COCKTAIL: CORPSE REVIVER #3

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Corpse Reviver Number 3. That’s right, not the all-popular number 2, but its little-known highball-ish cousin. To make it, you’ll need:

1 ½ oz Absinthe or Pernod
½ oz Lemon Juice
Chilled Champagne (or any other dry sparkling wine)

In a highball glass with ice, combine the absinthe or absinthe substitute with lemon juice, top off with champagne, and enjoy. Pretty simple, right?

Now, it’s important to point out that the Corpse Reviver family of cocktails is a problematic one in terms of unity. There’s not a whole lot of either ingredient or formulation correspondence that would make you think – ah, there’s a corpse reviver. The original two takes on the Corpse Reviver appeared in Harry Craddock’s 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book. No. 1 is basically a split-base brandy Manhattan featuring brandy, calvados, and sweet vermouth, and No. 2 is the iconic gin/orange liqueur/lemon/absinthe drink that many cocktail aficionados know and love.

This recipe for the Corpse Reviver #3 comes from Patrick Gavin Duffy’s 1956 Official Mixers Manual, and we can see the resemblance it bears to the Corpse Reviver #2. It’s got Absinthe and lemon, but instead of gin and orange liqueur, you just load up your glass with Champagne. To me, this is a logical extension of the Corpse Reviver format. The only two qualities that seem to qualify a drink AS a Corpse Reviver are multiple French ingredients and the explicit or implied directive that this is a drink to be taken in the morning or with brunch. So, more serious mixologists might roll their eyes at the Corpse Reviver No. 3, but we think it’s a welcome and unpretentious addition to the slightly chaotic Corpse Reviver pantheon. Plus, this episode is all about reviving old and strange-looking contraptions, so this cocktail fits right in.

SHOW NOTES

During this episode, we talk about a lot of very specific distilling practices and trade terms. Functionally, though, you need to know a few basic things to keep up with the conversation.

Vacuum Distillation vs. Traditional Distillation

Traditionally, distilling takes place when a fermented liquid (“wash” or “distiller’s wine”) is heated to the point when the alcohol vaporizes, rises, and is then caught by a condenser, which cools it and allows it to be collected in liquid form. Furthermore, a spirit can said to be “rectified” if it is distilled to an extremely high proof (and purity), which generally requires the use of a “column” still.

Reviving Ancient Stills with Dr. Eric Stroud

Vacuum distillation is different in that it can take place at much lower temperatures. When the wash is mechanically subjected to very low pressure, it can be “boiled” at temperatures that exert less oxidative or transformative effects on the flavor compounds in the fermented base. Thus, the alcohol that can then be separated tends to retain a flavor very close to that of the original wash. One challenge in vacuum distillation is the need to aggressively cool the alcohol vapor in order for it to condense. This makes sense. If being in a vacuum allows boiling to occur at much lower temperatures, it would stand to reason that a much lower temperature would subsequently be needed for condensation to occur.

Experimenting with Ancient Stills

Having done a great deal of reading about distillation in the 15th – 17th centuries, Eric Stroud was mesmerized by certain whimsical still designs that seemed to “leap off the page.” He knew that the people who had designed these devices were at the absolute top of their field (doctors, in many cases) during the late Renaissance and Enlightenment, which leant credence to their diagrams. He set out, with the help of a grant from the American Distilling Institute, to test what effects these bizarre shapes would have on the purity and efficiency of a distillate.

Working with modern glass blowers to recreate these designs, Dr. Stroud emerged with 5 different testable prototypes. Instead of using vacuum distillation like he does for his own products at Mohawk Spirits Distillery, he opted for a gentle, heat-based distillation that would closely imitate distilling practices when these stills were invented. The fact that the devices were made of glass allows an observer to closely attend to the path that liquids and vapors take in the still, which sheds light on how each design achieves its end results.

You can learn more about the experiments, still designs, and research findings by visiting Nanodistilling.com.