Particulate in your bottle?
Posted: 10/11/08
Your lunch was stolen, the boss bit you, your dog ran away, your pick up truck didn’t start….No it is not the new hit country song, it was your day today. You get home, kick off your shoes, aim for that Laz-y-boy with that bottle of Rocky Mountain comfort in mind. After all, even when your wife tells you to sleep in the garage, Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey still loves you. Your hand reaches for that glowing amber capsule, malted barley having undergone the alchemy of time, sweet, mellow, smooth, and complex. Before you pour a well deserved dram into the glass you hold the bottle up to the setting sun to behold its golden beauty, and what’s this?! Some “stuff” floating in the whiskey!?!? Some sediment?!?!? Did Stranahan’s fail you in your moment of need? Say it aint so!!!
The answer is no. In fact a cloudy particulate in the bottle is a good thing. Follow me here for a moment. Here at Stranahan’s we make a very traditional hand made whiskey. We use all natural ingredients, we use no additives, no coloring, no chemicals. There are 5 ingredients in Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey: 100% malted barley, Rocky Mountain water, Yeast, New American white oak barrels, and the time it takes to age the whiskey. Thats it. We effect the whiskey as little as possible with filtration and processing to create the most robust and delicious whiskey possible. The big boys chill filter their whiskey for a more uniform appearance. To chill filter a whiskey, they lower the temperature of the whiskey to 32 degrees F. and then run it through a centrifuge. The naturally occurring oils congeal and become heavy, they are then removed from the whiskey resulting in a clear whiskey that has no particulate or no chance of fogging up when cold. Sounds like a good idea right? Not really. If you have a sip of SCW and let it linger in your mouth, you will notice a rich buttery mouth feel, a luxurious blanket of smooth velvet across your palette. We believe that is a result of “phenols” which are a fatty acid present in the whiskey naturally. When they chill filter the whiskey they remove these rich flavor compounds. The result is a more uniform, predictable, mass-marketable whiskey. That sounds a little boring and generic to me, I would rather experience the whiskey the way that time intended it, even if it every bottle is not cookie cutter uniform. If you pick up a bottle of SCW and it has a particulate in the bottom, shake it vigorously, the particulate should disappear, meaning those phenols went back in to solution, and the buttery mouth feel is there. If you shake it and it does not go away, it is just a fleck of charcoal from the inside of the heavily charred oak barrels we use to age the whiskey and is totally harmless. If you do have a bottle with some particulate in it and you are not satisfied, bring it down to the distillery and I will swap you a new bottle and I guess I will just have to drink that one my self. Oh darn. Cheers Jake