Final Word Dept: Distilling in Wood, the DDL and LS

For officers only! Relevent history and facts about the growing, harvesting, fermentation, distillation and aging of Cane Spirits. Master this section and you master rum. Otherwise just masterbate...
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Capn Jimbo
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Final Word Dept: Distilling in Wood, the DDL and LS

Post by Capn Jimbo »

In terms of fine spirits, fine wood is essential...


...but only for good traditional aging, and alternatively for artistic blending and marrying. Nothing else, period. It does NOT include small barrels or micro-barrels. True oak stills do NOT exist and never will again and that includes the DDL and the motor-mouthed Lost Spirits.

This my friends, is the FINAL word. Trust me...



Let's start here...


Those of you who frequent The Project should now be aware of the greatest myth of all, namely El Dorado's "200 year old wooden pot stills". The real truth:

1. Since the "wood" is on a replacement schedule, the average age of the these so-called "pot stills" is more like 10 years. So... not 200 years old.

2. By "wooden", the marketing would have us believe that the stills are made of oak - just like good aging barrels - and all those years of wonderful tastes are somehow transferred to the distillate in the few hours it spends there.

First: they are not made of absorbent oak, but rather of "Greenheart", a wood most of us have never heard of, and ED ain't telling. Why? Greenheart is a very special, super hard/dense wood, extremely heavy and won't even float. It is absolutely non-absorbent, and is usually used for docks, pilings and around water for it's rot and fungus- resistant qualities. No one in their right mind would age a spirit in Greenheart, which is why no one does. Thus, the ED stills are not oak, do not absorb or transfer flavor, no more than an iron still would.

3. Last, these Greenheart structures are not pot stills as we think of them. In truth, they act as boilers feeding rough distillate to - are you ready - to a couple of column rectifiers where the final distillation actually takes place.

So... not 200 years old, not oak, and not used as pot stills.


So was wood ever really used?

Yes. In the US copper was controlled by the Brits, and was very, very expensive. There wasn't even much available here. Thus some very rough spirits were actually distilled in split and hollowed out logs, which were then reassembled to a vertical position, filled with wash/ferment, and heated over fire/coals to make a very rough and tough spirit. Pretty ugly. Later, there were some boilers made of wood staves, in barrel fashion (like large fermenting tubs), and often arranged in stacks or groups of two or three interconnected vessels.

Now listen up here, carefully...

Rot and infection with bacteria was a HUGE problem, so these vessels had to be accessible enough to be scraped and/or cleaned with a sort of flame spreader. Many stills were made from cedar which like a cedar chest, tended to be more resistant to rot and infection. But the point: the growth of bacteria and fungus was a well known and serious problem.

Thus the main reasons wood was used at all? First and primarily, because copper simply wasn't available or affordable. Even back then copper was known as the gold standard for distilling of good and tasty spirits. And thus second, in desperation, distillers turned to wood and suffered the consequences.

Needless to say, wood has been gone from distilling for many decades.


But not for Lost Spirits...

Lost Spirits is well named. They are the first modern distiller I know of to actually use not only a wooden still, but one made of oak! And why was that? LS would have you believe that it was all about a return to yesteryear, alleging their goal to reproduce "classic" spirits using yup, "classic" wooden stills (as though these were somehow admirable in the first place), but also using his ultra-modern theories, for example that the oak still would pass along flavor components to the wash and distillate.

Not a word about the wonderful and truly classic copper stills of Scotland, which are indeed very old, relatively unchanged, and have been producing fine and pure whisky for over a hundred years. This is truly classic.

The old wooden stills of the United States were really garbage. Cheap spirit produced by cheap and bacteria-prone wooden boilers. Thus cedar was one of the woods of choice. Honestly there is not a single famous wooden-stilled whisky that existed or remains from that area. And that's what's being re-created?


I think not...

What's really being recreated may be the snake oil marketing of those days, which did survive and prosper. A romantic story which doesn't - and shouldn't - hold water, much less spirits. Nope our budding marketeer sought and for awhile, actually succeeded with a groovy two-fer.

First - a romantic story of tradition, the stills of old, wonderful old spirits, blah, blah, blah. Second - a completely unusual (and marketable) still that actually looked like what it was: a huge staved oak barrel - the boiler - topped by a neck or onion that was, yup - another small oak barrel. A barrel on a barrel, finishing with a strange and wandering copper lyne arm. And third - a modern story: that by being made from oak, the still would pass along additional flavor (furfurals as I recall) to the distillate. And last the fact that the still could be be handmade from relatively inexpensive oak. A copper still of that size would have cost far, far, far more.

So the two-fer? Minimum cost with maximum marketing potential. The small distiller's wet dream. I won't even bother discussing the other marketing claims of "fast aging", "fast dunder", and "fast seasoning of wood".


Unintended and unanticipated results...

Even though his whisky was remarkably unwhiskylike, some reviewers became entirely captivated by this unique marketing story, romantic appearance and groundbreaking claims of new methods. So far, so very good at least from this distiller's viewpoint. Even though the old wooden stills were really rather rough in every regard, the story worked. The whole scheme actually worked except for one overlooked but very predictable factor:

Bacterial infection.

If truly researched, one could not have possibly been unaware of this common problem. All manner of distilling contraptions were patented, and so were the devices needed to keep these wooden stills clean. Either LS was unaware of the contamination problem, or somehow the clever barrel on a barrel design made cleaning difficult. Or maybe the research was limited to marketing. No matter...

At the very point of early success - a bit of notability and a few decent reviews and followers - his stills failed, and failed completely. What happened? The porous and steam heated oak - just like a pair of constantly hot and sweaty pair of disgusting sneakers - developed a bad, bad case of fungus - the kind associated with "cork taint" in wine. Such a fungal taint is of course, completely unacceptable and should not be sold (interestingly some the reviews even pointed out a "musty" element). Oh my! The stills couldn't be cleaned or saved, but had to be bulldozed and destroyed, to be replaced by yet another odd design: a relatively small handmade, hammered copper sheet still. I'm not sure that LS has truly learned its lesson, as this Renaissance Age looking still seems full of hard-to-clean crevices.

Lost Spirits is well named, and not just for the whisky and rum, but perhaps for its wooden-minded creators. It's a shame, as small distillers are indeed the only answer to the mega-corporations. However, those who succeed must do so on the basis of long proven methods and equipment:

Good raw materials, good fermentation, good copper pot stilling, and honest aging in good, larger oak barrels (perhaps with a finish). They will have to be able to survive for at least five to seven years. To be fair, a better path to success may lay with the purchase and blending of fine product in the manner of John Glaser. But one thing for sure...

It won't be done with wood. Too knotty...
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Post by da'rum »

Maybe Pussers need to change their sales spruke?
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Post by The Black Tot »

Cap'n, I'm interested in your thoughts regarding why then the Port Mourant and Versailles stills can get such unique tasting results?

I recognize that it is just the boilers that have wooden tank surrounds.

What is the heating source? I would imagine steam coils in the center somehow, since putting fire near wood would unlikely get any distillery 200 years down the line.

The PM stills of course have two stages of distillation in wooden tanks prior to rectification, whereas the Versailles only has the one.

This has gotten me thinking - In the old days, one assumes that the older pot still production may have been rectified either A) by a second run-through of the same pot still, or B) by either the Enmore EHP wooden Coffey or the Savalle stills.

Maybe the big funk of the old stills (and indeed some of the marque variation?) is generated by which combination of pot/rectifying still was paired together?

After all, in the old days, they didn't have the vodka industrial still. They had older column stills of character. The wooden coffey would likely have been paired with the Versailles as they lived under the same roof for a few decades at Enmore, and the Savalle and the PM still were roommates at Uitvlugt.

Now that everything left is under one roof, any shenanigans are possible.
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Post by Capn Jimbo »

"Maybe the big funk of the old stills (and indeed some of the marque variation?) is generated by which combination of pot/rectifying still was paired together?"
Tot, I would agree, yes, as again, the best that I seem to be able to glean from reports and pictures is that both the single and the double currently deliver the vapor to a rectifier column, ergo neither of these should be called "pot stills", but rather hybrids.

So much depends on the master distiller, the speed established, the cuts made, and the return or not of heads/tails to the next batch. Still I'm tempted to guess that the single greenwood boiler delivers a richer product at a lower percentage which might predict a more "pot like product", but then again it may not, as we have no idea how the rectifier is set up and run.

Perhaps another poster has more input on both the history and/or the history. More anon. Here's DDL's own blurb on these "heritage stills":

http://demeraradistillers.com/our-heritage/the-stills

And a nice thread:
http://rumproject.com/rumforum//viewtop ... +pot+still
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Post by The Black Tot »

Yes, true.

But I'm not talking about the new distillate.

I'm talking about the old great distillates. What we buy from the independents.

It's true, DDL have squandered their talents in recent years.

But SOMETHING they were doing pre-1999 led to them making the kind of rums which inspired even you to call them "that master of style" I believe it was.

Even if the wood (greenheart) lined tub is only the wash still, and perhaps in the PM the wash and the low wines still, wherever we find out that these stills have been involved, the marques seem to have shades of a similar character, which is very unique.

Throwing conjecture forward (having access to little else) perhaps the character-imparting property of having a wood lined still is the insulative properties of the wood - something in the differences made by the thermodynamics of the situation. Perhaps this allows for a smaller heat source or a more uniformly heated stage where there are less vapor eddys from contact with cooler metal walls, etc.

The devil take what they're doing now with the column nonsense, but I really want to know how they did that great old stuff.

Maybe back in the 90s they really were collecting the wash still output and putting it through a second pass of the wooden stills. Is there a reason why this isn't possible? Back when all they had was Versailles that would have been the only way to work it, right?

The older 90's independent bottler pot still output sure TASTES like pot still product. But as I wrote before, back then the most advanced column stills that they had were still very flavorful and less efficient Coffey and Savalles.

Maybe it was all in the long, open-tank fermentation and their particular yeast strains, I don't know.

But somebody does.
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Post by Capn Jimbo »

Sure wish I could help, but DDL plays it pretty close to the vest. I'll bet Velier knows, or perhaps JaRiMi may find this thread. For example, per DDL:
"These two unique copper-necked Stills are valued by blenders and other experts as a source of very heavy bodied, very flavourful and deeply aromatic rums – the ancient Green Heartwood of the Still playing a major role in the development of these distinctive characteristics.

While rum from this Still is used in the blending of other El Dorado rums, the El Dorado PM Marque Single Barrel Rum is a single distillate from the Double Wooden Pot Still from the old Port Mourant Estate."
Now does that mean a rectifier was used? Or not? Still, after reviewing Dave Broom's book, I tend to think that prior to these greenheart stills being moved around year 2000, I'd bet they were used as straight pot stills, and the godz only know that from time to time they still may run without rectification.

A great question...
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