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Flavors Used in Making Whiskey
of the wine. It is probable, also, that a small quantity of the water is decomposed, setting free oxygen, which forms, with some of the constituents of the wine, new compounds peculiar to old wines. It has been stated that whiskey soon becomes turbid after the application of electricity, and that this is not always remedied by subsequent filtration.
Peach Flavoring for Whiskey, by a New Method.
Take a 55 or 60 gallon cask; at 4 inches from the bottom place a false bottom, perforated with 4-inch holes. Cover this false bottom with a thin layer of straw, laid uniformly; this again cover by a thin, even layer, laid at right angles across the lower layer. Then pack ten gallons dried peaches (40 lb.) regularly, without pressing them; add 5 pounds black tea, well separated, over the peaches, and cover the whole with a cloth. Next pack 10 gallons oak sawdust evenly, and cover it also with a cloth. Piace some piece of lath over the cloth, with some middle-sized stones (12 lbs. in all), to keep the sawdust down. Insert a fawcet in the side of the pipe, between the bottom and the false bottom. Now add 20 gallons proof spirit, and draw off, three times every day, 15 gallons of the tincture, and pour it back immediately. As the sawdust acts as a filter, the tincture will be ready for use and bright in 10 or 15 days. This is an on the method on page 117.
To Improve the Flavor of Whiskey.
Whiskey will be much improved in flavor by putting three ounces of pulverized charcoal and four ounces of ground rice into a gallon of spirits, and letting it stand for a week, and stirring it up every day.
This is a compounder's recipe: a percolation rig for turning neutral or lightly aged spirit into something that tastes like peach brandy, plus a short note on polishing rough whiskey. The proportions are trade-scale and need dividing by twenty or more for a home-sized batch.
- The hinge: circulation, not soakingThe whole method rests on drawing 15 gallons off the faucet and pouring it back over the bed three times a day. Static maceration gives a muddy, uneven extract; the repeated pass through peaches, tea and sawdust is what makes the tincture both flavored and bright in ten to fifteen days.
- "4-inch holes" is a misprint"4-inch holes" looks like a misprint -- a false bottom perforated with four-inch holes would hold nothing back; quarter-inch is the likeliest reading. The straw laid in two crossed layers over the false bottom keeps the peaches from clogging it, while the text itself credits the sawdust with acting as the filter.
- Proof spiritIn the American trade of this period, proof spirit is 50% alcohol by volume. British texts of the same era mean 57.1%. Either way it is a diluted spirit, not raw high-wine, and the dilution matters -- water-soluble sugars and tannins from the peaches and tea extract poorly above about 60%.
- Ten gallons of dried peachesThis is dry measure, and the book helpfully gives the weight: 40 lb. At a tenth scale you want 4 lb of unsulphured dried peaches to 2 gallons of spirit. Modern commercially dried peaches are usually sulphured and much moister than the leathery 1900 article; they will give up their sugar faster and darken the tincture more.
- Five pounds of black teaThe tea is here for tannin and color, not for tea flavor -- it is standing in for years in the barrel. Use a coarse, cheap, strongly tannic black tea, and expect it to dominate if you overshoot; the ratio here is one part tea to eight parts peaches by weight.
- Oak sawdustThis must be clean, untreated, unfinished oak from a known source. Sawdust from any workshop may carry glue, finish, preservative or another species entirely. Food-grade toasted oak chips or oak dust sold for winemaking are the sensible substitute, and toasted oak will give a rounder result than raw.
- The charcoal and rice treatmentThree ounces of powdered charcoal and four ounces of ground rice per gallon is a filtration, the same principle as the charcoal mellowing used in Tennessee whiskey. Use food-grade activated charcoal; the rice is a filter aid that keeps the fines from packing. Be aware it strips character as well as harshness, and a week of contact with a week of daily stirring will take out a good deal of what you may have wanted to keep.
- Yield and scaleThe full rig makes on the order of 20 gallons of flavoring tincture, intended to be blended into a much larger volume of spirit rather than drunk neat. Start with a fraction of a gallon and blend to taste before committing.
This comes from the rectifier's side of the drinks trade, a business that flourished in the United States and France through the nineteenth century and was constrained in the early twentieth by pure food and labeling laws, which limited what rectified spirit could be called even as rectifying and blending continued. A rectifier bought plain spirit and made it into whatever the market wanted: brandy, rye, peach brandy, Holland gin. Peach brandy was a genuine American product, distilled from fermented peaches and common in the Mid-Atlantic and the South, which is precisely why an imitation of it was worth building a 60-gallon percolator for. The oak sawdust and black tea in this formula are doing the work of a barrel and a decade in the rickhouse -- tannin, color, a suggestion of wood -- and the same shortcuts appear in manuals of the period under headings like "to age spirits instantly." The stray passage at the head of the page about passing electricity through wine belongs to a whole nineteenth-century literature of rapid-aging schemes, most of which, as the author's own note about whiskey turning turbid suggests, did not work.