The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (6 page)

Keeping the world's great cider varieties alive is no simple matter. During World War I, the front line in the battle between the German and Allied forces happened to run right through Simon Louis-Frères' famous apple nursery near Metz, France. The 1943 Battle of Kursk devastated a thriving nursery and orchard trade south of Moscow. Today pomologists at Cornell University preserve strains in orchards in upstate New York as part of a global movement to catalog and save old apple varieties.

CIDER CUP

In the Middle Ages, people made a crudely fermented drink called
dépense
by steeping apples and other fruit in water and letting the juice ferment naturally. This is a much more refined version that is light enough to drink all afternoon in the summer.

2 parts hard cider

Sliced apples, oranges, melons, or other seasonal fruit

Frozen raspberries, strawberries, or grapes

1 part ginger beer or ginger ale (nonalcoholic)

In a large pitcher, combine the cider and sliced fruit; allow to soak for 3 to 6 hours. Strain to remove the sliced fruit. Fill highball glasses with ice and frozen berries, fill the glass three-quarters full with cider, and top with ginger beer to taste.

 

APPLE SPIRITS

Apple brandy:
A generic term for a spirit distilled from fermented apple juice or mashed apples, bottled at a minimum of 40 percent ABV, usually aged in oak.

Applejack:
In the United States, another term for apple brandy. “Blended applejack” contains at least 20 percent applejack; the rest is neutral spirits.

Apple liqueur:
A sweeter, lower-alcohol apéritif (often about 20 percent ABV) can be made from apples in a number of ways. One method would be to add apple brandy to fermenting cider before the yeast have consumed all the sugar. The higher alcohol content kills the yeast, stopping fermentation and resulting in a sweet drink almost like a dessert wine with fresh apple flavor. Apple liqueurs may be aged in oak before bottling.

Apple wine:
While apple wine is a very old term for cider, today it refers to a type of cider to which additional sugars and yeasts have been added to push the alcohol content higher, usually to at least 7 percent ABV. Apple wines are typically not carbonated.

Calvados:
Apple brandy made in a specific region of northern France, using apples from designated orchards, containing at least 20 percent local varieties, at least 70 percent bitter or bittersweet varieties, and no more than 15 percent sharp varieties. The spirit is bottled at a minimum of 40 percent ABV.

Calvados Domfrontais:
Follows the other rules for Calvados, but this apple brandy must contain at least 30 percent pears. It is single distilled in a column still and aged in oak for at least three years.

Calvados Pays d'Auge:
This is specific to the Pays d'Auge region; it follows all other rules for Calvados and must be double-distilled in a traditional copper still and aged in oak for at least two years.

Eau-de-vie:
A clear spirit made from fermented fruits that is not aged in oak and is bottled at 40 percent ABV or higher. It is the fruit equivalent of “white whiskey.”

Pommeau:
A delightful French blend of unfermented cider and apple brandy bottled at about 16 to 18 percent ABV.

THE VAVILOV AFFAIR

Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov risked everything to preserve the wild ancestors of the apple tree. In the early twentieth century, he traveled the world to identify the geographic origins of such important crops as apples, wheat, corn, and other grains, collecting seed from hundreds of thousands of plants to establish a seed bank and advance the science of genetics. His goal was to improve crop yields for Russian farmers, but Joseph Stalin considered him an enemy of the state. Stalin had some funny ideas about science: he believed that a person's behavior could change their genetic makeup, so that habits learned in one lifetime could be passed on through their DNA. Scientists who disagreed went to jail for it.

Vavilov was arrested for his beliefs in 1940. He spent his last days delivering lectures on genetics to the other prisoners, many of whom surely wished Stalin would have arrested some locksmiths or dynamite experts instead of botanists.

This version of an Old-Fashioned is mixed with equal parts applejack and bourbon, combining apples, corn, and grains in Vavilov's honor.

1 sugar cube

2 dashes Angostura bitters

¾ ounce applejack

¾ ounce bourbon

2 slices sharp apple, such as Granny Smith or Fuji

Place the sugar cube in the bottom of an Old-Fashioned glass. Splash the bitters and a few drops of water on the cube, and muddle. Add ice, the applejack, and the bourbon and stir well. Use a citrus squeezer to squeeze the juice of 1 apple slice on top. Add the second slice to the glass as garnish.

YEAST

--- (a love story) ---
Saccharomycetales
spp.

The oldest domesticated living organism is not a horse or a chicken
, nor is it corn or wheat. It is a wild single-celled, asexual creature capable of preserving food, making bread rise, and fermenting drinks. It is yeast.

Yeast is everywhere. It floats through the air, it lives on and inside of us, and it coats the skin of fruit in hopes of extracting some sugar from it. There's no need to go hunting for wild yeast—leave a bowl of flour and water on the kitchen counter, and yeast will find it. But a few particular species of yeast—especially those belonging to the
Saccharomycetales
genus—are so effective at fermentation that people learned to keep them alive, grow them in large quantity, and, eventually, to sell them to brewers and distillers. There are laboratories all over the world carefully tending their strains of yeast. Wineries, breweries, and distilleries are often reluctant to remodel, move, or replace equipment for fear of destroying the native yeast that have taken up residence and added their unique characteristics to their products. Tests on identical batches of apple cider show that the particular strain of yeast can radically influence the flavor, introducing unique fruit and floral notes to the finished brew.

The science of fermentation is wonderfully simple. Yeast eat sugar. They leave behind two waste products, ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. If we were being honest, we would admit that what a liquor store sells is, chemically speaking, little more than the litter boxes of millions of domesticated yeast organisms, wrapped up in pretty bottles with fancy price tags.

But as waste products go, those of yeast are endlessly useful. We'll dispense with the carbon dioxide first. If the fermentation is taking place in a vat, the carbon dioxide simply escapes. Beer makers allow some to remain so that the beer will be foamy. They might add a little back in during the bottling phase as well. In the case of sparkling wines, another bit of yeast goes into the bottle for a secondary fermentation that creates bubbles and builds up pressure behind the cork. (Bakers have much in common with brewers: carbon dioxide is what forces bread dough to rise.)

But what about the other waste product, ethyl alcohol? That is what we call pure alcohol, or ethanol. After some tinkering, it makes for a great drink—but not for the yeast. As they excrete this alcohol, yeast make their own grave. They can't survive in high concentrations of their own waste product, so as the alcohol content rises above about 15 percent, the yeast die off. That explains why, until distillation was invented, no human had ever enjoyed a stronger drink than beer or wine.

So that's how it ends for yeast. Either they run out of sugar and die of starvation, or they eat so much sugar that the alcohol they produce kills them. Either way, they die doing what they do best: making drinks for us.

 

If ethanol were the only product excreted by yeast in a vat of fermenting sugars, the world's brandy makers and vodka distillers would have an incredibly easy time of it. They would simply dilute, flavor, and bottle the ethanol. But yeast, being living organisms, are imperfect, and the crushed grapes or mashed apples they live in are themselves brilliantly imperfect and complicated. There is more than sugar in a vat of grapes: tannins, aromatic compounds, acids, and forms of sugar that yeast cannot digest (also called non-fermenting sugars) are bouncing around as well. With so much going on in a fermentation tank, mistakes are going to happen.

Many of those “mistakes” take place as the enzymes inside yeast cells try to do their job, which is to regulate chemical reactions. Think of an enzyme as a lock in search of a key. As molecules jump around in the fermentation tank, they may try to “lock” with an enzyme but not quite fit. The result of these imperfect couplings are imperfect compounds—and these make fermented drinks complex, intricate, and sometimes dangerous.

These accidental by-products are called congeners—like the word congenital, meaning that the compounds were present from the birth of the fermented drink. Some of them are quite toxic and have to be carefully removed during distillation.

If those poisons are made during fermentation, why isn't beer or wine a deadly drink? First, brewers can control the fermentation process through their choice of equipment, the particular strains of yeast they use, and the temperature at which they allow fermentation to take place. Storing the fermented drink, or aging it in oak casks as winemakers do, causes further chemical reactions that can break down some compounds.

Some congeners inevitably remain, but they are present in such relatively small quantities that our livers are usually able to keep up. Anyone who has had too much wine has experienced a hangover caused, in part, by a buildup of these toxins that the body simply can't eliminate fast enough.

The challenge of distillation, then, is to extract ethyl alcohol from a fermented mash similar to beer or wine, resulting in a higher-alcohol spirit that does not also deliver a concentrated dose of congeners. Fortunately, each of these compounds has a different boiling point, so the secret is to heat the mixture and separate out the unwanted molecules as they boil away.

Light a fire under a vat of beer or wine, and toxic fusel oils vaporize first. Distillers call this the “head” of the distillation. It smells like nail polish remover. At the Plymouth gin distillery, they recycle it as an industrial cleaner. Next, as the temperature continues to climb, comes the “heart,” the ethyl alcohol that is the goal of distillation. At the end of the run come the heavier molecules that contain additional toxins, but also some of the more flavorful compounds that make whiskey and brandy taste so good. This section, the “tail,” must be cut off as well, but distillers may leave a little in to flavor their spirit.

Knowing where to cut the heads and tails is the mark of a good distiller. Homemade moonshine, bathtub gin, and other such amateurish attempts at distillation can be fatal because those dangerous compounds might not be extracted properly. Cheaper, mass-produced spirits may also produce worse hangovers if those toxins were not properly extracted or filtered out. Some liquors are double-or triple-distilled, meaning the heart is run back through the still to extract more heads or tails, and some, like vodka, are filtered through charcoal to remove the slightest impurity, leaving a clear and mostly odorless and tasteless spirit that is as close as possible to pure ethyl alcohol.