post city – Ben's Beer Blog

The Friday Link Roundup – Post City and liquor edition

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Ben

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I drink things other than beer.

And sometimes I get to write about those things.

David Ort, who, in addition to being a blogger and a cookbook author, is also an editor for Post City magazine, has actually been letting me write occasional non-beer posts for his employer for the last few years, and it’s served as a pretty great way for me to try to learn a bit more about certain categories of alcohol and then try to share my findings and tasting notes with an audience. And let’s be honest, it’s also proved a pretty good way to get the occasional bottle of something interesting and strong sent to the house.

As I grapple with another one of these sporadic musings on spirits (Cognac! Coming soon), I thought it might be a good occasion to revive the near-dead Friday Link Roundup, a feature I’ve been neglecting wherein Ben’s Beer Blog used to lazily point you to other beery things worth reading on the interwebs. For this resurrecting installment, I’ve put together list of some of my Post City musings so that I might inspire your non-beer drinking this weekend.

Cheers.

	Sometimes enjoying whiskey can feel overwhelming: On Wild Turkey 81.
	In Spirit: On J.R.’s Dry Organic Canadian Gin by the Toronto Distillery Company.
	Time to trade-up your tequila: On Casamigos Añejo
	Bringing the characteristics of beer to a bottle of whisky: On JP Wiser’s new Hopped whisky

Someone put hops in my whisky

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Ben

This article ran on Post City’s website as “JP Wiser’s new Hopped brings the characteristics of beer to a bottle of whisky” on October 8, 2015.

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It was probably inevitable that, as interest in hop-forward craft beers rose at the same time there has been a renewed interest in whisky and dark spirits, that there would be an increase in attempts to market some combination of the two.

For the most part, outside of my own proclivity for pouring a few fingers of whisky alongside a pint of beer, this marriage has come by way of beers that attempt to bring you the flavour of whisky. Sometimes it works, as when Chicago’s Goose Island ages a stout in bourbon barrels to make the spectacular Bourbon County Stout—arguably the beer that started craft beer’s barrel-aging trend. And other times, as in the dreadful English import Old Crow, which is essentially a lager with a shot of bourbon flavour, it most certainly does not work.

There have, however, been few attempts to bring the characteristics of beer to a bottle of whisky.

Enter JP Wiser’s Hopped.

Made with a blend of five- to nine-year-old Canadian whiskies, JP Wiser’s Hopped Whisky is “dry hopped” at the end of its aging process—a technique borrowed from brewing wherein dried hops are essentially steeped in the beer, imparting the juicy aromatics of hops without as much of the bitterness that’s obtained from hops in the boil.

Read the rest of this post over on Post City…

In Spirit: J.R.’s Dry Organic Canadian Gin by the Toronto Distillery Company

Posted on January 7, 2015January 7, 2015 by Ben

In Spirit is the new bi-weekly contribution I’ll be making to Post City’s website. The name of the column was chosen from a short list of other horrendous “spirit” based puns and the idea is that, every other week, I’ll open a bottle of something and write about it. For this, my first entry, I wanted to write about a local Toronto distillery. If you’ve got ideas for overlooked, undervalued, rare, or just plain tasty booze worthy of look for my future posts, please send me an email with your suggestions! And watch out for my future editions. Cheers.

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The term “gin” is really something of a catch-all.

A scan of the entry for gin in any thorough bartender’s guide will show you that there’s a lot more to the clear spirit than you might have first assumed.

There are four different legal definitions of gin in the European Union alone and a handful of ways you might make a product that can be called gin, including pot-distilled gin, or column-distilled gin, or the lesser “compound gin.” Really, the only thing all gins have in common is that they use juniper berries and some other combination of botanicals to flavour what begins as a neutral spirit. The botanicals a distiller uses are essentially what makes any gin taste different than any other and ingredients as diverse as grapefruit rind, cinnamon, dragon eye (yes, that’s a thing), orris root, and saffron might be used to flavour the stuff. Even the way these botanicals are added varies greatly from one gin to the next. Bombay Sapphire, for example, is distilled using a “gin basket” whereby a selection of botanicals are placed in a basket in the path of distilled alcohol vapour, and in so doing, the vapour takes on the flavours of the botanicals. Beefeater gin uses botanicals that are steeped in the base spirit for a day, like tea, and then filtered and redistilled.

Most people, sucking down G&Ts at the cottage or unwinding with an ice cold post-work martini, probably don’t appreciate the complexity and variety of what’s in their glass.

But then Jess Razaqpur isn’t like most people.

Having co-founded the Toronto Distillery Co. in the Junction with his high school friend Charles Benoit, Razaqpur is a self-confessed “gin guy.” And so while the company business has thus far been largely devoted to the production and marketing of their unaged organic whisky, it’s clear Razaqpur is excited for the launch of “J.R.’s Dry Organic Canadian Gin.”

And yes, that really is him on the label.

Read the rest of this post over on Post City…