Story — Blog — Pens and Gin

“And another thing,” Lazarus continued, “the two of us wrote this blog together. Since each of us are several, it’s already quite a crowd.”

“I think I know what you mean, and I’ll admit that invoking Deleuze and Guattari may not have been the smartest idea, but it struck me that bourbon, as I’m coming to understand it, (and gin as well, for that matter), is a multiplicity.”

Lazarus sipped the Apple Dumpling we’d picked up at the ABC Store on Peter’s Creek Parkway, ran his tongue along the roof of his mouth, breathed in slowly, and then looked at me resignedly.

“Welcome to the n-1 dimension, then. Let me have it, boss.”

“As we (however many of us there are) continue to visit distilleries around the state, our collection of products has expanded considerably…”

“Yes, for sure. You’re going to need another liquor cabinet before much longer.”

“At the rate we’re going, I don’t think we have to worry. Anyway, one of my friends asked me recently, with all the products and all the research, which was my favorite? Questions like this always confound me. As far back as I can remember, I’ve never had a favorite anything. So often, the items under consideration are so profoundly dissimilar that I can’t imagine any consistent criteria with which to judge them. Recently, I’m beginning to question whether there are any objective standards of quality at all.”

“So now Simon Frith is involved in this too?”

“He’s been with us for some time; as you observed, both of us are several. So, if we take bourbon, for a moment…”

“Which you have, for much longer than a moment!”

“Yes, well, the same applies for gin, and it’s coming…”

“You keep saying that.”

“Anyway, trying to find a favorite or best bourbon attempts to plot a point: this is what bourbon should be. The thing is, the parameters are too broad: best how? Best of what? “Bourbon” isn’t a flavor, and the criteria that define a spirit as a bourbon include location (made in the US), material (at least 51% corn), and procedure (aged in new oak barrels, etc.). Flavor never enters the picture. In fact, whatever flavors we can imagine within that sizable plane of consistency are all eligible to be bourbon. If we think in terms of slogans, the idea is not: This is what bourbon should be, but, What else can bourbon be? Instead of plotting a point, we run a line: what bourbon flavors have yet to be discovered?

“If we narrow the field to wheated bourbons, for example, we can run a line from something like Maker’s Mark, a popular brand with 16% wheat in the mash, to our North Carolina brands, Old Nick Williams and Doc Porter’s, with 30%; about twice as much. The line would continue out to 49%, after which it ceases to be bourbon, and becomes simply wheat whiskey. It would end up with something like TOPO Eight Oak, which is 100% wheat. While there’s certainly a “family resemblance” of flavor along this line, they aren’t the same, obviously, and I can’t think of any justification, beyond personal preference, why their relative position would be any indication of objective quality.

“Doc Porter’s makes gin… So does TOPO. Are we going there eventually?”

“Yes. Hopefully in March.”

“I’ll look forward to that, anyway.”

“The really remarkable thing, is that, until last Summer, I didn’t like wheated bourbons at all. They seemed to have a bitter note that put me off. After spending more time with them, however, and comparing them to 100% wheat whiskeys, they taste sweet. Sweet! Like butterscotch, actually. Where I used to avoid them, now I seek them out. Even if I had plotted a point (that is, picked a favorite), it wouldn’t be very meaningful now.”

Lazarus looked thoughtful. “...and, of course, the factors that contribute to the flavor profile of bourbons are more complicated than the mash bill.”

“Exactly! Even if we were to leave out the type of still, the age, whether the oak in the barrels came from the top or the bottom of the tree, the level of char, whether agitation was used, and so forth - which we can’t - but even if we could, wheat is only one of several possible grains available! Instead of a tracing of the perfect bourbon, what we need is a map of bourbon potential:

“There! As Deleuze and Guattari would say, ‘What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.’”

“The real? Then why does ‘bourbon’ look like North Carolina?”

“Go with me… it’s just a shape to represent the plane of consistency... and of course, this is just a sketch: a real bourbon map would include all the other parameters… I’ll have to leave that to a real designer.”

“But… boss! You make it look like Southern Grace is in Elizabeth City! And why are Doc Porter’s and Old Nick in the same place? What is that... in Elkin!?!”

“It isn’t literal: percentages of corn run from left to right; thus Conviction, at 88%, is nearly on the coast. I placed Doc Porter’s and Old Nick together because they both have 30% wheat, and are in the 60s for corn (strictly speaking, Doc Porter’s should probably be further to the left, but it’s a sketch).”

“What about a 90%+ corn mash?”

“I suppose it would have to be in the Outer Banks… anyway, we can run a similar line to represent rye: starting with Knob Creek at 13% we skate down to Southern Star at 36%, past the 49% boundary, and end up at Broad Branch’s Rye Fidelity. As long as the mash has 51% corn, the rest of it could be any other grain… millet, oats, amaranth… even rice! And we could run more lines.”

“Rice? Like sake? That would be pretty subtle, I imagine.”

“Apparently, it has been tried: I’ve read that Jim Beam has a Signature Craft Harvest bourbon made with brown rice. Around Christmas, when I had to go to Spokane, I was delighted to find that their local Dry Fly distilleries had a bourbon made with 47% triticale. Triticale is a wheat/rye hybrid that really gave the best of both: butterscotch sweetness and peppery spice notes. Their 100% Triticale Whiskey was even better, and for a real treat, they let me sample a version with a port barrel finish.”

“And you didn’t bring any back for me?”

“Well, I was only there for a few days, and I didn’t have any way to bring back a 750ml bottle... so, in effect, there isn’t any BOURBON, there are only bourbons. As distillers continue to experiment inside the plane of consistency, our understanding of what bourbon is and how it tastes will continue to expand. As Deleuze and Guattari would say, it “spreads like a patch of oil.” The only way that there could be a BOURBON would be, again as they would say, the result of a power takeover.”

“I love the way everything in Europe is political.”

“They were French, certainly… actually, considering the way capitalism and the liquor business work in general, the image of a power takeover is actually fairly apt. Big houses are able to dominate the market through advertising, name recognition, shelf space, and, thanks to the scale of their operations, even price point. In that way, it would be fairly easy to create the idea that there is a BOURBON, and they are the only ones that sell it.”

“You have a point there. Even though Old Nick Williams was distilling before the revolution and Statesville was the ‘Liquor Capital of the World,’ one could argue that through tradition and marketing, everyone knows that BOURBON comes from Kentucky.”

“Opposing forces from both sides of the market even create conflicting images of BOURBON: on the one hand, the big sellers can easily create a low-priced mainstream BOURBON that reigns through its ubiquity; on the other, self-styled mavericks, rebels, and snobs, in search of something to signify their individuality, will gravitate toward an underground BOURBON that challenges the mainstream. Hence, a broad field of higher-priced prestige bourbons have risen to meet the demand, with such signifiers as: Heritage, Craft, Artisan, Small Batch, Single Barrel, Special Reserve, Cask Strength… anything that sounds unique and different.”

“Who are we talking about here, Mr. Local Craft Spirits?”

“Did you say something, Virgil?”

“OK boss, I had that coming.”

“Not that this is a bad thing! This demand for something different is what makes it potentially profitable for distillers to get creative: why would anyone experiment with an amaranth bourbon if people (and opossums) like us weren’t looking to buy something unique? Even still, in this scenario, there still isn’t any BOURBON! What is the mainstream? Jim Beam? Jack Daniels? Buffalo Trace? All of those houses sell a range of bourbons across the spectrum of flavor and price points. The underground is even hazier.”

“I would think that would be ‘any bourbon that I have and you don’t.’”

“Yes! From a distiller you’ve never heard of, who only made six barrels…”

“...each individual kernel of grain selected by hand…”

“...proofed with water from melted Himalayan snow…”

“Along those lines, another idea I’ve been unpacking recently came from a comment on the internet somewhere (I’ll probably never find it again) to the effect that many of the new ‘underground’ bourbons are actually sourced from MGP Ingredients, a massive factory distillery in Indiana. The reviewer was complaining that, in effect, MGP had snuck a new BOURBON in through the back door. By selling essentially the same product under a myriad different labels, they were inhibiting the acceptance of other flavor profiles.”

“I can see some problems with that logic…”

“It comes back to underground snobbery, for sure. Even if the distilleries getting their bourbon from MGP didn’t create unique products through secondary maturation, a brief perusal of the MGP website shows that they offer five different bourbons: 45% wheat, 49% malted barley, 21% rye, 36% rye, and 99% corn. Obviously, those are all going to taste really different, and I am positive that, if you had a big order and offered enough money up front, they’d supply whatever weird mash bill you asked for.”

“Still no BOURBON, then.”

“Absolutely not!”

“So…?”

“Buy what you like, and drink it.”

“Speaking of that, how much have you had?”

“You’re asking me? I think you soaked the rest of the Conviction into your fur!”

“If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else… no one can keep that stuff in the house for long. By the way, what did Deleuze and Guattari mean by ‘be quick, even when standing still’? Was it something like this?”

“Hey! Come back here!”