We figured that our Rosé base that is by default very aromatic with a lot of peach and stone fruit flavors would pair well with our Baton Brandy and other botanicals to make sweet vermouth.
Over the next six months, we did a few small trials with botanicals including the classic wormwood, various citrus, and barks to some of our favorites like figs, vanilla, cherry, and came with a recipe that we thought was the best and would complement our existing Baton Brandy for cocktails like a Manhattan which is one of our favorite cocktails.
Once we locked on a recipe, we scaled up production by infusing our first 40 gallons, utilizing a classic cold extraction method, the entire mix infused with wine, our aged brandy and botanicals for over 4 months.
At the end of those 4 months we added Washington wildflower honey to make the vermouth more of a classic sweet style but without the overly sweet combinations that you see for other commerical products.
The result was a clean and delicious vermouth that can really stand on its own.
The winning recipe was a combination of following botanicals:
Try our vermouth over ice, with an orange slice or top it off with some good quality club soda or tonic.
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It got us thinking what are some of the other areas where we can apply the same principles and innovate with a new and unique product.
And we started with the love for Syrah grapes. Syrah is the base for our Rosé for Cure wine and we wanted to continue to experiment with this beautiful Washington grown grape, that path led us to create Hazy Syrah Brandy.
Hazy Syrah is a brandy unlike anything you have tasted before, crafted with fresh Washington Syrah grapes and three-year-old aged brandy, by infusing fresh unfermented grapes with high proof aged brandy.
The high alcohol in the brandy stops the natural fermentation of the grapes, while borrowing all the delicious flavors, sweetness, and color from the Syrah grapes.
The result is smooth blend that has a deep purple color bottled at 43% ABV, with no additional additives, colors, or sugars.
The name Hazy was inspired by the fact that this product allowed us to blur the lines between our businesses to create something really special, it also applies to the actual product as the Syrah infused brandy is a bit hazy, when viewed in a glass under light.
]]>Only recently it crossed my mind to actually make a post of some of my favorite pairings that I found worked really well with our Baton Brandy.
Before we dive into our Top 5 cigar pairings a few clarifications:
First, its all about personal preference these are cigars that I enjoyed more than others thus made a good pairing with my drinks and my palate. This does not mean you should not try them or experiment and try a few that you think would work better.
Second, I try to provide options that are easily available with one exception.
So with that said let’s start with our Top 5 Cigars & Brandy pairing.
I have been a fan of the Nub line from Olivia for years. I like the short cigars a lot, meaning you can enjoy them in under 30 minutes, making them great for a nice dram of brandy and quick smoke.
Just the sweet spot. That was the tagline for the Nub concept when it first came out. It claimed that the cigar needed no time to warm up or develop, but was able to localize the most flavorful portion of a cigar and keep the smoker there from first draw to the last. Whether or not this concept is true is a matter of opinion, but we found the Nub Cameroon to burn cool, smoke well and deliver loads of nutty, earthy flavor.
Pairing this with the brandy made sense not only because we smoke Nub often but also the earthy flavors of the tabacco complimented with the fruitiness from the brandy.
With a #1 Cigar of the Year title from Cigar Aficionado in 2014, it deserved a spot because we simply love this cigar. We smoke it often as the quality for the price is unbeatable.
A great wrapper with an exceptionally smooth smoke. What we like specifically it’s that it didn’t overpower the brandy, leaving a lot of room while sipping a dram to fully appreciate the honey and vanilla undertones of the drink which providing a full body mouthfeel from the smoke.
What a great cigar. Hand rolled and family owned, the Series 6 natural smokes beautifully, 5-year aged tobacco very smooth and of full flavor and an abundance of smoke with every draw. Paired with the Baton brandy it brought more wine like flavors than any other pairing with lots of coffee and chocolate flavors.
The My Father La Opulencia blend is a marriage of two opulent tobaccos with splendid provenance—Mexican and Nicaraguan. The tobaccos play off each other in interesting ways. The combustion is perfect, the draw offering earthy underpinnings of chocolate and cocoa with each puff, balanced by a mid-palate oakiness and sweeter, subtle top notes of anise and nougat.
The cigar started strong but mid-through and to the end it was sweeter with a great mouthfeel along with the brandy. A great pair for a very affordable price.
If there is a quintessential Cuban robusto, the Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 probably holds that title.
Hoyo de Monterrey is probably the hardest to find in the US, but it was probably one of the best cigars that I had the opportunity to try!
Its a great cigar that paired perfectly with our red fruit forward Baton Brandy.
Floral and nutty, this well-made cigar also shows notes of leather and toasted almond before a sweet, honeyed finish. Elegant and balanced.
I hope you enjoyed this Top 5 as much as I had putting it together. Let me know in the comments your your all time favorite cigar in the comments!
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Although we are not the first wine to give back, we are the first wine that will not go through a non-profit to donate money. We believe that when possible treak the mold and try something bold, something new while helping those in need.
Non-profits rely on donations and take a big percent cuts from each of those donations in order to operate. We took a different approach and wanted to work directly with families and donate money without any additonal layers, skipping a step and thus making a big difference to the family by giving back more money.
As parents and small business owners, we are proud to take this bold step. Our innagular Rosé For Cure is the 2019 release and is a blend of Washington Syrah, Cab Sauvignon and Pinot Gris.
Its currently available to purchase and ship directly to your door in the following states: Washington, Alaska, Washington DC, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, West Virginia and Wyoming.
A great tasting, affortable Rose wine that was founded on the premise to give back!
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It's a very aromatic resin that derives from the lentish tree and it is only grown and sold from the island of Chios Greece. The resin itself is very valuable, it is used to make chewing gum (probably the first chewing gum in history was that of Mastiha), flavor food, and of course spirits.
Mastiha production has shaped the island’s life and culture. Mastiha producing trees grow around the Mastihohoria (Mastic villages) in southern Chios, an area of 24 settlements with a population of about 5000 whose livelihood is directly linked to the resin. Mastiha production is done between the months of July to October, the resin is extracted just before dawn, in which harvesters gently score the bark for a week then wait for the sap to trickle down, in long tears.
The production of our Mastiha distillate is also unique, we import the precious Mastic tears from the island of Chios in Greece, which we then soak in un-aged grape brandy for a period of 3-5 months. This means that we use 100% Mastiha in its raw format, with no additions of essential oils after distillation, a pure mastiha distillate.
During that time the Mastiha naturally melts and releases all of its aromatic properties into the grape brandy, giving it a slightly yellow tint and a beautiful aroma, it's really a pleasure when we open the tank after a few months the smell takes over the distillery.
The final step to producing our product is, of course, a second distillation. We pump that high proof spirit into our pot still and distill it one more time, capturing truly the essence the Mastiha distillate. We only collect the hearts of the distillate or 1/3 of that original volume ending which ends up on the tank in preparation for bottling
After the distillation usually Mastiha spirits that are produced or imported from Greece all have sugar added as a sweeting agent and most of the time Mastiha essential oil to enhance the aroma, this is where our production adds another point of separation in quality.
We wanted a spirit that can really stand on its own, layered with flavors upon flavors without the addition of sugar or any other additives.
We really love raw unadulterated Mastiha, so the thought of adding sugar on something so unique and beautiful did not work with our ethos!
The decision was to bottle our Mastiha at a higher alcohol of 43% ABV, and with no sugar added. It's a decision that I'm really proud to stand behind and really showcase this unique tree that only grows on the island of Chios.
One final aspect of our production that I wanted to address is the fact that Mastiha itself is a PDO - Protected Designation of Origin product, which essentially means it has to come from Chios, Greece. And our Mastiha does, in fact, get purchased from the official Co-Op of Mastiha Growers located in Chios Greece, its properly imported and added into our spirits here in the US, making the only true Mastiha Spirit that is produced and bottled in the United States.
Born and raised in Greece, our approach to crafting these spirits is super simple. Make the best spirits by paying tribute to our roots and Greek heritage. When I approached making our Mastiha for the first time, I really thought what some of the famous Greek notables like Herodotus and Hippocrates would think if I craft a Mastiha that had sugar? With that respect and philosophy in mind, we crafted truly a unique product that without hesitation it would have made our Greek ancestors proud.
Meraki into everything we do!
]]>In this second series, we are taking a technical approach to give you a little more details and pulling the curtain on what we do behind the scenes to create our award-winning Brandy!
After four years of experiments with lots of grapes and wines distilled, we have concluded that Riesling and Baco Noir offer the best mix of flavor, acidity, and terroir for our style of brandies. We source our Riesling from primarily Yakima Valley AVA, and our Baco Noir from a small block vineyard just outside the Puget Sound AVA.
Our goal is to produce single blends of those varietals to showcase what Washington has to offer in terms of a proper barrel-aged brandy, from both sides of the mountains.
Our season usually starts from September to November, and although each year is a little different as we work with farmers and grapes we tend to get very consistent high-quality grapes and juice every year for the last four years.
Once the grapes and or juice has arrived at our distillery, we crush and transfer the juice into 275-gallon fermenters, let the juice settle for a period of 24 hours and then we add our yeast
Here you can see our yeast starting to become active thus foaming up and getting ready to consume all that delicious grape sugar and produce a wine of between 9-11 percent alcohol.
Once fermentation is completed, we single pot distill our brandies, achieving a balanced blended of 55% ABV before it enters our barrels.
Our single distillation has some benefits and our decision behind that due to the fact that our fermentations are so clean and flavorful that produce very highly aromatic and clean distillates during the first distillation, the second approach is due to our use of wine grapes, we can achieve slightly higher Brix levels during maturation and thus higher base alcohol wines, so a single distillation concentrates those wines into an average of 55% when all the hearts are collected, which we believe is the perfect equilibrium to enter spirits into barrel.
Aging of our brandies happen at our facility as well, we primarily source ex-wine barrels that are a mix of French and Hungarian oak. We decided on using full-size barrels from the beginning, and letting the spirits age for at least two years, so neutral oak played an important role into our aging program, as we don’t want to over-oak the spirits by using new oak and we don’t want too little oak, so we work closely with wineries that once they are done emptying their wine barrels we bring them fresh to the distillery and fill them up right away.
Our bottling takes the same approach, we don’t chill-filter our spirits, but we do a slight filtration during bottling to remove anything unwanted particles.
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Everything starts at our distillery location in Lakewood, WA. Where grapes arrive only once a year from the months of September to November. We are lucky to know some of these farmers on a personal level and we consider them friends.
For example, Chris, which runs Millennium vineyard a 14-acre cool-climate site that grows our Baco Noir. Once grapes arrive, we add yeast, a few key nutrients and begin our wine fermentation.
In order to produce quality brandy, you must first create quality wine. And although the wine destined for distillation is a bit different (lower alcohol and higher acidity) as your normal bottled wine, we still have to pay close attention to the fermentation temperature and quality of the ingredients to ensure a healthy and strong fermentation.
Once fermentation is completed, the wine is ready to be distilled and it enters our stills. One is a handmade direct-fired alembic pot still imported from Portugal and our second is a high-tech column still imported from Poland. Utilizing both old school and new technology along with different distillations techniques produces a really unique brandy that you can taste the difference immediately.
Due to our distillery size, you are most likely going to try a single barrel brandy. This means you truly get the terroir of the grape along with some of the barrel characteristics and the quality of those two ingredients being married for a minimum of two years before they end in your bottle.
We primarily use ex-wine barrels to age our brandy, we add no colors, caramel or any additives other than water. We slowly proof our brandies to 43% ABV over many weeks, non-chill filter to ensure a full-body, and we slightly filter prior to bottling to remove any small particles from the barrel aging process.
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