Tinctures, Part 3

Another update on the tincture batch.

The lemon tincture and all of the fruit tinctures that I started a few weeks ago are done.  Yesterday, after capturing a half-dozen grapefruit peels, I started a jar of grapefruit tinctures.  Also, the bittering agents that came as dried leaves (leafs?) or powders are all out and strained.  That means that in addition to the grapefruit tincture, the only ones left are the woody bittering agents (barks, peppercorns, cardomom pods, etc.).

I've tasted a few of the bittering agents, and they're definitely bitter!  All I do is dip my fingertip in and taste it, but still, they make my tongue go numb. And what an intense flavor!

I think I've got another week or so before I can strain the bittering agents, and at that point, I can start experimenting with creating cocktail bitters. Any requests?

Tinctures, Part 2

It's been a week since I started the tinctures, so maybe it's time for a quick update. Every day I shake all of the jars, which, in addition to the functional benefit of encouraging the infusing, also gets me in the room to monitor the process.

The floral tinctures are already completed. The hibiscus was the first one done, followed shortly by the rosemary, juniper, lavender, sassafras, and a few others. There's no easy way to tell when they complete; you just have to taste them every day (taste, do NOT just smell, as the smell is pretty rancid). Then, when they're done, you remove the solids, rinse the jar, and re-jar the liquid.

Most of what's left still infusing are barks and woody bits, though I did add a jar of lemon tincture to the shelf a few days ago. It's already beautiful and yellow!

Tinctures, part 1

Last fall, I made a couple of batches of bitters, using recipes from Brad Thomas Parsons' great book on the subject. Both batches came out well, but through reading the book in detail, it became apparent that the way to really customize the bitters was to make them by blending tinctures. Simply, a tincture is an infusion of one ingredient into a solvent. Bitters tend to be a blend of tinctures of bittering agents (roots, etc.) and flavoring agents (fruit, etc.). So, for this next step of my explorations, we cleared off a few shelves in the music room and put up some tinctures.

Rosemary, Juniper, Ginger, Orange, Clove, and Hibiscus tinctures.

Right now, there are about 25 jars of tinctures on the shelf. Some are woody (Cherry Bark, Arnica Root), some are leafy (Sassafras, Rosemary), and some are floral (Hibiscus, Rose Hips). I'm using different solvents for different ingredients. For lighter flavors, I use Everclear, but for thicker or woodier flavors (like the Ginger or Clove), I use a high-proof rum or bourbon. I still have a few tinctures to make, but once they're jarred up, all you do is shake them every day and wait.  The floral tinctures will be ready in a few days, but the woodier flavors will take up to a few weeks.

USITT

Last week was final exam week at UCI, but it was also the week of the annual USITT conference. This year, the conference was in Milwaukee, so theatre designers and technicians from around the country converged in the frigid north for four days of conferences, seminars, panels, and socializing.  Here are the highlights of the trip, from my perspective:

• The Guerrilla Sound Challenge, a 3-hour, do-it-yourself, sound design sprint, which I officiated this year.  You can read all about it (and hear the pieces) here.
• Me Inc, The Business of Being an Artist.  I chaired this panel, featuring three sound designers of national repute: Toy Deiorio, Jim vanBergen, and Tony-Award winner Rob Kaplowitz. We talked about how to make a career as a designer/technician. The audience was packed for this session, filled with designers of all ilks, stage managers, and technicians. I got a lot of great feedback on this session, and I feel pretty good about doing a good job filling in for pal/chair Brad Berridge, who couldn't make the conference this year.
• The Sound Commission spent a whole day focused on networking, with John Huntington, Davin Huston, and Ellen Juhlin sitting on a panel. They talked about setting up networks, good network management skills, innovation in networking, etc.  I was really excited to see how big AVB has been getting. 
• Food and drink.  Ellen was our alcohol divining rod, and she led us to a number of great bars. Distil had some terrific cocktails and a chill vibe, and Stir, while more drab in appearance, had a well-cultivated bar and some innovative bitters.  

The low point of the conference was, for me, a session on video design that I attended. It was hosted by the Scenic Design commission, and it was almost entirely useless.  There were five panelists, but only one of them was a full-time video designer. Additionally, that one designer was the only person on the panel who appeared to have an idea about how professional theatre is done.  Of the other four panelists, three were professors with limited professional experience, and one was a scenic design student at one of their schools.  The discussion was uninspiring, and I ended up leaving halfway through.  

Now, with USITT behind us, Mike, Josh, and I are back at UCI with the rest of the cohorts, in the middle of three days of system training/tuning and mixing seminars with Tony Meola, Richard Bugg, Steve Bush, and Gavin Canaan.  It's part technical training, part storytime, and part art.  Fascinating!

Bitters: bottled and ready

At long last, the two batches of bitters are done a bottled! Tonight, after getting home, I did a final skim & strain of the bitters (leaving some of the heavy ashy solids behind). Then, I funneled the bitters into some bottles that I bought and washed. I ran off quick labels and snapped this photo before I called it a night.

While I was pouring, I was also smelling and doing a little tasting. Here are some initial thoughts:

The Coffee Pecan is nice. Thick and opaque in color, round in flavor. Heavier on the coffee than the pecans, but not overly so.  I suspect I'll add more pecans next time (or toast them more lightly than I did this time).  The Charred Cedar is very clear - it looks just like regular bourbon, but it has a very strong nose.  Much less 'charred' than 'cedar.'  I haven't tasted it yet. I guess I'll need to do that soon...

Bitters: strain and boil

After two weeks of daily shakings, it was time to open the jars of bitters. With each jar, the process was the same: strain the solids out of the liquid, add the solids to a pan of water, and boil.  The pots are cooling now, and when they cool completely, I'll put them in two more jars for a week of sitting and filtering.

The charred cedar jar smelled more like cedar than char when I opened it today, and while I was filtering it, the cheesecloth grew black and gunky with the ash from the char. I suspect that when I finish this process and get rid of the wood, the charred aroma will take primacy over the cedar.

The coffee pecan bitters smell amazing!  More like coffee than pecans, actually.  I suspect that is because coffee has more of a natural aroma than pecans, but once I throw the solids away and am just smelling whatever has seeped into the whiskey, the aromas will balance out.

Chop de Wood

My precaution got the better of me tonight when I got home from work, and I pulled out the long pieces of charred wood and chopped them smaller.  It didn't seem to make a difference in terms of how much wood was covered by whiskey, but at least it made me feel better.

After reviewing the recipe, I'm confused at how it's all supposed to go together. That much charred wood, plus other dried herbs, only covered in two cups of bourbon? Seems highly unlikely.

This is my skeptical face.

Then again, I tripled the amount of whiskey and still only cover half of the wood.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Bitters: a side project

I like cocktails. Whiskey drinks, mostly. Bourbons, ryes.  Manhattans, Old Fashioneds. Sazeracs.  Knowing my affection for booze concoctions, S gave me a book on bitters for my birthday. The book is divided into three sections: part I is a history of the bitters, a discussion of the social impact of bitters, and a survey of the more significant bitters, both historically and current.  Part III is a collection of recipes for cocktails and foodstuffs that can be made (or enhanced) with bitters.  The middle section of the book contains some discussion of barware, equipment, and a number of recipes for bitters themselves. There are perhaps a half-dozen recipes, each with a complex list of unusual ingredients (cassia? wild cherry bark?) and an alchemical creation process (store in dark place. shake daily. repeat for two weeks. filter. boil.).

Over the past few days, I’ve motored around LA collecting the ingredients and materials needed to make a couple of these recipes. I also cut and dried some orange peels (they're downstage center in the photo).  Here’s everything, nicely laid out and ready to get made:

Bet you can't identify everything!

I chose two recipes to start with: Charred Cedar Bitters and Coffee and Pecan Bitters.  The basic process to make each is basically the same: combine ingredients and booze, let sit, shake daily, filter, boil, refilter, skim. Today, we combine ingredients.

The Book

I ran into some trouble yesterday when the shop I went to for herbs didn't have wild cherry bark. This was the second shop I tried, so I punted and thought I'd combine a few different herbs as a substitution.

This morning, I got up early to fire up the grill and char the cedar planks. Once those were cooled, I scraped off the ash and broke them into pieces. Into the jars went spices, herbs, peels, wood, beans, nibs, and nuts. Then, the bourbon!  You need to add a high-proof bourbon so that it can soak up the flavor without losing too much potency.

Here are the jars, ready to go:

So, moving forward, I have two concerns.  The first is that the cedar chips are not fully immersed in the whiskey.  In fact, I've had to triple the suggested amount of whiskey in the cedar chips jar, and there's still a lot of wood sticking up. I may go back after a few days and cut the wood smaller so that it can be fully immersed in the boozy boozy goodness.  The second is whether the bitters will be useful without the wild cherry bark (my guess is it will).  Stay tuned!