Whisky Party

The Fourth of July is over and, as is our yearly custom, the Whisky Party crew and friends traveled to upstate New York to celebrate our nation’s B-day in a previously run-down, now under renovation, house along the Delaware River.  As promised, I spent part of my holiday weekend attempting to infuse a bottle of Buffalo Trace bourbon with bacon. Bacon + Bourbon = pure, patriotic American goodness, right?

Here’s a quick rundown on the experiment, what was good, and what I’d do differently next time around.  If this is your first time reading about this, I’d advise you to check out this (very) short video, which was the inspiration for this experiment.

The Bacon

First up was cooking the bacon.  Infusing a bottle of bourbon requires a few ounces of rendered bacon fat, which is what you get after cooking a whole slab of pig in a pan.  So on Friday morning, I got up and cooked a bacon and eggs breakfast for the crew.  In the picture above, you can see me guarding a large iron pan to fry up a  slab of pork, producing a goodly amount of rendered fat.

Once the bacon was cooked, breakfast eaten, and the fat cooled down a bit, I attempted to infuse my bottle of Buffalo Trace.  Unfortunately, I hit a snag.  As I said, the house is currently under renovation and lacking in some of the usual amenities, including any large glassware that could hold a full bottle of bourbon plus a few ounces of bacon fat.  You can’t just pour the bacon into the bottle because 1. it won’t fit in an already full bottle, and 2. because the shape of the bottle (ie the “bottleneck”) would make the filtration process difficult if not impossible.

Necessity is the mother of invention (or rather, desperate times call for desperate measures), and my solution was to dump the entire bottle of bourbon into the frying pan and seal it up with some aluminum foil.  Obviously, this is less than ideal since it puts the bourbon in contact with metal for a relatively long period of time, and the imperfect aluminum seal lets in a lot of air, but I didn’t really have much of a choice.  For the record, I do not recommend that people repeat this process.

Problem solved (kind of), we all went canoeing on the Delaware and left our bourbon bacon to get its infusion on for a good five or six hours.

Next up is some home-brew chill filtration.  Once the bourbon is infused you have to get all the grease/fat (and in this case, gristle) out of it.  The best way is to stick the whole thing in the freezer.  As the temperature drops, the fats start to leach out of the bourbon congeal on the surface.  This is essentially what whisky producers do when they chill-filter their whiskies.  In this instance, I left the bourbon in the freezer for somewhere around an hour (it’s hard to tell when you’ve been out canoeing and drinking all day).

Home Chill-Filtration

I don’t have a picture, but let me tell you that the bourbon coming out of the freezer is foul.  The grease at this point is a thick white coating on the surface and it reeks like you wouldn’t believe.  It’s not for the faint of heart or stomach.  A fair amount of this can be scooped out with a spoon at this point, but to get rid of the rest you need to run your whisky through coffee filters or some other fine strainer.  I ran my bourbon through the filters three times to get rid of as much fat as I could.

Next up is re-bottling.  Again, I’d recommend using a glass pitcher or measuring cup, two things that were not at my disposal.  Once again I had to resort to metal.  I dumped the filtered bourbon into an empty, clean coffee pot and then poured that back into the bottle.  Thanks to evaporation during the infusion process and loss of whiskey during the filtration process, the “Angel’s Share” turned out to be quite large.  I estimate we lost about 20 – 25% of the bottle in the process.  This could probably be reduced using better methods, but I’ll get into that in a minute.  Now for some tasting notes.

The Angel's Share

Did the bourbon taste like bacon?  Yes it did.  In particular, there was a heavy bacon smell on the nose.  Unfortunately, it also retained a little bit of the rancid smell from the grease that was evident during the filtration process.  On the palate, the bourbon was thick and oily. Combined with the natural sweetness of the bourbon, many of my fellow vacationers thought it tasted a bit like maple syrup.  Consensus also said that the drink was far too heavy for a hot July afternoon.  All of us drank it neat, but it probably could have used some ice.  I don’t think anyone had more than one or two glasses, and we left well over half a bottle on the house bar, where it awaits our return next year.

What would I do differently, given the chance?

1. Make sure you have suitable glassware for storage during the infusion process, and make sure that you seal the container up tight to prevent evaporation, particularly on a hot day.
2. One hour in the freezer was not enough.  I think that the thick, oily character was due to the fact that we did not leach enough of the fats and oils out of the bourbon after infusion.  More time in the freezer would leach out more of those fats and create a cleaner, lighter consistency.  It might have also removed some of the rancid character from the nose.
3. Both of these together would surely reduce the Angel’s Share.

On the whole, it was a fun experiment.  If I ever find myself with a spare bottle of bourbon (I’m not normally a big bourbon enthusiast), I’ll probably give it another try to see if my advice does produce a better quality product.

Pass the Bacon (Bourbon)

Related posts:

1. Tales from the Cask: The Tuthilltown Distillery Tour & Tasting