The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (14 page)

By the time American distillers were applying to use surplus potatoes for their whiskey blends in 1946, vodka was poised for a comeback. The troops returning home from Europe had done a little drinking in foreign lands. They were ready to try something new. With the postwar prosperity came a new era in cocktail drinking. Mixed drinks like the Moscow Mule and the Bloody Mary won over drinkers who liked vodka as a neutral, all-purpose mixer. Whether it was made of grain or potatoes didn't matter so much. During the last half of the twentieth century, vodka became the spirit of choice for cocktails.

Now potato vodka is getting another boost from foodies' enthusiasm for artisanal vegetables. Chopin, a Polish potato vodka launched in North America in 1997, quickly became a popular premium brand. Many other Polish vodkas followed suit. Craft distillers in Idaho, New York, British Columbia, and England are selecting specific potato varieties the way a winemaker chooses a grape and rolling out their own locally made vodkas.

But does the variety of potato really make a difference? There's not much consensus among distillers on this point. Potato vodkas have what is described as an oily, full-bodied taste as compared to grain vodkas, but whether you can taste the Russet Burbank or the Yukon Gold is between you and your palate.

Tyler Schramm of Pemberton Distillery in British Columbia uses a blend of five potato varieties, but he selects them more for their starch content than flavor. “I did my master's thesis on potato distillation,” he said, “and I tried single-variety distillations. Our vodka is a sipping vodka, so it's meant to have some flavor. But there is no flavor difference from one potato variety to the next that anyone could really pick out.” Of greater importance to him is environmental stewardship and the distiller's traditional role in putting otherwise unusable food to use. A single bottle of his Schramm vodka requires fifteen pounds of potatoes, so he only wants to take the part of the crop that could not go to feed people. To do that, he purchases from organic farmers and asks for misshapen or oddly sized potatoes that the farmer would not otherwise be able to sell.
He believes that the climate in British Columbia also works to his advantage: “Unlike grains, potatoes do not store well,” he said. “We can do this in our cold climate, but it won't work everywhere.”

Karlsson's Gold vodka, made in Sweden, is distilled from a carefully chosen blend of seven varieties: Celine, Gammel Svensk Röd, Hamlet, Marine, Princess, Sankta Thora, and Solist. The vodka is distilled only once and bottled with minimal filtration, so that the flavor of the potatoes comes through. Master blender Börje Karlsson, who also created Absolut, believes he has produced a vodka that should be savored on its own. “Just drink it as it is,” he said forcefully in an interview. “If you don't like it, don't drink it.” In fact, their signature drink, the Black Gold, is surely inspired by a baked potato. All it needs is a little butter.

RICE

Oryza sativa
var.
japonica

poaceae (grass family)

F
or such an ancient and important plant, rice has not figured prominently in the tastes of American drinkers. In 1896, the
New York Times
called sake a “vile rice wine” and said that it had a “markedly poisonous effect” on native Hawaiians, who were choosing it over “less unwholesome California wines.”

Even today, we tend to think of sake as a miserable hot, sour, yeasty drink we once tasted at the urging of an aunt who took us to a Japanese restaurant in Kansas City. But making a decision about sake based on a bad memory of that cheap, low-grade
futsu-shu
would be like judging wine based on a jug of Boone's Farm. In fact, sake is as diverse and interesting as wine, with an even longer history. And just as the grape is made into an endless parade of spirits, rice has been put to use in a wide range of alcoholic beverages around the world. It turns up in Budweiser, it's an ingredient in premium vodkas, and its surprisingly floral essence is captured in Japanese
shochu.

Evidence uncovered by both archeologists and molecular geneticists points to China's Yangtze Valley as the origin of all varieties of rice grown around the world. It was domesticated there between eight thousand and nine thousand years ago. Making some sort of drink out of it was clearly the first order of business: archeologist Patrick McGovern found evidence of an eight-thousand-year-old brew of rice, fruit, and honey at the Jiahu site in Henan Province. (He worked with Dogfish Head brewery to re-create the brew, which they named Chateau Jiahu.) It would take centuries of trial-and-error to develop the intricate process used to create modern sake, but those early rice wines were headed in that direction.

But first, rice diversified and spread around the world. It is a water-loving grass that reaches up to sixteen feet in flooded fields. However, it does not have to grow in standing water. Its peculiar method of cultivation in rice paddies probably came about when people noticed healthy rice plants growing in flooded fields during the monsoon season. The plants just happen to have a well-developed system of airways that carry oxygen from the tip of the leaves down to the roots, just like aquatic plants do. Without this, they would rot and die during a flood. But unlike aquatic plants, they can grow in regular soil as well.

Growing rice in flooded fields turned out to be a useful strategy for early farmers throughout Asia and India. Low-lying areas prone to flooding were useless for any other crop but perfect for rice. The flooded fields were blissfully weed-free, since terrestrial weeds are incapable of living in standing water whereas the aquatic varieties cannot survive when the floods recede.

Rice is wind-pollinated and wildly diverse; over millennia, new varieties have been selected not just for their flavor and size but also for their ability to tolerate specific soil types and water levels and for the extent to which the grains cling to the stalk after they are ripe so they can be harvested. There are over 110,000 different varieties of rice around the world—and this does not include so-called wild rice,
Zizania
spp., a related grass native to North America and Asia. For the purposes of making alcohol, just a few specialized varieties of
Oryza sativa
var.
japonica
take center stage. But the rice is only part of the story. To understand how rice becomes a drink like sake, you have to understand the mold.

As with any grain, fermentation cannot begin until the starches have been converted to sugar. This can happen all by itself by getting the grain wet, which encourages enzymes to turn starch to sugar to feed the emerging seedling. Brewers could speed this process up with malted barley, which possesses abundant levels of those
enzymes. But Asian cultures found other ways to do it. The Japanese method is just one example, but it's the best known. First, the rice is first milled to remove some of the outer coating, called the bran. The bare, brown grains have to be carefully polished to strip the bran away without crushing the rice. Leaving each grain intact is tricky: corn, oats, wheat, and other grains are often milled and crushed at the same time to make meal or flour, so it takes a different approach to mill rice without breaking it at the same time.

The technology used to polish rice has changed little over the centuries. Although the equipment is more sophisticated, it still involves passing grains of rice across an abrasive stone hundreds of times to grind away the outer coating, leaving only a pristine, white kernel of starch. The only difference is that today's machines have more endurance than human-powered mills. A modern brewery might polish its rice for four days straight, resulting in a remarkably smooth and even removal of the bran. The quality of sake is thought to be vastly better today than it was a hundred years ago; sophisticated milling technology gets most of the credit.

The variety is also important, just as the grape variety is to wine making. In good sake rice, the nutrients are not distributed throughout the grain. Instead, it has a kernel of pure starch inside and nutrients on the outside, which means that it can be more easily polished away. Yamada Nishiki is the best-known high-end rice variety for sake brewing; it was bred in the 1930s from two older strains of sake rice and is considered a full, round, mellow-flavored rice. Other rice varieties include Omachi, prized for its wild herb and floral flavors, the cold-tolerant Miyama Nishiki, and Gohyakumangoku, which was developed in the 1950s for lighter, machine-made sakes. On the West Coast, the ubiquitous Calrose rice, developed in California in 1948, is used by Sake One, a brewery just outside Portland, and other American sake makers.

Even more important than the variety of rice is the extent to which it is polished. This is the way to judge a good sake; the finest styles are made of rice that has been polished to half its original size. This gives the mold—which we'll get to in a second—less protein, oils, and nutrients to contend with. It can go straight to the starchy core of the rice and do its work.

The polished rice is washed, soaked in water, and sometimes steamed, all of which helps increase the moisture content. At that point it's taken into a room that resembles a Japanese sauna—warm, cedar-lined, and extremely dry. The damp rice is spread out in an enormous bed, and there it meets the mold, a species of fungus called koji,
Aspergillus oryzae.
Koji was domesticated in China about three thousand years ago; it traveled to Japan a thousand years later. Like
Saccharomyces cerevisiae,
the yeast used in the West for fermentation and bread making, koji is an entirely domesticated creature now. In addition to its role in sake production, koji is used to ferment tofu, soy sauce, and vinegar, making it a sort of staple microorganism in Japanese cuisine.

The koji mold spores are sprayed on top of the bed of damp rice. Normally mold would simply grow on the surface—picture a moldy loaf of bread—but the dry atmosphere forces the mold to grow into the bed of rice, and into each kernel of rice, to seek the moisture it needs to survive. There, inside that damp, starchy bit of grain, it releases the enzymes that break starch apart and turn it into sugar.