Book Review: Fire Water
If you liked Alt Whiskeys, you’ll love Fire Water, Darek Bell’s follow-up tome on the intricacies of craft distilling.
While Alt Whiskeys focused mainly on the impact of using different grains in your whiskey mash, here the Corsair Distillery founder takes a look at how smoke can impact craft whiskeymaking. This isn’t just a lark. For this book, Bell experimented with over 80 different fuel sources to see how different types of woods, roots, and herbs would impact the finished, distilled product. Curious how avocado wood might make your whiskey taste? It’s in here. Persimmon tree wood? Cloves? Mugwort? Yohimbe? Chopped up, used bourbon barrels? All in here.
As with Alt Whiskeys, the actual utility of this book is extremely limited, as home distillation is totally illegal. That said, it’s still a ton of fun to flip through for kicks. If you’re a fan of peaty Scotch, Fire Water hints at the tantalizing promise that smoked American whiskeys might be arriving in short order. (In fact, some are already here, like Lost Spirits Leviathan, Corsair’s own Triple Smoke, and High West Campfire.)
And if you decide to go ahead and make your own smoky moonshine in your backyard, be sure to let us know what kind of wood you decided to use.
A- / $27 / [BUY IT FROM AMAZON]
Fire Water
$27
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Firewater sounds pretty good. I had major surgery 2 1/2 weeks ago on my back and it would be extra painkiller. Of course I couldn’t mix it with Hydrocordone and valium but I can wait until I get off those 2 and then keep the pain down to a minimum.