Spirits | United States | Matchbook Distilling | Late Embers Sunchoke and Honey Spirit

Late Embers Sunchoke and Honey Spirit

NOTES

Late Embers introduction by Leslie of Matchbook Distilling.

- When the world met mezcal, it fell in love. Vodkas, gins, whiskeys, brandies.. we had experienced a world of beautiful flavors, clean and definitive. Whiskey tasted like cereal, occasionally peat. Apple brandy like apples. Gin like juniper and botanicals. Vodka; alcohol and cream.

And then we met mezcal. And we tasted smoke, earth, florals and fruit. And we got into Jamaican Rum, for the fruity, funky, earthy. And suddenly, nothing was off limits. We wanted to taste everything. It was an awakening.

Sugar cane is a tall grass. Agave a giant succulent. What else could we make spirits from and what flavors were waiting to be discovered, built, harnessed and bottled?! This is the drive for our constant R+D, our passion for biodiversity and our commitment to farms that steward soil.

 Late Embers – Smoked Sunchoke & Honey Spirit. Sunchokes, or *Jerusalem Artichoke, are knotty root vegetables (tubers) that grow on the rhizome (horizontally growing underground stem) of a type of sunflower. Sunchokes are particularly suited to growing well here in the North East. 

 Sunchokes are similar to agave in that they are comprised of fructose (fruit sugar) chains called inulin. Yeast (and humans) can’t metabolize inulin as it is. The sugars need to be unbound, and this is accomplished through a process called *hydrolysis, or more simply put, roasting.

 In Oaxaca, the home of Mezcal, agave hearts are smoked, roasted and baked in giant pits with hot rocks. The agave hearts steam, breaking down the inulin - and there we have hydrolysis.

 The team at Matchbook, inspired by this process, built up a fire in their pit and began roasting 1800 lbs of locally grown, organic sunchokes. For the fermentation, inulinase (an enzyme grown by aspergillus or koji in a lab) was added to help finish the job of breaking up the fructose chains, making sure all available sugar was in fact available.  With the addition of water, local honey + champagne yeast, the fermentation began.

 Ferment lasted a week before being transferred to the still where it was run through a pot and column with the spirit collected right into glass demijohns where it rested until final bottling.

The spirit is full - it’s smoky and earthy with notes of pear, black pepper + rose rounded out by the smell of earth, concrete and grass after rainfall and freshly chopped wood.