Beyond Dry January You're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle The Binny's Podcast. It's Lexi, and who else do we have here today? I'm Roger. I work in beer. I'm Dan. I work in spirits. I'm Chris. I do wine-related things. So, dry January just ended, but that doesn't mean we can't keep the dry motif going, right? Well, it never started for me. I work with the Whiskey Hotline, so it was a pretty damp January. Damp? Mine was pertinere soaked. I mean, it is like the darkest, coldest month of the year. It's like, what a time to not have a libation at the end of the day. Yeah, right? Yeah. I feel like it never would have existed if it weren't for everyone's New Year's resolutions. Like, two of the most common are, I'm going to drink less and I'm going to eat better. So, it's just like, oh, let's abstain from alcohol. But to your point, during the worst month, arguably the worst, February is right on its heels. This is why countries close to the Arctic Circle have very low rates of drinking. That's true. Good point. Fair point. We made it past Blue Monday. That was like last week. What's Blue Monday? The most depressing day of the year. A big part of it is the whole like people breaking their resolutions. Oh, gotcha. By the third Monday in January, a lot of people have given up. Originally, we were just going to do this as a gas, right? Like as we misinterpreted the meaning of dry January, and we thought it meant what's your favorite dry drinks to drink during January. I mean, that's pretty fun. In the spirit of that slash, sure, it's February now and we like dry things. Yeah. Thank you. So yeah, we have beer, wine, and cocktails today. I think if we're going to do a no drinking month, I think it needs to be like April. What about Easter? That makes more sense. I mean, you've already got a bunch of people doing Lent, right? Why don't piggyback on that? Although it changes every year. Yeah. Yeah. When you're stuck inside, I mean, those bottles get looming large in the corner. They start talking to you. Drink me, Roger. You can have just a little bit. You know I've been sitting here in your beer cellar for two years. What are you waiting for? I'm an avid winter beer drinker. It's like the time I drink the most beer and there's something about it being freezing cold out and having a big rich beer. It's just magic. Absolutely. Certain styles. Yeah, absolutely. What's better than when you brave the cold this time of year and then end up at just a bar and it's just warm and you're just getting drinks served to you? Even during the day, it's nice. Maybe the stone was falling. Yeah. You're inside. You walk to the neighborhood bar. You're having some beers. Some cozy day drinking. Drinking next to a fireplace? Very fun. Yeah, exactly. The best thing in the world. You can't do that in July. Yeah, you can do it next to like a campfire at night, which anytime you're next to fire drinking, it's okay as long as it's not the Great Chicago Fire or Peshtigo or something like that. Although I wasn't there or something. Well, yeah, it might have been a hoot. Who knows? Chris dropping some knowledge that you're mentioning the Peshtego Fire. Well, yeah. I've been to the Peshtego Fire Museum where I've got the recipe for vinegar pie. Ew. I'm going to say, I've known you for quite a while, Roger, and nothing you just said surprised me at all. No, not at all. Was that after you went to the Mustard Museum? No, different trip. They're different areas. Yeah, they are. I did just eat some mustard last night from the Mustard Museum. The Mustard Museum is real? A grand champion. It sure is. It's in Middleton, Wisconsin. I haven't been there since it was in Mount Horeb, though. Ah. It's right across from the Capitol Brewery. Yeah. Speaking of nice winter beers, remember those big box at the Capitol? Oh, yeah, and their winter skull. Yeah. It was fun, too. That's a great beer. Okay. Anyway, we digressed into an entire new universe. Maybe one of the things that we should start with is, and I think this comes up the most in wine, we joke all the time around New Year's Eve when people walk into the store and go, what's a dryer? Brut or extra dry? Right. I think a lot of people kind of don't understand the concept of dry, so maybe that would be a good stepping off point. Very true, and I've got something in the wine department here that's going to allow us to talk about that a little bit, so that's fortuitous. Cool. Yay, let's do it. Can I start with you? 5:05 Dry Champagne Styles Oh, yeah, sure. Do you want to start with that? Yeah. Why not? All right. Why not? Why not? I'm going to open a bottle of champagne. So what we have here is champagne, of course. This is Laherte Freres, and this is a Blanc de Blanc, so 100 percent Chardonnay, non-vintage. And the reason we're drinking it is because, just like Roger said, there are a bunch of different champagne styles, and they can be a little confusing. And this is a more modern take on champagne, in which there is no added sugar. Very unusual for champagne, historically, and this is part of the reason why the naming is so confusing. Back in the old days, there used to be a lot of sugar added to champagne. They were quite sweet, especially on the export market, going to Russia, Britain. Really, if you drank something now with the amount of sugar that they used to put in, you'd be quite shocked. Very, very sweet. Succavasa. Yeah. So we've been ticking our way down in dryness over the years. So a really sweet champagne is known as Dew, and that has over 40 grams per liter of sugar. Whoa. Yeah. I'm sorry. Did I say 40? 50. 50 grams per liter. You go down a demi sac and then sac or what we call extra dry, which is confusing. But as they were naming them, this is extra dry. But a lot of people think of extra dry as kind of a sweeter version because it does have a little sweetness to it, not as much as demi sac. And then you get down to brut, which had become the standard. Now there's still quite a fair amount of sugar in a brut champagne. When you make champagne, the last thing you do is disgorge the champagne. So it's fermented for a second time in the bottle to create bubbles, the magic of champagne. But if you want it to be clear and bright, you have to get rid of the yeast that was doing all that work. So just like Roger's always talking about bottle-conditioned beers, where they don't disgorge and leave the sediment in, so you'll see that in your beer, here they do a process called riddling, which is basically just shaking and turning the bottles until the yeast settles in the neck of the bottle, and then they freeze that yeast plug and pop it out. When you do that, you obviously have some room left in the bottle because you just knocked some wine out. And what they do is they top it up with a little wine that has the dosagen in it, or the sugar, and that sets the style. So you can take the same base wine and make a Brut or a Demisac or whatever you want. You just set the style at the very end. It's called the Liqueur d'Expedition. So it's going out, it's leaving the winery, it's going on expedition. It's peg to peg. Yeah. So it's all about the finishing. Yeah. So the champagne style is set at the very, very end. And to accomplish a balanced champagne, the grapes are picked really, really early. So there's not that much sugar in them. A lot of times the potential alcohol is like in the 9% range. And then you ratchet it up through more than one fermentation, right? But in recent years, they've been going down and down to the point where we got extra Brut. So Brut can have 6 to 12 liters of sugar per liter, 6 to 12 grams per liter. And extra Brut is under 6. And Brut Nature, Brut Zero, any number of different iterations of this same saying, there's no added dosage. And it can have up to 3 grams per liter of natural sugar. So generally, they're picking the grapes a little riper. Ironically, the wines are bone dry, but sometimes you're getting a little more ripeness in the fruitiness of the wine. And all of this is an artifact of the northerly clime of champagne, hard to ripen grapes fully there. Although they do it, you can buy a still red wine from champagne, but usually not always made in every vintage. But with climate change, it's getting easier and easier to make brute natures that don't taste so searingly austere that you feel like you're going to lose your mind, just like a mineral laser beam slicing across your tongue. There's some fruit to it. Here is one. What do you think? It's great. It's really nice. It's like fresh baked bread on the nose. Really nice pear notes. Yeah. So you get, I think, fruit. But if we could compare this to, say, a commercial Brute like Vuv Clicquot, which is considered a dry style, but they're working probably at right around the maximum of 10 to 12 grams per liter, I would guess. It would taste sweet next to this. It definitely would, even though if you drank it without comparison, you'd say, yeah, dry champagne. So that's number one. What's this on the shelf for? This is 54.99. By the way, Laherte, small grower, been around for seven generations, family owned. They own 11 hectares of vineyard. This comes from their own holding south of Epernay, major area there. They, however, are not any longer technically considered a grower because maybe 10, 12 years ago, they started working with some other growers and they buy about four hectares, they contract for about four hectares of additional grapes. So they get immediately taken out of what's known as the RM category or Riquel Tente, Manipule Tente, the grower champagne. And you buy any grapes, you get chucked into the Negocéant Manipule Tente box, which they share with all the giant houses like Vuclico, Moet, et cetera, but small. So this style wasn't even codified until 1996. So this was, I mean, that's getting to be a while ago now, but modern style of champagne, but it's all the rage these days. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty modern though. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I love that. I find that champagne is one of those things that people really should sample around when we do our big champagne gala tastings. Like it's a must attend because there's so much variance within the category, especially for someone like me that just casually tries it every once and again. If you think it's not really your thing or you've had certain ones you loved and certain ones you didn't, and that kind of keeps you away from the category, I get it, but take advantage of that. I think some of the coolest things Binny's does. Yeah, the champagne galas are nuts. You have an opportunity to try so many different things. You're right, Roger, there are three main grape varieties in champagne. They can be vinified completely alone and put into a bottle of Blanc de Blanc, like this is 100% Chardonnay, and there are four more lesser known varietals that can be used. If you have 100% Pinot Meunier, tends to be a lot fruitier, Chardonnay delivers minerality, intensity, cut, Pinot Noir tends to be weighty and heavier, and then you add in all the styles you can be, and the house styles, there's tons of variation. Great, thanks for sharing. What do we got next? 13:13 Unexpected Dry Wines Okay. So along these lines, so I'm trying to point out some wines that may cause a little cognitive dissonance in people's minds because they immediately associate certain names with sweetness. My whole thrust here is things that you might think are going to be sweet but aren't. So this is a dry muscat. If you think about most iterations of muscat that we sell most frequently, here they're like Moscato d'Asti, the sweet, slightly fizzy Italian version. Or there might be dessert muscat, Muscatel from Sherry or something. Most of them are associated with sweetness. This is made by a winery called Zind Humbrecht in Alsace. Great producer, organic, biodynamic, owns a lot of Grand Cru vineyards. This is their entry level muscat and it is vinified, totally dry. There's one gram per liter of sugar here. Talk about cognitive dissonance. It smells like pure honey. Right. And then it's just like dry and like citrusy and acidic. Exactly. So that's the thing. Muscat is famous as an aromatic grape. It's floral, it can be honeyed, it resonates like rose petals and things like that. Yeah, the florality is awesome. So, you know, immediately you smell it and your brain says, prepare for something sweet, but this is dry as can be. What do you think, Lexi? It's kind of, maybe this isn't the right word, but kind of funky to me, kind of fun way. Maybe it's just like the minerality and the floral kind of go back and forth. I don't know, I'm not totally sure why, but I like it. Maybe you're getting some of that diesel intrigue. Yeah, right. It's like that kind of gooseberry petrol. Oh, Mary snuck it in. Anyway, that's dry muscat from a great producer. And interestingly, the muscat family is one of the oldest in great families, so it's very much branched. There are just tons and tons of different kinds. Here they're using probably the most prestigious kind, which is known in some circles as muscat de sas, but also muscat apetit gran. So this is like it's there's a lot going on, you know, floral honey palettes, just like acid and it's dry and it's delicious. But it's like if I had this bottle at home, it would be would take everything I could do to not pour this into a giant glass. Yeah, drinkable on top of everything else. And who's going to stop you then? Well, my wife usually. But it also kind of tastes like one of those wines to me that you pop in the freezer just before you're ready. Which, sorry, might be a little crazy, but I like really, really, really cold on a hot day in the summer. Slush it up. Like it might be really good. It's refreshing. It's interesting that keeps you coming back, you know, and wanting more. And I think as you drink this bottle, you keep getting new stuff off it. Yeah. And what is this on the shelf? $32.99. Nice. You got one more bottle over there, I see. I do. And sticking with this theme, I've got a absolutely bone dry sherry here. So again, people often hear sherry and they think it's going to be sweet. And there is sweetness to sherry. And interestingly, most people would not make this connection because it's not really the same. But when sherry is sweet, it's sweetened on the back end. A lot of fortified wines are sweetened in a process where they actually stop the fermentation by adding alcohol and killing the yeast. So if you're thinking about port or something like that, they ferment the juice to about 5% alcohol and then they put in what's known as aguardiente or neutral grape spirit. Basically, it's an aged brandy. Here, any sweetness is being added on the back end. It's usually by blending in Pedro Jimenez, which is a very, very rich. In sherry proper, it's almost always a rich sweet wine. Although neighboring area grows only basically Pedro Jimenez and makes all the sherry styles including Fino like this one with it and it's bone dry. There's like star anise and ginger. I get honey on this one for sure. Almonds, almonds for sure. Give me like Marcona almonds, some Manchego cheese, some fig jam or something. Was that you that brought that giant jar of honey with almonds in it? Yeah, I brought that. Yeah, because I didn't know what to bring for ice cream social day. That's what this is reminding me of. So again, yeah, the nose is kind of like a little head fake. You smell that honey and those nuts and all of that and you think, hmm, is this going to be sweet? No. Not even close. There's not even a hint of sweetness. I don't know. This is about a gram per liter too. That's why these are so popular with tapas because think of the palate cleansing ability of this. It's just going to be like an eraser for. And it just plays with so many things that can be on a charcuterie board or... We've already said nuts and even like a... Very rich cheeses, very rich. Like a dark fruit jam or dried dark fruits and all of these things. I want to spritz it. Yeah, you can do that. So yeah, that's a Fino from Valdespina. The interesting thing about this, and you don't see this a lot, this is single vineyard from a high elevation vineyard and it's 100% Palamino Fino, which is the typical grape of sherry. Lexi, you love mix and drinks. This is a very old school turn of the century cocktails. They would do like floaters of sherry in some cocktails. And this kind of intrigue of this, putting just a little je ne sais quoi to a cocktail with a little bit of a Fino sherry floater. Yeah. It's very unique in that this is one of these biologically aged wines. So as this ages in barrel, they leave head space and most wines or anything you're ageing in barrel, you want to top it up to keep it from oxidizing. Here they leave space so that something called the floor or the flower can grow, which is kind of a head of yeast. What happens in Fino in particular, that head prevents oxidation, but you got to have that room to grow and promotes something called acid aldehyde, which is kind of an in-between stage between acid and alcohol. These are very what would be known as very aldehydeic wines, and they present that kind of tang, but it's not straight acidity per se, it's this aldehyde, and that gives you a lot of these interesting aromas. Yeah, some of the apple-y notes. For sure. You can go beyond that if you let the floor die on a fino, and then age it oxidatively after the wine itself is exposed to oxygen, then you get into amontillado territory, so fino will become an amontillado if the floor dies. Isn't it Paulo Cortado first? Paulo Cortado is when the floor dies really early. Amontillado has longer biological aging. Paulo Cortado used to be considered like, oh my God, it's an accident, a happy accident, and they were rare. Now, they can make it happen, of course. It's considered a hybrid between oloroso, which is 100 percent oxidative aging, and amontillado, which is part biological, part oxidative. Sherry, some of the best values in wine. Totally underappreciated, super cool flavors. Very underappreciated. Speaking of which, what size bottle is this? 375. 375? Oh, yeah. Half size bottle. Yeah. For a world-class example of Fino, we're talking 1499. This is why you shop the undervalued territory in our stores. It's amazing. Also a great option to deglaze your onions if you're making French onion soup. Oh, yeah. I love it. That's what I use it for. When I'm not drinking it. I find that to be very good. I also occasionally use vermouth to deglaze. 22:03 Classic Dry Cocktails Speaking of Vermouth, when you think dry, the first place my brain goes is a dry martini. So we've tried a million martinis on this podcast in my head, but I don't remember the last time we tried a dry one. I think we tried dirty ones last time, right? We did a really dirty martini for Thanksgiving. That's probably the last time. Yeah. So we'll try a dry one. See what we think. How does everybody define dry martini? It would be my first question because- A martini that actually uses vermouth, which for about 20 years stopped happening when you would go out. They would just show the bottle to the mixing glass. Chris knows my method, which is you get your gin cold and then you take a light and shine it through your bottle of vermouth into the cocktail. That's all it needs. I figure that there may be some quantum entanglement between vermouth and gin molecules, so it's already in there. I think we've established, but for first-time listeners or just for review, vermouth is misunderstood by a lot of people. I think unfortunately, a lot of people's exposure to vermouth is either with one that is not the best example of the category or even worse, one that's probably that and one that has not been stored properly. Yeah, it's usually both. Somebody pulls a three-year-old open bottle of dry, something cheap from under their bar and goes, okay, I'll mix a martini for you. So yeah, I think that that's one of the, we've proven over the years having tasted through these, that there is vermouths that are incredible, ones that you would want to just sip as an aperitif from a glass, as is, or maybe drink on the rocks with a But I mean, the whole aperitif culture in Italy is largely, I mean, now it's about spritzes, but vermouth. I also, if you're ever trying to do like a damp January or trying to just drink a little bit less, to do like a highball with Dolan Blanc, it's like a Blanc vermouth with a lemon is just, it's magic right before a meal. Totally agree. I think that's something that is woefully underappreciated is things like, I mean, we were mentioned that when Lexi made its amazing cocktail with Lillet, so like another aromatized wine. There's these options with these things that are lesser known that are fantastic. They're not super high in alcohol. They take really well to mixers like nice tonics and soda waters. But again, it's just so paramount that once you open these bottles, you should write a date on the back. Some purveyors even put a little space that encourages you. It says like date open and keep it in the fridge. And again, it's not going to hurt you. You probably unwittingly have drank multiple year old vermouth at someone's house or a bar, but it just totally changes. It gets flat, not like it's bubbling, but I mean the flavors get muted and flat and more oxidative. And it's just not going to be as beautiful as it was when it was fresh. And there's so many options now in our stores of just half bottles of vermouth. So if you're not blowing through a fifth of vermouth, you know, every month, because you're drinking that many martinis, like get a half sized bottle. You know, they're very true. Usually a pretty good value. You're talking you can get good vermouth in a 375 for, you know, plus or minus, you know, 10 bucks. Yeah, 10 to 15 dollars. 8 to 15 bucks you can get. Really good vermouth. And again. Yeah, go ahead. Is that a pineapple base? Yeah. Love it. Hey, you know, you got to adapt. It's dry January. One thing that I would say is that when we've tried different vermouths on the podcast, especially with dry ones, some dry ones might not be to your liking. I could see it being a very specific, you know, palette type thing. The herbal character and some dry ones shines through more than if you're using a sweet base. So I know Greg got all hung up on saying that Dolan tasted like what, oregano or something. So I mean, again, it's all just what your palate is going to discern from it. So if you try like Noir le Prat is one that you'll see in a lot of bars. It's a pretty famous, a lot of times people steer towards the French purveyors for dry and Italian for sweet. Like Dan said, you know, we offer these half bottles, like get yourself a couple of different brands. Try them side by side. Can actually be a really fun thing to just make the exact same cocktail, but sub in, you know, use the same gin and then sub out the vermouth and see which one you enjoy better. Yeah, I agree. Even even between the two major French brands like Dolan versus Noir le Prat, the base grapes are different. The grapes are different if you go to Italy. A lot of times, interestingly, most vermouth in Italy is based on Moscato. Also Noir le Prat is a little more oxidative. You know, their process is a little different than Dolan. So like everything is different. The botanicals are different. The other thing too, please, please be making some gin martinis. Hell yeah. You notice we're not talking about a vodka martini. Yeah. And you notice that whenever you order a martini made out of vodka, you should say vodka martini because a martini has gin. Yes. I didn't garnish this guy. Shocking. It actually has some nice citrus to it even without a garnish. Yeah. For drier martini, I go with a twist personally. Yeah. I think we are using Dolan and I do see what Greg says with the oregano, but I think it works really well. I can imagine an olive just based on the aroma and flavor. Yeah. No doubt this resonates in that savory realm. Very nice. Again, Mike, this is also the importance of mixing. I bet if you sat down and tried Dolan plain, you might think, oh, it's too savory. But when you mix with it, then it's great. So if you're one of those people and you might grow to love vermouth so much that you just want to sip on it, there's ones that you might like to sip on and ones you just want to mix with. You were mentioning earlier the Biancos are really good sippers. Yeah. So Lexi, we've got Bombay Sapphire and Dolan dry. What are the proportions that you used? I did a heavy handed two ounce boar of the gin and 0.25 ounces. Of vermouth. Yeah. That's pretty dry. That's very good. Speaking of which, the less vermouth you put in, the drier the martini is, the general rule. And one thing, if you're just starting to drink martinis and you find them too dry, you can just add more vermouth until you get them to the proportion you need. Yeah. There's a historical pattern to how these were made. It used to be quite a bit of vermouth. Equal parts, baby. Yeah. That's how I, in the summertime, especially I'll do ones with even Bianco. I do that too. I do large proportion. My go-to is three to one, honestly. If I'm drinking a martini, most often it's three to one martini, which is a high proportion of vermouth for these days. But if you're making a three ounce drink, it's just think of it in three-quarter ounce increments. Cool. Walk on the wild side, man. Ounce and a half gin, ounce and a half vermouth. Yeah. All right. That's my drink of the summer, summer 2026. There you go. It felt a little missing to not include another dry cocktail. There's a million you can think of, but we're going to try a dry Manhattan next. Excellent. I don't think a lot of people drink these. I recently taught one of our local businesses, bartender, how to make a perfect Manhattan out of aged rum. I taught him how to make it, and he made one, and I've been drinking it ever since. What kind of rum? Diplomatico. It's what they had on hand, and he wanted to move it, and I was thinking about what I wanted, and I didn't really want anything sweet. I'm like, whip me up a perfect Manhattan with rum, and it works really well. It's delicious, and it is so much drier. I mean, it's insane. Even so, a perfect version of a drink that requires vermouth is you split the vermouths half and half, half sweet, half dry. What Lexi is doing is making a dry Manhattan with all dry, which will be even drier. And she's got rye, which is the perfect whiskey for a dry Manhattan, in my opinion. And it's a rye with some proof on it. You want to, at least for me, when I'm making cocktails, I start it 100 proof, just so that the base spirit shines through. Yeah, good rule. I probably said that 16 times on this podcast. This is adult flavors. Look out, Peter Pan syndrome. This is not going to remind you of your lunchbox as a child. Hey, what? Spicy. You know, I always joke about how like rye is, you know, people can't, a lot of people can't handle rye. And they're like, well, why don't you like rye? And I'm like, I don't know. It's too spicy or it's too herbal or it's, you know, it's like adult flavors. Oh, I like to say dole, like the pineapple. Oh, no, I jokingly refer to as like Peter Pan syndrome. Oh, people don't want to ever grow up. They want to stay kids and they like like kid flavors. I was going to go home and do something with like peanut butter and pineapple juice. I mean, you could definitely make this drink spicier. She's using Sazerac, which has a pretty high proportion of corn. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So definitely a Kentucky style, right? I mean, that's the other thing is we said this last time. It's like if you are a bourbon drinker, you are drinking a lot of rye. Yeah, for sure. Just that's just the reality. And that rye really brings a lot of balance to the sweetness that corn brings to the table. And that's that that's the spice. That's a little bit of austerity. And I think it's really important for a good balanced bourbon to have a good dose of rye. And the interesting thing is you can be at 51% corn and you're going to call it bourbon and you flip it over to 51% rye and it's suddenly a rye, right? Right. There ain't that much difference. And that, you know, that said, I mean, a lot of the bourbon, a lot of bourbon is closer to 70 75% corn. Oh, yeah, I am not suggesting that even anybody does that. I don't know. No, there's some. But the other thing that's really cool with rye is you have such a range in mash bills. You do have Kentucky style rye, which are mostly rye and a lot of corn. It has to be mostly rye, obviously, but you've got a lot of corn there. Whereas and then you've got Maryland style rye, you've got Pennsylvania style rye, you've got Monongahele. Now, those are spicy. I'll let you say it. Yeah, because there's usually no corn in most ones. So with rye, you have a lot. I think you have a good amount of variance and not as many bottles to suss through on the shelf. Well, the problem is that I'm going to date myself here. When I started selling rye way back in the day, there were like five, that was it. They had all but disappeared. There was like Rittenhouse, Old Overcoat. Pikesville, maybe. Before this, there wasn't even that. There was Wild Turkey, if you could find it. Maybe Beam. I think Beam and Mothball, theirs too. There weren't many. Yeah. So then when Templeton hit the market, it was kind of like a lot of people's, this is the first rye they'd ever tasted. Because rye got this bad rap as like a bottom shelf, very cheap, hot kind of spirit. Well no wonder it was popular because the rye character was not prominent. So then when it exploded as a category because mixologists got really into it, there were some of these, especially stuff coming out of MGP, there was like huge 95% of rye mashbills. So it's a different, that's like throwing somebody off the end of the pier into the lake. It's not a bourbon with some little extra spice to it. It's like all spice. When you get to that 95.5 level or higher, like some of the stuff from Whistle Pig, there is a thinness to it that is part of the way the spirit turns out because of the rye. There is not that fat sweetness you get from corn when you've got that high of a rye mash bill. One of the reasons that ryes are just so good for cocktails because you control the amount of sweetness and you're already getting the dilution from ice. You're getting, in this case, some vermouth and you're getting Angostura bitters. Even for an old fashion, the best old fashions you'll have are made with rye. Well, a lot of the classic whiskey cocktails, especially out of the Prohibition era, used rye or Canadian whiskey that had high rye, just because that's what was available unless you were bootlegging it. Did you try this? Yes. What do you think? It's got like that, I think the Angostura does a lot more work in a Manhattan than I realized because when I smell it, I'm like, this is just a Manhattan. I can't tell that it's sweet vermouth. And so it's got that richness from the Angostura and spice from the rye. And then you drink it and it's like, because it's a dry vermouth, it's like refreshing. Yeah. Can you even believe how dry the drink tastes despite some sweetness from the whiskey? Right. It's like minerally, it's spicy, it's fresh and refreshing. It's not, I mean, this is 100 miles from a Manhattan made with a richer, like say you're making it with an Antica formula or something. Right. Yeah. It's amazing that it's still called a Manhattan. You could drink this quickly because of how lean it is. Yeah, I think you're spot on. This is refreshing. Maybe like a twist of lemon would just top it off. Yeah. That would be the traditional garnish for this, is a lemon twist. Proportions here, typical Manhattan proportions? Yeah. Two to one? No, then, actually. I did a heavy two again, so like a little bit more than a two, and then I did three-quarters of an ounce, a little less. That's okay. A lot of recipes for this are not typical Manhattan proportions. The vermouth is pulled back a little bit. I tend to be pretty heavy with Ango. I love it, maybe a little too much, but you just got to. I agree with Dan, though. Here it's doing a lot of heavy lifting and it's nice. Well, I think when my first bottle of Angostura I ever bought lasted me like two years, and now I buy the big bottle and it's like three months. That's good. But you're just deglazing pans with it. Yeah, that's it. I do shots of Angostura before bed. I love to do a shot of Angostura bitters. Probably 30 years ago, I went to a bar on Washington Island in Wisconsin right off of Door County and there's an old Prohibition era bar there where they serve shots of Angostura bitters. I've heard of this place. Yeah, it's a historic thing that they served during Prohibition, of course, because that's what they could get. You get a little certificate if you do it. Is that like a $25 shot? I don't know. I mean, it was a long time ago. It's a bottle. It's expensive. It's rumored that the purveyor drank a Pinesworth every day. Whoa. Mad in that. I hate to say I kind of can, but. My sister is also part of that club. She has been there. Nice. Excellent. I made my brother drink a shot of Angostura once because he said his stomach was all messed up and he puked. And then I said. I feel great. And I go, do you feel better? He's like, I guess. God, what's wrong with him? Well, these were great cocktails because like they're, I mean, again, you can have a drink, but you don't feel like it's super heavy or you've had a lot of sugar. So these cocktails are perfect, like keep the resolutions coming and keep it lean. This is a great lesson in the idea of how cocktails are built and how you can swap ingredients out, right? Everything is just one giant branching evolution of cocktail making. And yeah, if you're missing something or have to substitute, you can come up with a really great cocktail. It may be very different from what you set out to make, but try it out. And the more you geek out on cocktails, you realize that half of the names out there are just, this started as a fill in the blank, and then you do this fill in the blank, and it's without this fill in the blank. Yes, the branch in evolution. Very interconnected. Nice job, Lexi, by the way. Those are great. OK. 39:29 Dry Cider and Pilsner Onto beer, dry beer and beer adjacent. All right. So much like what Chris was saying about, you know, stereotypes of certain categories and certain products, you know, I've watched it now for almost two decades. Cider drinking in this country has never really recouped since Prohibition. Kind of told this story before. When you see people swinging the hatchets around during the Prohibition era, they weren't just smashing up barrels of whiskey and beer. They were chopping down apple trees. Our American heritage. Yeah. I mean, Americans made their own hard cider. It was one of the most important things in the founding of our nation. A lot of people's water supply wasn't necessarily safe. So they would, you know, make their own ciders of various strengths. Some were very low in alcohol, and that's kind of thing they would drink in the morning, even giving kids that were pretty young something that was extremely weak. Because again, it was like safer than drinking the water supply sometimes. So we had this rich heritage of making apple cider in this country, and a big part of that is using different types of apples that are more akin because of acidity levels to making great cider. They're not necessarily the kind of apples you would use to eat out of hand, but they're the kind of things that are bitter sharp, tannic, that make beautiful cider. So since about the 2000 or so, there's been a cider renaissance in this country. It's purveyors, especially in apple growing regions, a lot of people in the Pacific Northwest, but then small farmers in places all over the country that are just trying to bring back this heirloom fruit. Even though it's often packaged like beer, cider is wine. So you might even sometimes hear it referred to as apple wine. They do that especially in other countries, in Germany. Apple vine is how they refer to a lot of their ciders. The cider makers always had to deal with that. Then the most pervasive myth that they've had to deal with is that all hard ciders are sweet. Because once they started to come back in popularity, they were launched in about the late 80s, early 90s. Some of the first ones started hitting the market in mass production, and they were geared at like malternative type beverages. Things that were marketed towards people that were drinking things like wine coolers, people that didn't necessarily like the taste of beer, but were looking for something that was in a similar format. You know, you could hold in your hand, drink it. Would that be like your angry orchards? Yeah, so, really who started it were brands like Widers and Woodchuck, and you know, and even those brands over the years have kind of changed a little bit of how they approach cider. So some of their stuff is definitely on the sweeter side, but if you go to one of our stores, we have this massive selection of cider, and there's a cider there for everybody. So we have everything from bone dry to very sweet. You know, this is where the store associate can really come into play and help you find, you know, the type of cider you're looking for. There's plenty of purveyors who market cider specifically as dry. So they can choose when they're fermenting the apple juice, how much residual sugar they want to leave in the beverage. And some of the purveyors will have like a little scale on the back or they might even list the bricks, which without kind of some context might not mean much to you. But I like when they kind of have a sliding scale from dry to sweet. And then they show you, you know, where this product falls on that. So the cider that we're starting with is a locally made cider. This is from Wright B right here in Chicago, readily available at a lot of bars and restaurants. I think they do a nice job. And this is their dry. As an avid drinker of this exact cider, big fan. Big fan. It is bone dry. Yet it has character. Sometimes really dry ciders get pretty neutral in their flavor profile. I get kind of like a peach nectarine kind of thing going on. Certainly. Sometimes really, really dry ones like that are bone dry, can almost have similar to like a dry sherry, like almost an olive-y kind of note, which I don't think this goes quite into that territory. But again, this is why ripey, I think we've actually talked about them on the podcast before, which I didn't pick the semi-dry. But if this is maybe a little too dry for you, they do make a semi-dry, as do several other purveyors. And then sometimes you steer away from some of the, you know, kind of like less expected green apple skin, tar, almost herbal. And you go more into the like floral fruitier honeyed character. This is what I was saying earlier is unlike some really dry ciders, this actually has fruit character to it. You mentioned bitter sharp apples earlier. Some of the sweeter ciders don't even, you know, play in that yard much. So it comes down to apple variety too, like whether it's sweet or dry, how fruity things are going to turn out. Yeah, I think there's some really nice complexity here. And you know, the acidity to a great apple is something that, you know, I've kind of geeked out on apples before. But you know, even a lot of the apple cultivars now, like it's just kind of an arms race for like how sweet you can get things. And sweetness can be awesome as long as you have some acidity to balance that out. So, you know, again, we offer all sorts of different, you know, ciders. And again, maybe like bone bone dry isn't what you're looking for. But there's all sorts of variance. The benefit of dry ciders is that they're typically very low calorie. They're very low carb. Like they can be, if that's something that you're interested in. And then obviously they're gluten free too. So these can be a real nice alternative if you've been doing things like looking at gluten free or gluten reduced beers. Maybe check out some of the dry ciders. They could be a nice thing to try every once in a while. I think refreshing. Well, I think that was like one of the things I saw was when the gluten thing was big, what, seven or eight years ago. That's when you saw this massive expansion on really craft beer adjacent ciders that were packaged and trying to appeal to people that couldn't have gluten. I think we all benefited from it because there's just really awesome cider out there now. Yeah. If you go to a bar that you know isn't going to have maybe the best wine selections, it's going to be something that you're not excited about, but you don't really want a beer. You want something kind of in there. This is always what I will go to as a decent cider, always. In the summertime, these can be fun to make into a tall drink and just add some ice and some sparkling soda or you can even add some tonic, you can add all sorts of stuff, a splash of a spirit you like. A little fruit. Yeah. Yeah. This was like a, it might be because I'm looking at the bottle, but this was like a half a shot of Laird's on ice would be excellent. Well, it's summer. So I'm going to have 10 of them. I'm sitting outside in the summer. So yeah, if you're ever next fall, you know, take a trip to Wisconsin or Northern Michigan during apple harvest and diversity is the beauty of apples. That's where you're going to find Roger. Do they make mead? Is that the B connection or is it just? They have some. They actually have an apiary on there. They're in an old Schwinn factory. And then the roof of their building, they have some beehives. So they do add some honey to that would be like, what a sizer. I used to make, I used to have unlimited access to honey. So I made a lot of different. Nice. All right, so we're gonna finish up here with a beer. I've often jested as, you know, craft lagers are gaining some popularity. A lot of craft breweries, you know, decide that they're gonna make a Pilsner as their lager offering. That's awesome for people that are looking for something with some hop character. When it doesn't work out sometimes for a brewery is when they're making the lager for somebody that doesn't want to drink an IPA, because the Pilsner style is the driest of all the lager beers. So if you are making an American style Pilsner, sure, it doesn't have much hop character. But if you're making a traditional Czech or especially a Northern German style Pilsner, they're dry. They're very lean in their malt bill and then they're aggressively hopped. So it's not uncommon for them to hit around 40 IBUs, which would be pale ale if not some IPA territory. Especially compared to the type of IPAs a lot of people drink now that are hazies, some of those have no hops in the kettle, so their IBUs would be like 10, super low in bitterness. So the one that I wanted you all to try is from Art History. This is called Bauhaus. Of course, a nod to the German art movement and style of art and architecture. The Bauhaus School. This is so good. I had to edit myself. I mean, this is like, do you know when they're going to start packaging this in five-liter kegs? They can. Because holy mother of God, this is a- I bet if you called them. I don't think that will fit in your lunchbox, Dan. Well, you've never seen my lunchbox. This is just, it's refreshing, it's complex, but I could just drink it all day. If I'm just hanging out barbecuing, this is great. If I'm pairing it with numerous types of food, this is a multi-use beer. It's just awesome. Some top-notch local lager, for sure. It's just so good. I get worried with hops and bitterness often, and I would crush a couple of these. Let's say an herbal bitterness rather than a citrus. That's, I think, what I was- that's perfect that you brought that up, because that's what I really wanted to hammer home here, is that this features Tet, which is one of the classic noble German hop varieties. Tet Nang is just one of those hops where it's so different from what the kind of hops that get talked about a lot as of late, are either American-grown cultivars that were selectively bred to produce these very fruit-forward flavors and aromas, so a lot of things that are in the stone fruit, tropical fruit. You know, you hear descriptors like papaya, mango, now you're starting to hear things like specifically fruit candies, like, oh, this reminds me of like peach rings, or, I mean, everything is this bent lately about, you know, fruit. And then some of the really interesting stuff from the Southern Hemisphere, again, a lot of like tropical characteristics, some of the funkier, like diesely, gooseberry, there's some of that weirdness, but still like a lot of tropicality. For hundreds of years, the majority of hops that were grown in places like Hallertau, in the Czech Republic and Zatek, these are grassy and herbal flavoring components. The noble hops. Yeah. I mean, these are old school. Noble refers to the fact that they're grown where they're from, correct? They have like that kind of old school, they're the oldest of the land race varieties and that they're from, yes, the typically, it doesn't like have to be, but like you might have a Saas hop that's grown in Germany. It doesn't have to necessarily be from the Czech Republic, but- Although to be clear, all of these are named from their places of origin. Yes. I was thinking, Roger, that you should introduce a class scale for hops. So this is the aristocracy, but you got to go all the way down to like Lupin proletariat hops. What are the bourgeois hops and what are the- Well, it's funny, there's that one that they called, that was like the Native American hop, and they were kind of joking about that, and they ended up calling it like Neo-Mexicanus, like there was the Zappa variety and stuff, because they were just like wild, non, you know. So yeah. Which is the definition of a land race, by the way. You've used that word, but do people know. These are uncrossed, like naturally occurring cultivars. Yeah. Beautiful beer, just again, like it's very dry, but again, like I wouldn't say like offensively bitter. And again, like some people say they don't like bitter, or they might think they don't like bitter, but then you start to ask them what kind of foods and other things they drink. It's like, you can probably handle some bitterness, or especially like herbal bitterness. So anyone that's drinking Malort, like you can handle a German style Pilsner, like you'll like. That's a good pairing too, is a German Pilsner and some Malort. Well, I would say the proper pairing would be with an Underberg, but Underberg in this beer is phenomenal. But yeah, if you like Amaro. I think they call that the... The German handshake? I was gonna say Hanover or something. The Hanover handshake. I just didn't, I don't have enough tiny little straws to drink Underberg, so. Yeah, it doesn't come out properly. You need to get us some of those super cool, you got the hookup connection with the Underberg people. We all need our own super long stem glasses. Yeah, those are cool. Yeah, their stemware is beautiful. I thought you were gonna want a bandolier. Oh yeah, I could use one of those too, but... I want a bandolier for long stems. That's dangerous. I'll follow Roger around. I always... I always want to decant the Underberg into a shot glass. So most places that are serving... I just decanted straight into my mouth. Foot above your mouth. Shake it. I love the straw technique. It's perfect. One last thing on the beers like this that do highlight such a great herbal hop, you know, just like you use herbs in cooking, this is why I'm always kind of beating the drum on, we need to get back to food and beer pairing. And the beers like this just complement eating. You're eating and drinking going together, and they never should have been divorced in the first place. And, you know, I get it. If you're drinking an IPA that basically tastes like fruit salad, then yeah, you might be difficult to be like, what will this pair with? But these beers that feature this herbal hoppiness, I mean, think about how you use herbs in your cooking, and this can just pair so well with things. And being a German style of beer, like a lot of richer, heavier dishes with rich sauces or fattier, like sausages and stuff, this crispness to this beer, the dryness is just gonna refresh your palate and lift everything off. I like a roasted chicken with roasted potatoes and rosemary. Yeah, that would be great. 54:14 Discover Dry Drinks Wrap it up here, guys. All right. Anyways, important takeaways, I think you should keep drinking dry stuff, and if you're scared of dry stuff, you should ask someone in our stores for a recommendation because a lot of stuff will catch you off guard, like this pilsner. You might not think it's going to be dry if you don't know much about beer, and it is. We got these wines. Don't think they're dry, but they are. Right. So, you know, shop around. Flying under the radar. Dry stuff. Yeah, and next January when people are asking you if you're doing dry January, you can say yes with a straight face. If you like this podcast, give us a thumbs up or like it or whatever you want to say. Share it with your friends and your family and your doctor and your dentist. They'll be worried about your liver if you share it with your doctor. If you know of a good dentist, reach out to me. I got a string and a door knob. Oh, God. Until next time, I'm Lexi. I'm Roger. I'm Dan. I'm Chris. Keep Tasty