Boozehound (9 page)

When it comes to Liquor Store Archaeology, the winner by a landslide would have to be a man named Eric Seed. “The Indiana Jones of lost spirits” is how Seed is often described in food-and-drink media. As an importer of the rare and the obscure from around the world, Seed’s fingerprints are all over so many forgotten-but-now-revived spirits that it’s hard to think of anyone who’s been as influential in the renaissance of fine cocktails.

Seed’s company, Haus Alpenz, is the one that imports Hayman’s Old Tom gin, the missing link in recreating the original martini. As people gained new appreciation for vermouth, he began importing the highly regarded Dolin brand from France. He found a source for Batavia arrack, distilled from sugarcane and red rice on the Indonesian island of Java; it had been a staple in the punches of colonial America but had long ago disappeared. In Barbados, Seed located falernum, a spiced rum that had been essential to the mid-twentieth-century tiki drink craze but since vanished. When Seed can’t find what he’s searching for, he’ll commission a distiller to recreate a spirit from old recipes—as he’s done with pimento dram, a traditional Jamaican allspice liqueur. “The customers I sell to,” Seed has told me, “take a very dim view of vodka.”

As globetrotting as he is, Seed’s “Indiana Jones” moniker is pretty funny, kind of like calling a fat guy “Tiny” or a fuzzy kitten “Killer.” That’s because Seed is the complete opposite of Harrison Ford’s swashbuckling, lady-killing rogue archaeologist. Seed is cerebral and mild-mannered, a bespectacled forty-year-old husband and father who lives in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. Unlike Indiana Jones, Seed seems happiest when he’s lecturing like a tenured professor of booze. Wayne Curtis, drinks columnist of the
Atlantic
, described Seed as “the only person I’ve heard use the term
Hanseatic League
since I was in high school.”

My friend Emily and I once shared a taxi ride to the airport with Seed, and he held forth for the entire thirty minutes on the history of vermouth; the species of alpine botanicals that grow near Chambéry, France; the genealogy of the Dolin family; and a comparison of French
amers
versus Italian amari. (Emily, who was very hungover, later joked that she nearly jumped out of the speeding taxi.)

The first time I met Eric Seed was in 2007 at Tales of the Cocktail, the famed spirits industry event that happens every year in New Orleans. Tales of the Cocktail is a blend of academic conference, trade show, and, as one prominent bar owner put it, “Star Trek convention for cocktail geeks.” Unlike your typical professional or scholarly conference, however, you get about three cocktails per session along with the PowerPoint presentations. Free booze continues to flow in all-day tasting rooms, happy hours, dinners, and after-parties. Needless to say, just about every serious bartender and boozehound in America attends.

At Tales of the Cocktail, one moment you’ll be tasting a new product like a gin from France distilled from green grape flowers or sampling a liqueur made from “baby Vietnamese ginger” or comparing four different kinds of absinthe. The next moment, you’ll attend a panel discussion with a title like “Citrus: In History and Application” or “Aromatics and Their Uses in Cocktails” or “Spice and Ice: The Art of Spicy Cocktails” or “Tiki Drinks—From A to Zombie.” Then you’ll attend a panel called “Molecular Mixology,” being served a Ramos Gin marshmallow or a Sazerac gummy bear, and you’ll hear something scolding and manifestoish like, “I hope people in this community will think a little bit more about how you shake.” And then a few hours later, in another panel called “On the Rocks: The Importance of Ice,” someone else might declare, “We’ve all been preaching ice. We all realize what a travesty ice has become in the American bar.”

During the week, you might attend a presentation on “Big Trends” where someone talks about “bartender proactivity” in getting people to try new spirits. Perhaps someone suggests how important it is for a spirit to have something called an “equity delivery vehicle.” Tequila, for instance, is fortunate to have the popular margarita as its equity delivery vehicle. Perhaps, it will be suggested, pisco and cachaça need better equity delivery vehicles to expand their appeal? “What’s new in fruits right now?” the moderator will ask. “In Europe, we’re over fruit,” will come the reply from a British bartender. There will possibly be talk of a movement to eliminate tedious muddling in high-volume bars. And it will be agreed that mezcal, rye whiskey, and grapefruit juice are all hugely popular.

At various points during Tales of the Cocktail, the issue of vodka will be addressed. Someone will say something solemn like, “We needed to kill vodka in order to create a place for ourselves.” Later, a famous bar owner—a leading figure in the so-called mixology renaissance—will cause audible gasps by telling the cocktail geeks to lighten up a bit. “If someone wants a vodka drink, give ’em a vodka drink. Are we fascists? Vodka tonics pay the rent.”

Then, later on, you’ll be tasting an aged rum next to someone wearing a fedora, a kilt, or a seersucker suit and bow tie.

In the midst of my first visit to this craziness, I attended a panel called “Lost Ingredients: Obtaining (or Making) Rare Ingredients for Even Rarer Cocktails.” Eric Seed was among the experts on this panel. We all got to taste falernum, Swedish punch, Amer Picon, and what the presenter referred to as the “holy trinity of lost spirits”: absinthe (this was several months before legalization), pimento dram, and violet-flavored Crème Yvette (out of production for a half century). For some people in the room, that tasting clearly was a life-changing experience. I cannot say I wasn’t one of them.

For years, the holy grail of our Liquor Store Archaeology game had been Crème Yvette, which was a purple-hued violet-and-vanilla liqueur, a variation on the traditional crème de violette liqueurs found in Europe. Crème de violette and Crème Yvette pop up as ingredients over and over again in old recipe books. Even as late as the 1940s and 1950s, bartending guides suggested that a particular brand called Crème Yvette was part of any well-stocked home bar. But by the late 1960s, Crème Yvette had simply disappeared. The Charles Jacquin et Cie distillery, in Philadelphia, was Crème Yvette’s final place of production. Since that’s near where I’m from, I searched for years, with false hope, wasting hours in dicey Philly bottle shops and neon-lit “package goods” stores in Jersey strip malls. But I never found Crème Yvette.

And then, just like that, in a conference room at the Hotel Monteleone, a guy named Rob Cooper, the scion of the family who owns Charles Jacquin, was pouring little plastic cups of the spirit for all of us. “From one of the only two bottles left in existence,” said Cooper, who promised that—if he had anything to do with it—he would return Crème Yvette to the market. It would be 2010 before that came to pass.

However, that same afternoon at the same panel, the Indiana Jones of spirits beat Cooper to the punch, casually mentioning that he would very shortly be bringing out a crème de violette made by a distillery in Austria.

The next day, Eric Seed and I had a drink, and then he invited me up to his hotel room. Don’t get the wrong idea. At Tales of the Cocktail, the big liquor brands host lavish tasting rooms and parties with bands and DJs and tons of free booze and swag—and sometimes even burlesque dancers and scantily clad women painted blue (such was the case at one Hendrick’s gin party, for instance). Smaller companies, like Seed’s Haus Alpenz, can’t afford those sorts of things. Which is why a bartender from Boston with a shaved head and I found ourselves sitting on opposite hotel beds while Seed sat at the desk and opened what he called his “medicine bag,” full of tiny bottles of his various products.

First, we tasted the two products that Seed had originally begun importing in 2006—
kletzenlikör
, a traditional Austrian pear cream liqueur, and
zirbenschnaps
, a liqueur made from the fruit of the native Arolla stone pine, both made in Austria by Josef Hofer, a two-hundred-year-old family-owned distillery. Seed had discovered these spirits during a college semester abroad in Vienna and thought they might be popular at ski resorts like Aspen. The spirits never quite caught on. Of the kletzenlikör, which sells under the name Lauria, Eric Felten wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
, “The texture is off-putting. One expects a cream liqueur to be creamy. Instead, Lauria, thick with a pulpy pear purée, is gritty and gloppy.” The zirbenschnaps, which sells under the name Zirbenz, tasted like … well, pine. Not in an unpleasant way, but it was certainly a unique, acquired taste. Gary Regan advised, in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, to use Zirbenz “sparingly in cocktails, lest it take over the drink completely.” Both Zirbenz and Lauria are lovely spirits, but they have very little application for most bartenders. And I can tell you from spending my formative years as something of a ski bum … the après-ski crowd was likely looking for something else. Like maybe a shooter of some kind.

After the Zirbenz and Lauria, we tasted Seed’s upcoming launches, including an apricot liqueur, a walnut liqueur, and then—the thing we’d come to the hotel room for—the crème de violette. Now, with a larger glass of the lavender-hued stuff and more time to contemplate it, I could tell that Seed was on to something. The bald bartender from Boston and I agreed that this would be his breakout product. Indeed, several years after that day in New Orleans, events have proved us right. Today, crème de violette is one of Haus Alpenz’s top sellers, and you will see it on the back bar of most serious cocktail bars.

Here I must pause to raise the reasonable questions that you might well be asking yourself right now: Why? Why had a taste of it brought a conference room of cocktail geeks nearly to tears? What was the big deal with crème de violette? On its face, crème de violette, with its fancy-soap aroma of spring violets (“It smells like your grandma’s underwear drawer,” according to one friend), should have been no more successful than a liqueur made of pear puree. Seed’s apricot and walnut liqueurs were bolder and tastier, seemingly more in line with modern tastes. If you were simply looking for obscurity, what could be more obscure than a liqueur made from fruit harvested from a frickin’ wild stone pine tree that grows in the high Alps! Maybe it was simply nostalgia for a pre-Prohibition taste? But almost none of these people had been of legal drinking in the 1960s, so how could it be actual nostalgia for something they had never before tasted?

During that first trip to Tales of the Cocktail, my outlook on Liquor Store Archaeology changed significantly. For one thing, I was quickly learning that finding interesting spirits would require slightly more effort than a jaunt to my local liquor store.

After we’d sampled everything in Seed’s room, I shook hands with him, then took the elevator back downstairs. In the Hotel Monteleone’s lobby, a local jazz band was jamming, trumpets blaring, and people were handing out free samples of new vodkas, one called Absolut New Orleans, and another one, from the Netherlands, called Sonnema Vodka-Herb. I ran into a woman named LeNell Smothers, a liquor store owner from Brooklyn, who wore a pink cowboy hat. I’d met her late the night before, in the wild after-hours suite sponsored by Sonnema VodkaHerb, as she’d been pouring shots of Chartreuse directly into people’s mouths. LeNell had promised me a taste of her new private bottling of rye whiskey, and I reminded her of this promise. She graciously pulled a hip flask out of her jeans pocket and gave me a nice big swig, right in the lobby.

LeNell wasn’t the only one with a hip flask in that lobby. A friend of a friend introduced me to an Irish fellow named Phil Duff, who worked for Lucas Bols in Amsterdam. I had actually been looking for this guy for a few days because word had it that Duff was carrying around a hip flask of Dutch genever.

Genever is the original gin, dating back to the sixteenth century when a chemist in Leyden invented the spirit by adding juniper (
genever
, in Dutch) to distilled alcohol. With a traditional recipe that calls for at least 15 percent malt wine, genever—particularly
oude
(old) genever—has a funky, earthy quality that is unlike any of the London dry gins that most of us know. It’s a flavor that seems to predate the modern world. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, genever or “Holland gin” was the preferred gin in the United States. By 1880, six times more genever was imported than all other gins combined, and it was one of only four base spirits mixed for cocktails. After Prohibition, however, the London dry styles took over, and imports of genever slowed to a trickle, until finally it was nearly impossible to find the stuff in America.

I told Duff that I had spent one very memorable day drinking genever in Amsterdam, and since then I’d pissed away many hours searching for the stuff at home. Duff smiled and said he knew what I meant, produced the flask, and let me take a long sip … Wow. That funkiness and earthiness from the flask took me directly to that Amsterdam afternoon.

Yes, I realize I’m probably violating some sort of literary law by including two Proustian moments in one chapter, but I don’t care. Proust was writing about a cookie, and not liquor. As Liebling joked in
Between Meals
, “The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories … In light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite.”