Join us on our tour of the Chuckanut Bay Distillery in Bellingham, WA with owner Matt Howell and WWU Chemist Dr. Elizabeth Raymond. Matt tells us about the local ingredients and the stages of the process while Dr. Raymond helps use dive into the chemistry.
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[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
? Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
? As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
? Cyclotron and any and every mic
? You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
? Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
? Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
? I’m every element around
(Dr. Regina) Welcome to Spark Science where we explore human curiosity. We are here at the Chuckanut Distillery in Bellingham Washington. How’s it going Jordan? I’m here with my co-host.
(Jordan) It’s awesome? [Laughing.]
(Regina) We are here with our science guest Dr. Elizabeth Raymond, a friend and college at Western Washington University. How’s it goin?
(Dr. Raymond) Things are going well. I’m excited to be here. Looking to get some new examples for class this spring.
(Regina) And some new samples of tastings.
(Dr. Raymond) That too, that too.
(Regina) That had nothing with your agreeing to be here.
(Dr. Raymond) No.
(Regina) OK. We are here with . . .
(Matt) Matt Howell. I’m one of the co-owners and head of the distiller here at Chuckanut Bay distillery. A distiller at our distiller means doing pretty much everything. A little bit of everything. Tony Vernon helps out with, again pretty much everything.
(Regina) Our listeners are going to be able to go to Instagram and see pictures of the distillery and our tour. I’m just going to let Matt take us through the tour and we will be interrupting you with question. Maybe Dr. Raymond here may be interjecting things about science or maybe I’ll just make her do that. Let’s get started on the tour. Are you ready?
(Matt) Yeah. I’m ready, this is exciting.
(Regina) Let’s do this.
(Matt) Pretty much, things start at the back, the back of the distiller here. We’re fortunate enough to be surrounded by all sorts of farm land both to the north and to the south. We are able to source all of our grains right here in Whatcom county about 20 miles away. Each one of these bags here is round about a ton, so, 2000 lbs. We’ve got everything pretty much. We’ve got rye, corn, white wheat, barely, and we do all of that processing right here on site. We’re fortunate enough to work with a farmer who’s like, “Alright, what do you want?” I’m like, “I’d like some corn,” and he’ll put it in the ground for us.
(Regina) Wow.
(Matt) It’s hard to get him to grow rye for us because he sees it as a weed when it doesn’t quite yield as much per ton, per acre rather.
(Regina) Could we take a quick step back and can you tell us about the origins of the Chuckanut Distillery and how you did this? Was it your goal to have local produce and grains?
(Matt) I started the distillery with my partner Kelly Andrews. The goal for us was, we wanted to create something, something that was intensely local in terms of sourcing. OK, so this is where we bring everything back. If we open up these bags, [sound of corn spilling onto the ground] if you want to take a look . . . [Crinkling sound.]
(Regina) You can hear the crinkling sound, listeners, [laughing.]
(Dr. Raymond) It’s really just an enormous bag.
(Regina) They are huge. Please again listeners go to our Instagram and see these bags because they are, yeah.
(Matt) Here we can see, just ah, this is white wheat berries. We just get it, you know . . .
(Regina) Can I have some to look at and smell?
(Dr. Raymond) [Laughing.]
(Regina) They smell really good though.
(Matt) The white wheat is, it’s just fantastic. It ends up comprising a lot of what we do. The busker that we do which is a liquor, Krampus, which we do, our Wheat Vodka, our Wheat Gin, it’s all from this base because this wheat is such a prolific producer of sugars for fermentation and distillation. It’s almost five times as efficient as potatoes per lbs.
(Regina) What? Wow.
(Matt) Yes. So, from a processing standpoint, it just makes sense. It’s one of the reasons that when you see, if you’re in the store looking around and you see potato vodka on the bottle, it’s kind of a big deal because it is just so much harder to make things out of potatoes.
(Regina) OK.
(Matt) It just takes that much more effort. One, it just takes more volume.
(Dr. Raymond) Is that because potatoes have so much more starch in them?
(Matt) It’s a starch and then also, like, water content. I mean, it’s both those things. You just have to deal with basically, you have to upsize things because you are really just pushing volumes to get similar yields.
(Regina) Oh. So, I’m going to take a break here for second with fermentation. Betsy do you want to tell us something about the most basic fermentation? So, what happens? Maybe Matt you can tell us the very beginning and then you can tell us chemically what is happening.
(Matt) Happily. None of the stuff we work with is malted. What that means is, it hasn’t yet undergone the process that makes it available like alpha amylase and a couple of other enzymes that allow the starch to be fermented or turned into fermentable sugars. Right now we have a bunch of stuff that yeast can’t do anything with.
(Regina) OK.
(Matt) What we actually do is do a step mash where we are hitting different temperatures and then we do enzyme additions to simulate that.
(Regina) I don’t know anything about enzymes.
(Dr. Raymond) So the enzymes just speed up the reaction. The reaction, theoretically, would take place over a very, very long period of time. Over such a long period of time that it wouldn’t be useful. The enzymes, you add them and it causes the reaction to happen a lot faster because it makes a lower energy pathway to get from your reactants to your products.
(Regina) OK.
(Dr. Raymond) They essentially act as catalysts. Catalyst reactions.
(Regina) What did people do before, a long long time ago?
(Matt) You can allow it to germinate. So, basically, what happens is, I believe it is the endosperm will make available the alpha amylase and those other enzymes so that, because when it wants to grow, right, it needs available power source, it needs those sugars by which it can start growing. So, if we basically were to get it wet, it would start to root, then we would have to cease that otherwise it would use those sugars for that.
(Regina) And then it starts to ferment, is what you’re telling me?
(Matt) It depends. There are lots of ambient yeast so it might. In fact, that’s one of the things I was thinking about as you guys were heading out. I was thinking about the differences between fermentation and distillation. Fermentation, it’s kind of a fun idea. It’s something that we probably discovered, right? It’s something that yeasters did. Distillation was very different. It was invented, it was something that we actively went after. We said, “We’ve got this, now we want to create something else.” Or, refine it so that we have a more concentrated something in this other solution.
(Dr. Raymond) The fermentation is actually turning the sugars into alcohol. The distillation is then the purification of the alcohol to concentrate it.
(Regina) Matt was telling me this. I want to have a quick question about general fermentation. Fruit, right, fruit ferments. There are these instances where birds, right, they . . .
(Jordan) I’ve seen the squirrels on YouTube. They’re running into trees and stuff. [Laughing.]
(Regina) Right and there’s that famous video of that Moose that gets stuck in that tiny tree because he’s like, eating an apple, apples off of this tiny 6 foot tree and he gets stuck in it. Is that where we discovered fermentation or is it even well before that. There’s certain areas that don’t have as readily available fruit but they probably had alcohol. Do you guys know any, or do you both know any stories about?
(Dr. Raymond) So, sourdough starter is a fermentation process. Leave almost anything out and it’s going to collect molds and yeasts and bacteria and the trick is somehow, as human beings, we figured out how to collect the good ones and not the ones that kill you.
(Regina) Right. It’s the people that survived.
(Dr. Raymond) Yeah.
(Jordan) I just had a quick question. So, when people are making beer, they use mostly malted, like, sprouted what and stuff. What’s the purpose of using the not sprouted? Does it create a cleaner taste? Because, you’re essentially making a beer right before you distil it.
(Matt) Exactly yeah. We do make a beer. The thing with malting is, like, for a beer, it just wouldn’t make sense at all. The malting does a great deal to inform your product. That malt, the malt level that you’re doing on it, so like, after you allow germination to occur, you stop it by heating. Then it actually goes into a kiln and they’ll heat it to varying levels depending on what kind of beer you’re making. That helps to define, if it’s a very dark beer, it’s very heavily roasted right? So for beer, they have to do that. For us we’re really looking to just capture alcohol.
We do a product called Green Man’s Dram that the malt character informs the product. But for most of them, we’re just wanting to make as clean ethanol as possible. In the case of our whiskies, we do a Bourbon and then we do an Irish stout whisky, with those, it’s not like a single malt whisky where we’re dependent on a malted grain to inform the product.
For us, it’s just, we don’t have to do that extra step of either sending this stuff out to have it malted, or building a malt house ourselves. It enables us to go straight to the farm and say, “We want 20 thousand pounds of wheat.”
(Regina) Is that actually easier for you to malt it?
(Matt) We get to skip a step and then we get to do it in match time.
(Regina) Alright.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Early late at night
? I wander off into a land
? You can go, but you mustn’t tell a soul
(Regina) So, what’s the next step then? You get this grain and you’re fermenting it, mashing it.
(Matt) So we mill it here. We’ve actually moved the mill on the other side because its potato season so we’re processing potatoes. We don’t have any potatoes at present but, yeah, that’s our potato grinder right there.
(Regina) This thing right here?
(Matt) We do a grind on the potatoes and we basically just make a potato sludge.
(Jordan) Like a slurry?
(Regina) So a pulpy . . .
(Matt) Yeah. We just try to make something with as constant of a grind as possible. After this point we go up to our mash tun. The milling, the grinding of potatoes, we’re just trying to make everything as accessible as possible for the heating and the enzymes to get at so that the yeast will be able to get at it even further to create alcohol.
(Jordan) I love that you named all of these.
(Regina) Yeah, so . . .
(Matt) Lots of fun names.
(Regina) All of their containers, what are these called?
(Matt) These are fermenters and this is like, mash tun, and our still. We’ve got a little bit of everything.
(Regina) You had Sagan over there.
(Matt) Yeah, Carl Sagan. How could we not have Carl Segan? That’s Birch and Russ [sp?], Spenoza [sp?], here’s Natsu, Ferb from Phineas and Ferb.
(Regina) Wait, just Ferb but not Phineas?
(Matt) Yeah, well see, the thing is, we feel that Phineas gets all of the accolade type of thing.
(Regina) [Laughing] because he talks more.
(Matt) Ferb gets stuff done, like in the background. I don’t know. My niece was over quite a bit a couple of summers ago and I saw a number of episodes.
(Dr. Raymond) It’s kind of the shape of Ferb’s head, too.
(Regina) Oh that’s true!
(Matt) I didn’t think of that but I like that. I’d like to say, “Yes I know, that’s exactly what we did it.”
(Regina) [Laughing.]
(Dr. Raymond) I love that we’re talking about Phineas and Ferb by the way.
(Regina) It’s apt. He’s a scientist. Ferb’s a scientist.
(Matt) Yeah. Fantastic.
(Regina) This is called Spark Science.
(Matt) So, we go to our mash tun right here, the George Bailey, everything we use is steam powered. We have these hot lines, we don’t want to touch those guys. We’re running steam and then it’s got a jacket and we basically just adjust the steam flow rate and then that will heat this up.
(Regina) What do you mean by jacket?
(Matt) So, we can see that it stops right here but actually there’s about 6 inches and there’s steam piping that runs all the way. This is a low pressure steam system. It runs anywhere from 13 psi to about 10 psi with a pretty high volume.
(Dr. Raymond) So like a thermos but with a steam coil in the space where there would be a vacuum.
(Jordan) What’s the capacity of that?
(Matt) 150 gallons.
(Regina) Wow.
(Jordan) Wow.
(Matt) Yep. Once we hit this point, we basically add all of that, we add our water, and then we start to heat and add our enzymes. We hit a couple different levels, we basically run it up to, we add our alpha amylase and our beta glucanase and we run it up to . . .
(Jordan) Oh yeah, maybe break that down a little further.
(Regina) [Laughing.]
(Matt) So the alpha amylase is going to be the thing that allows us to convert those starches to formidable sugars. The beta is something that is something that is helping us to break it down so it’s not so sludgy. We have to be able to move things around.
(Regina) So in the natural world, where do these things exist? Like, these enzymes.
(Matt) I mean, I think that’s a big part of the plants that actually poses some of those in order to propagate themselves.
(Regina) For someone like me who didn’t take chemistry, people see certain chemicals and they’re like, “That’s like stuff in whatever.” They’ll tell me this everyday thing. There’s nothing like that for these enzymes?
(Dr. Raymond) Its how biochemistry works. It’s how plants and animals, it’s how chemistry happens in the cell, so it’s, to break a fair number of bonds takes a fair amount of energy and these enzymes help to lower the amount of energy that it takes so that plants and animals can actually do the, so the cells can actually do the chemistry but only when you want to so it’s not happening all the time.
(Regina) OK.
(Matt) I think, correct me if I’m wrong, we even have alpha amylase in our mouth, like in our pallet.
(Dr. Raymond) Yeah, in your saliva so you break down starches and stuff.
(Matt) That’s why if you take a cracker or something it will change from that salty flavor to sweat, because you’re starting to break that down. They actually spent in certain African alcohols . . . in order to get the fermentation process started.
(Regina) That’s what I wanted. I wanted some sort of relationship. So spit. That doesn’t happen here though because this is a classy joint.
(Matt) No no. Not on purpose anyway.
(Dr. Raymond) [Laughing.]
(Matt) Don’t worry, we distill it several times.
(Regina) Exactly.
(Dr. Raymond) [Laughing.]
(Matt) So, we’ve hit our temperatures, we’ve basically started the conversion that we want to start happening. Then what we do is, we have to cool it back down. So, by the time this is done, we’ve hit about 160 degrees Fahrenheit. We’re going to need to bring that back down to about 70 degrees Fahrenheit before we’re going to put yeast into it. Otherwise we’ll just kill the yeast.
In addition, you can probably expand on this, it would be fun to hear, when we have lower temps, the yeast creates more of what we want which is ethanol and less of what we call co-generates. If you have higher temperatures as these things convert, I’ve only read a little bit about this, but the way they sync up, they’ll just start forcing together connections more so. You won’t get as clean a product.
(Dr. Raymond) There are certain temperature regimes in which these enzymes will do different processes. The higher the temperature, the more energy that is available. So you can do different things at different temperatures. If you raise the temperature you now have more energy available to do these other processes.
(Regina) Awesome. We’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’re going to see what happens after the enzymes have been at it, right?
(Matt) Awesome, yep.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? There’s a world inside
? Where dreamers meet each other
? Once you go, it’s hard t come back
? Let me paint your canvas as you dance
? Dance in the trees
? Paint mysteries
? The magnificent droid plays there
? Your magic mind
? Makes love to mine
? I think I’m in love, angel
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
(Jordan) Welcome back to Spark Science, we’re at Chuckanut Distillery, Chuckanut Bay Distillery, I have to add that in there for legal reasons.
(Matt) Well, I don’t know.
(Dr. Raymond) It is the name. [Laughing]
(Jordan) So, we’ve done our mash and we’ve let it ferment. How many days do we ferment it?
(Matt) We kind of, it depends on the substrate so, potatoes happen pretty quick, it’s a 4-5 day affair. With grains, it’s 7-8.
(Regina) I thought we were just saying that potatoes take longer. I’m confused.
(Matt) It takes a lot more to create a bottle. In terms of volumes, we only have 150 gallons to work with.
(Regina) Got it.
(Matt) There’s less sugars there so it ferments out much quicker.
(Regina) Got it. Got it.
(Jordan) Do you use wild yeast?
(Matt) Oh, I wish. That would be so fun. I want to go cultivate my own I think up in the Chuckanuts. No, we use a dry yeast. We actually use a Daejeon clone. It’s a great virtual clone. We just really like what it does. We tried different yeast and different yeast does lots of different things. So, for a lot of what we do, this is kind of our work horse. It produces a nice clean spirit.
(Jordan) Once we move it from the fermenter, you put it right from the still to there?
(Matt) Right into the still from there. What we do initially is, with any given ferment, we’re shooting for somewhere between 6 and 8 percent alcohol. We go to the still and initially we do what is called the stripping run for our stripping run, we’re just trying to run that initial ferment up to between 25-30% alcohol by volume. We’re just trying to concentrate it a little bit. That’s something that happens pretty quick. It’s kind of down and dirty and they don’t smell super great because we’re taking everything.
(Regina) When you are distilling, there’s a lot of history with distilling in our country with prohibition, and people distilling at home, and why it’s dangerous. Why is it dangerous and why is there like, jokes about things exploding and stuff like that? I should know this as a scientist but I have never looked into it.
(Dr. Raymond) The process of distilling, you’re heating it, you’re taking this liquid and solid mixture and you’re heating it up and boiling off the stuff that you want. You collect it, the alcohol. The alcohol we want to drink is ethanol but all alcohols are flammable. So you have a heat source and you’re concentering the alcohol because that’s what you want and you’re doing it, long ago, near a flame.
(Regina) I’m with you now.
(Dr. Raymond) Not as much anymore.
(Matt) We have a steam powered one.
(Regina) Like the ones here.
(Matt) I always joke, you have to be quiet a knuckle heat to get yourself in trouble with a steam powered system. It’ll vapor. It will go to vapor. It’s pretty volatile stuff. It has no problem igniting explosively.
(Jordan) Also with the lower heat when you’re distilling it, doesn’t it create methanol before ethanol?
(Matt) Yeah.
(Jordan) That causes the blindness, which is sort of like another old tale or whatever.
(Matt) When people talk about oh, “Be careful with that, it will make you go blind.” You’ve got methanol and if you ingest it will start to shut down your internal organs and damages, I believe, a central part of your brain.
(Regina) What? This is why the original moonshine was not good.
(Matt) Yeah, because if you don’t know what you are doing, the most volatile stuff in a still is methanol and acetone. Those are the first ones to come off. The thing is, you can smell, that’s a big part of what we do, and good distillers, you’re getting into it, like you’re getting very different smells. They feel different when you touch them. Fusel alcohols towards the end, I mean, they’re exceptionally oily. You can identify them in all these different ways.
But, the other thing is, with a lot of the stuff we use, we do produce methanol and certainly a fair bit, not too much, acetone. As you use fruit stuff with pectin, as I understand, pectin, yeast interacts with that and has a tendency to create higher methanol amounts than like, grains and potatoes. It’s still certainly present.
(Jordan) If people used to do it back in the day when we discovered this thing, why did it all the sudden became illegal and why did the government just want . . . I mean like they want to now?
(Regina) Distilling taxes?
(Matt) I think the whisky tax was like one of the first taxes that the American government levied against American people. Certainly money is a big part of that. I don’t know the exact history, it would be interesting to figure out like, here’s your cause and effect kind of thing.
We had a very interesting relationship with alcohol in this country. In large, it creates an unhealthy culture. I mean, you guys are at the university and so like, a lot of these kids, their interaction with alcohol doesn’t happen until they go off to college and all sudden [shouts] their consuming way too much. Rather than like, this is it, with appreciating wine or something like that.
(Regina) Right. Especially in Bellingham, breweries and now you the distillery, and Bellewood Acres with their distillery, I think it’s very much popular now. When did that start? In your memory, when did that boom start? Dr. Raymond or Jordan you could chime in too. We could probably hone in on the year it kind of started. Late 90s maybe?
(Matt) Breweries is kind of a 20 year old thing. It started a while ago in our area and has been going stronger and stronger. I think that people are just realizing that you can have a different experience with these alcohols as opposed to some-thing that some of these lagers, like people who think that think beer in the 1960s or 70s or whatever and you think “MGD, that’s pretty good stuff.”
(Regina) [Laughing]
(Matt) Or whatever. And you kind of think, getting back to as we were discussing, kind of these disciplines that have been around for a long time. A lot of people used to home brew. A lot of people had little home stills and they would put different botanicals in there and it was to help with your ails and to help you feel better. It has a long tradition. As for distilling, it’s a much newer sort of thing. In our state, the first distillery was Dry Fly. They’re in Spokane and they started in 2007. They kind of pushed through that first wave of legislation for craft distilleries.
(Regina) Because it wasn’t . . .
(Dr. Raymond) There were significant law changes. I don’t remember now what prevented them but I do remember that there were big changes that allowed them to, places like you, to come into being.
(Matt) Yeah, and in fact, I don’t know that it was they weren’t allowed, it’s just that, and even still, the tax structure and everything was so prohibitive. It still feels punitive like with some of the changes they did with 1183, the amount that goes to the federal government and to the state. Alcohol is one of the few things that fell federally, like we pay the same amount per proof gallon that Jim Beam does like every other thing such as beer or wine, it’s scaled to leveled production.
(Regina) Oh really? I didn’t know that.
(Matt) It’s something that they wanted to change. In fact, there was something in front of congress at the end of last year but of course it dropped out at the end.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? The grass grows inside
? The music floats you gently on your toes
? Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos
? Don’t freak and hide
? I’ll be your secret santa, do you mind?
? Don’t resist
? The fairygods will have a fit
(Regina) We talked about the fermentation, the distilling, is there anything past that that you want to talk about?
(Matt) I mean, we kind of looked at, so, our initial still there was designed by a gentleman up in Canada. It’s a simple pot still that allows us to get that strip really nicely. It also allows us to make whisky really well. Like, these are things, we’re not requiring big jumps in alcohol and it’s not very concentrated at that point. But, in order to be vodka, we’ve got to hit 95% alcohol by volume which gets harder and harder. It take more and more energy to achieve the separation.
(Dr. Raymond) Ethanol, the alcohol that we drink and water, they like to interact with themselves really well. Water likes to interact with water, ethanol likes to interact with ethanol, but, when you get them together in the right proportions, they actually interact with each other very strongly. The boiling point of ethanol has a value and the boiling point of water has a value.
(Regina) I know that value. [Laughing.]
(Dr. Raymond) As you change the amount that are mixed together, the boiling points actually coalesce. Instead of boiling off water at one temperature and ethanol at another, they both boil off together at the same temperature. There becomes a point where you can’t separate the ethanol and the water anymore without extraordinary efforts.
(Regina) What’s the effort? How do you do that then?
(Matt) She’s talking about mechanical separation with heat. I think the upper bounds of that you can hit maybe 96.3% alcohol by volume but to move beyond that you have to do it chemically. I think it’s a benzine or something.
(Dr. Raymond) If you want to use ethanol as a solvent and you don’t want water around, to get rid of that last 3-4% water, you actually have to introduce some other molecules in order to get rid of the water. Benzine is something that is typically used. Benzine is carcinogenic and you really don’t want to drink it.
(Regina) Oh my gosh. Wait, wait, so nobody drinks that?
(Dr. Raymond) No. No, they don’t. It’s purely using in a chem lab.
(Regina) This is how my knowledge of chemistry is. Completely void.
(Jordan) I actually saw the myth busters. They tried to run cars and one of them used the 99% alcohol which obviously rad the best in whatever their getaway car was. They were talking about bootlegging.
(Regina) [Laughing.] It was prohibition.
(Jordan) The myth was that they used to run their cars off of moonshine.
(Regina) OK.
(Jordan) To get like better . . .
(Regina) And it worked?
(Jordan) It’s worked to a point. The lower alcohol obviously was, didn’t work as well.
(Dr. Raymond) And having the water in there will be very hard on your engine in the long term.
(Regina) Yeah, but they were making tons of money. Just buy a new car. [Laughing.] I mean . . . So actually some bootlegging history here in Whatcom country. When prohibition was going on people would get beer and alcohol from Canada and they would actually bring that in. My husband’s grandfather lived on a road called Double Ditch and he would actually float the barrels of alcohol down the double ditch to the two people down into Lynden. At least that’s the story. [Laughing.]
(Jordan) [Laughing] The one bad thing Lynden ever did. [Laughing.]
(Regina) Hey we had the drug tunnel too.
(Jordan) Right [laughing.]
(Regina) OK, so you get your vodka and do you sell different kinds of vodka or is it just the one?
(Matt) So, we do wheats and potato. So just the two different substrates. We treat them very similarly. Just given where their starting point is, even though we run them up past 95, they do have different characteristics. The wheat just kind of has this more, kind of, high tone thing.
(Regina) What do you mean by high tone?
(Matt) So . . .
(Regina) We’d have to taste it.
(Matt) You’d have to taste it probably.
(Regina) Maybe we should. I mean, on the air, I think I promised our listeners that we would be tasting some alcohol so, maybe we should.
(Matt) Sounds good.
(Jordan) So when it gets, obviously are not serving 95%, what do you cut it down with?
(Matt) We do a proof down, so water. And what we do, we we’re just basically using city water that we pass through a series of filters. Who else would like some?
(Dr. Raymond) I would taste some, yeah.
(Matt) Yeah.
(Regina) Oh my god.
(Matt) Is that too much?
(Regina) Are you supposed to drink it all at once?
(Matt) Well I guess that’s up to you. Whatever you’re feeling.
(Jordan) I’ve been here before and I’ve tasted, ah, there was one that tasted like a straight up potato.
(Matt) Yeah. So that was our initial thing. I’m always like, I’m looking at history.
(Regina) What’s this one?
(Matt) So, this is wheat. I’m always looking to history to kind of inform what I do and what we do here, then try to make it our own. So initially, like I said, we started the distillery because we wanted to make gin. But I knew I wanted to do something with potatoes. As I looked at things, I’m like, “Alright, well, this is cool but alcohol, or vodka rather, becomes typically about alcohol delivery. You’re wanting an inebriant.
I can toss this with whatever but I don’t know, I didn’t really like that, especially considering, we use so many potatoes. It just felt like a shame to take this thing, distill it up to this point, and then filter it without adding any flavor.
So, we have one potato and that’s like our original style. I don’t tend to add it to this market. We usually just add it to the taste room. We’ve got another potato vodka that we, that matches more with people’s expectations. I’ve found that if people are a vodka drinker and they go to that, they’re like, “Oomph, I don’t want that!” But, then someone’s like, “I don’t like vodka,” I’m like, “Try this one,” And they’re like, “Yeah, I like that.” You know? So I don’t want people’s first experience with our stuff to be something that catches them so off guard.
(Jordan) [Laughing.]
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Dance in the trees
? Paint mysteries
? The magnificent droid plays there
? Your magic mind
? Makes love to mine
? I think I’m in love, angel
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? This is your land
? This is my land
? We belong here
? Stay the night
? I am so inspired
? You touched my wires
? My supernova shining bright
(Regina) We’re trying vodka, the wheat vodka here at Chuckanut Bay Distillery. It was a little strong for me. What did you say, it was 40%?
(Matt) 40%, yeah.
(Regina) 40%. So we’re going to talk about, we’re gunna try the potato one. Dr. Raymond here, during the break, she was talking about how the smell of this vodka as a chemist kind of affected her. But, you also talked about how the potato and the wheat actually distinctively tastes different.
(Dr. Raymond) So, in the lab, we don’t taste things. We don’t drink things, but we use ethanol quite a lot and it has a distinctive smell to it. So there’s that response of don’t taste it, don’t drink it because you’re in the lab and I don’t drink a lot of vodka. So, smelling it is like, “Now I’m in the lab.” But then you taste it and its like, “Oh, this is actually really tasty.” [Laughing.]
(Regina) I wonder if you train yourself, you know, like, no this is OK. You have to get passed the barrier.
(Dr. Raymond) It certainly used to be the case that chemists tasted things. That was a method of determining what is what, and what are the properties that things had.
(Regina) What was the life expectancy?
(Dr. Raymond) Not so good. [Laughing.]
(Regina) I mean, my favorite scientist in history, especially as a physicist, is Michael Verde and he worked for Davies right? He got injured a fair amount of times and he’s a chemist.
(Dr. Raymond) Older books, you will see, you know the properties of things. You’ll have what it looks like, what it feels like, and what it smells like, and what it tastes like.
(Regina) Like, what does mercury taste like? That’s terrible. Don’t do that kids.
(Jordan) I’m sure they did the same thing with food right? Who ever saw a crab walking around and was like, “I should boil that and put it in my mouth.” [Laughing.]
(Regina) Right, and that was a good choice. You’re right. Lobsters were apparently pretty terrifying for people and they were like, “Wait, we can actually eat these?”, because they looked like sea bugs.
(Jordan) Once you know that you’re dominant.
(Dr. Raymond) Artichokes.
(Regina) Artichokes. Is there any stories of like, certain chemists, Matt was saying during the break that there was one guy that got in trouble.
(Matt) It was from that lengthy book, what is it? A Brief History of Nearly Everything.
(Dr. Raymond) Oh, the Bill Bryson book?
(Matt) Bill Bryson, which I’m a big fan of. He covers so much material. But, there’s this, I think it was like in Denmark or something, a chemist that made several discoveries and then was found dead at his work desk after trying the wrong thing.
(Dr. Raymond) I suspect it’s probably really common for chemists to die of poisoning or some dreaded disease.
(Regina) My daughter wants to be a chemist. For those of you that listened to the Geek Girl Con episode, she wants to be a chemist because she wants to create potions. That’s her thing. I can see maybe a while ago, or even now, people being like, “I’m going to create that potion.” They need to be careful though.
I’m going to bring us back to Dr. Raymond. You were saying that like, this distilling process that Matt is telling us about that’s happening here at Chuckanut Bay Distillery, it’s so much refining yet, we’re going to try the potato vodka. Jordan said it tasted like potatoes.
(Dr. Raymond) Yeah. It does taste . . .
(Matt) It’s quite a bit weightier, like um, so the thing is, um . . .
(Regina) It’s only slight though. It’s only a slight difference to me. I’m not a big alcohol drinker.
(Matt) I find that it just kind of lives in a different place. Where the wheat is kind of up here and bright, it’s kind of down, and maybe it’s a function of, hey the wheat is grown above ground and it’s influenced by my thinking about it versus the potatoes that are in the ground.
(Regina) Maybe, is it all in our minds? I don’t think so.
(Matt) I don’t know. I tend to think most things are there.
(Regina) Yeah [laughing.] So, why would that be? We had the wonderful Dr. Leina Dahlberg on talking about the science of smells. That kind of makes me think about taste. Those molecules are still in there right? I mean, that’s what’s happening.
(Dr. Raymond) And they can’t be particularly volatile because they would have distilled off.
(Regina) OK.
(Dr. Raymond) But they potentially interact really strongly with the ethanol and the little bit of water that is left, but they also maybe, a lot of flavor molecules, complex flavor molecules tend to be pretty big. They distill off at very high temperatures. Think about making Carmel, you go from making a very simple sugar and between melted sugar and burnt and just carbon is Carmel. Its dark brown and you get a lot of really complicated molecules at a particular temperature.
(Matt) This seems like a good segue into gin almost.
(Regina) [Laughing.]
(Matt) With gin, I mean, this is one of my favorite things to do, like, gin running days. They’re these very long runs that we’ll do, like 12-13 hours.
(Regina) Running through the machines.
(Matt) Running through the still.
(Regina) You’re not running through Bellingham with gin.
(Matt) Well, not typically.
(Dr. Raymond) Like, at the end of the barrel.
(Matt) At the very end of a long day. The thing that’s really fun is, our alcohol concentration, the solution, like in the still, will change over that period of time because we’re pulling methanol out and leaving water behind. So, the fun thing is, you work with those different botanicals and some are more ethanol water soluble but it’s pulling different characters the whole time.
So, the thing that’s so fun about them, as you were saying these long chains, that’s not my area, but I do know that it’s like really fun to, because you get snap shots right, you go to the still and you get a snap shot of what that will be at any given time. You start off with like, maybe this kind of citrusy thing and it evolves into more of this kinds of resinous juniper kind of thing.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? La la la la la la
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
(Dr. Raymond) How does the distilling differ say, between a vodka and a gin? When do you, when does that Branch?
(Matt) Yes. So, the front side of the process is really very similar. We’re not treating a great deal differently except for a spirit that is going to gin gets a little bit more filtration because we want the backdrop of the gin to be blank. We want it to be all about botanicals. In the vodkas, like I said, it’s not just all about alcohol delivery, we still want it to have substance. We want some refinement there. We don’t want to beat anyone over the head with a particular flavor but, at the same time, we want it to bring something to the party so more filtration.
(Regina) So when does the juniper, when do the junipers go? They’re the start.
(Matt) So like, with this we’re using wheat. And then we’ll actually go into the kettle. Sometimes people put botanicals like, actually into, they’ll mash them, and then they’ll boil that solution. Sometimes it goes in the column. It just depends on the style. So, in all of your varying alcohol solutions, like whatever I go to kettle with, I’m not trying to play aloof with this but everyone has their own style.
(Regina) Right.
(Matt) Whatever alcohol percentage that you go to the kettle with is going to pull a different character. Then, you’ve got your snapshots and that’s how you put together your gin. You get different things based on what alcohol percentage you put in there.
(Regina) You were talking about how doing alcohol with barrels and fermentation in barrels. How is that different from what we were walking through and taking pictures of?
(Matt) With the barrels, actually, it would be fun to ferment in barrel. We don’t actually ferment in barrel but we’re aging in barrel like, all of our brown stuff.
(Regina) Right. Which is what I see on the TVs. Commercials tell me that that’s what happens.
(Matt) Right. So, how we were talking about more filtration of the gin, actually, we’re accomplishing that sort of thing in the barrel. So, we’re using chard barrels. The inside has be carbonized.
(Regina) OK.
(Matt) That carbon is pulling things and softening character. We’ve actually got some rough spirit. We can try some of that next to some finished spirit.
(Regina) That’s do it, and pour this out because I can’t finish it. [Laughing.]
(Dr. Raymond) [Laughing.]
(Jordan) How long do you leave a vodka resting before you are able to bottle it?
(Matt) That’s the biggest part. You’ve really got to allow a lot of time for things to settle out. It’s still, like we were talking earlier, the water and the ethanol, they’re not sure of each other. They’ll heat up in weird spots. Its like, “What the heck is going on here?” You just have to give it time to settle out. The longer you leave it the better. So like, the larger producers will allow it to sit for like, months. Like, we can’t unfortunately allow it to sit for that long. We have to turn stuff around, we don’t have a lot of room here.
(Regina) One day.
(Matt) Several weeks. One day. [Laughing.] It was in there a day. Pull it out.
(Regina) I mean, one day you’ll be able to have more room. I was trying to be positive here. [Laughing.]
(Matt) Oh I see. You have yet interact with Tony a little bit. But you’ll see why I responded that way. It’s like a glass that’s half empty right there.
(Regina) [Laughing.]
(Dr. Raymond) The container that it’s sitting in, is that closed or is that open to the air?
(Regina) To the elements?
(Matt) It’s closed but we open it a little bit.
(Dr. Raymond) It’s vented periodically but it’s not open, open.
(Matt) It’s not open, open.
(Regina) Why did you ask that?
(Dr. Raymond) I’m just curious about whether it would, I mean, it makes sense that you want it closed because you want to retain the ethanol but I was just wondering if there are things that potentially would evaporate out and actually leave. Or whether it’s closed and it’s just how things are interacting with each other or if the composition is actually changing.
(Jordan) I’ve actually heard of that too. People just leaving it open with a filter on top of it. They say that stuff evaporates over a 24 hour period. They say that the taste really changes.
(Matt) Definitely yeah. The more time you, like when we first put together what it was that we were doing and we just filtered or we had just done the initial proof down, it definitely kind of has like with wines, there was this dumb period with pinot noir, I was into wine history for a long time. It kind of has this dump period where you try it and it is like really, really harsh. The thing is, it just settles out and it finds a happy spot. But definitely, initially on trying it, its like, “Is this really what we just made?” And then it always rounds out in a good way.
(Regina) Let’s try this next to each other. You said the beginning and the finish.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? This is your land
? This is my land
? We belong here
? Stay the night
? I am so inspired
? You touched my wires
? My supernova shining bright
? Hallueluja hallueluja halleuluja
(Matt) So, what we have here is, we have a little bit of Bourbon that we’ve completed, so bottle that spend it’s 13 months in barrel and finished the way we wanted. Then we have some Bourbon that’s spent about 2.5 months in barrel. So, we can kind of see it’s a different between something that’s polished and finished versus something that is still kind of younger and raw. It’s edgy you know.
(Regina) Alright let’s do this.
(Dr. Raymond) The Bourbon, is it colorless when it goes into the barrel?
(Matt) It is, yeah.
(Dr. Raymond) This young one is fairly light in color, whereas the finished is clearly much darker.
(Regina) Yeah, definitely. More like an ice tea dark and this is more like an apple juice.
(Matt) Should we do shot glasses of each side by side.
(Regina) Sure. Let’s do that. If you can spare so many shot glasses.
(Matt) We have a lot of shot glasses.
(Regina) Let’s do this.
(Matt) I’ll do the finished one. I’d try the polished one first.
(Regina) OK. Here we do. Here we do? [Laughing.] Here we go. OK. Whoa!
(Dr. Raymond) They smell really different.
(Regina) Yeah they do, they’re totally different. The finished, I don’t know, it smells like Bourbon, I don’t know. I’m good at this.
(Dr. Raymond) Whoa!
(Matt) So it’s actually…
(Regina) Sorry I just tried the harsher not smoothed in the barrel one.
(Dr. Raymond) It feel a little like you’re a fire breathing dragon. [Laughing.]
(Regina) It’s intense.
(Dr. Raymond) As Regina’s eyes are watering.
(Regina) Yeah. I’m not going to finish this. And our crew here is coughing.
(Matt) That’s reason it’s still in barrel I guess. One of the big things is just letting it mellow out. It’s pulling a lot of color. I guess it’d be nice to know, I don’t know chemically what it’s pulling, but it pulls stuff that ends up being the sweetness from there like vanilla and sort of character. I think some of it is some proteins and maybe some fatties.
(Regina) From the wood itself.
(Matt) Yeah. Depending on what you proof down to, some of those things will go out of solution. It’s one of the reasons that people will filter whisky. Um, we don’t believe in filtering whisky. It’s why we keep it on the high side. We’re at 40% alcohol there which keeps those in solution. If we go down, it’s like kind of the magic number, 46%, as you drop below that, you’ll start to have stuff that falls out of solution.
(Regina) Interesting.
(Matt) Yeah. So, [inaudible], I think that when you filter, right, you can’t just target filter so you’re going to filter flavor too.
(Regina) To end our episode, in the middle of the episode I talked about distilleries, I think of explosions, I think of moonshine, what do you see in pop culture that is accurate or inaccurate about distilling?
(Matt) I do know that a lot of people bring up moonshiners and that sort of thing to me. I think that’s great. That’s so far from what we do here.
(Regina) [Laughing]
(Jordan) So you didn’t get your start out in the woods and you just happen to . . .
(Regina) They don’t come in barrels with Xs on them? Jugs, jugs, sorry.
(Matt) No, no barrels with Xs. Oh jugs, OK right.
(Regina) I was so wrong.
(Matt) Wasn’t it the Dukes of Hazard that were bootleggers, right?
(Regina) We’re they?
(Matt) Really?
(Jordan) They were running it for Uncle Jesse.
(Matt) I didn’t realize that. I had a little Dukes of Hazard race track that I loved as a kid. The Dukes of Hazard car would jump over and they would never make it.
(Regina) That’s how it started. We found it.
(Jordan) Unconscious.
(Dr. Raymond) [Laughing.]
(Regina) Good job Jordan.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
(Erik) It sounds like our gang had a good time at the Chuckanut Bay Distillery in Bellingham Washington. This is producer Erik Faburrietta. Our hosts today were Regina Barber DeGraaff and Jordan Baker. Our science guest today was Dr. Elizabeth Raymond and our tour guide, co-owner and head distiller at the Chuckanut Bay Distillery was Matt Howell.
If there’s a science idea that you’re curious about, send us an email or post a message on our Facebook page Spark Science. If you would like to see a tour of the distillery, check out the Chuckanut Bay Distillery’s website page for more information. Our producer for today’s show is Erik Faburrietta and the engineer for today is Nathan Miller. Our theme music is Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious and Wondaland by Janelle Monae
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
[?Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
? Iodine nitrate activate
? Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
? Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
? Careful, careful with those ingredients
? They could explode and blow up if you drop them
? And they hit the ground
[End of podcast.]