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Lets go back in time 40 years and take a look at the final chapter I selected from the ultra rare text Flavour of Distilled Beverages edited by J.R. Piggott. This is a short one; a roughly three page sales pitch by a flavor company to the distilling industry. On a technical level, all you really see is acknowledgement of advances in compounding gin where they go from essences produced by crude simple distillation (separation of the volatile from non-volatile) to alcohol assisted fractional distillation of concentrates. Fractional distillation gives the opportunity to remove excessive terpenes and possibly staler aroma at the back end. It also reduces the temperature of distillation, generating less process volatiles.
The tone is a little bit grasping and rationalizing… I see the importance of commodity products that keep the party moving and I’m not a purist on using flavor company products, but I’ve never been impressed by any interaction I’ve ever had with people that work at flavor houses. Do they select for people that drink the kool-aid? It is a really funny insular industry that keeps close secrets. Employees make entire careers within a firm probably at a higher rate than other industries and entire operations run on direct mentorship and unpublished institutional knowledge (safe from AI!). Someone develops one important process which gets patented and maintaining that becomes an entire career.
The chapter presents an interesting follow up to questions I had about the last chapter regarding changes in botanical aroma due to alcohol & acidity and whether any contemporary producers had harnessed any positive potential of unique processing. Here, we see a flavor house touting “fermentation and enzyme techniques for the manufacture of some unique products”. Nothing is explicitly described, but based on patents I’ve read over the years, some of the niche fermentations used by flavor houses may match the aroma producing mildew yeasts that a few of us have been trying to re-introduce into the rum industry. Enzymes can liberate high value bound aroma that we have also been harping about for years now…
Is it possible to take any of these ideas from creepy processed food commodity culture context and port them over into fine artisan context by bringing them in house and removing the annoying secrecy? Lean into it, as they say. My opinions have a slow food bias. It would be wonderful to pull some of the old flavor chemists over into popular culinary and maybe even the artisan distilling industry.
Many of my ideas about contrast enhancement through terpene removal originated in reading the scant writings of flavor chemists. Many other ideas related to systematically developing supernormal stimuli were also based on feature extraction and amplification ideas routinely practiced by flavor houses. There is a lot to be learned from the flavor industry.
There is a 150 page history of the industry from 1945-1995 worth taking a look at; candid moments & recollections galore. I would chose to highlight some, but I’m out of time.
Chapter 15
A Flavour Company’s Contribution to Distilled Beverages
George A. Hopkins
International Flavours and Fragrances (G.B.) Ltd., Duddery Hill, Haverhill, Suffolk
In the brief space available I would like to mention some of the ingredients that I.F.F. as a flavour company manufactures to meet the growing needs of the distilled beverage industry.
MATURATION COMPOUNDS
Wood and nut extracts are used in brandy, eau-de-vie, arak, foreign whiskies as well as wines, to give a smoothing effect to the spirit. We at I.F.F. have been able to extract these by physical means, using no artificial chemicals, thus obtaining totally natural extracts.
We of course understand that there are two types of oak being used, depending on the product being aged. Therefore we have produced two types of extract, the limousin and the American oak. The base oak extracts can be used alone or combined with other extracts such as nutshell or other woods to give the best possible combination for the product in question. It is not our practice at I.F.F. to produce a range of products that we offer for general sales but instead, we prefer to co-work with a customer to give the correct combination of extracts to suit his particular product and the effect he is trying to achieve.
These maturation compounds come in a viscous liquid form which are easy to use and in general utilise a carrier of light caramel which has been found to be normally acceptable to the distilling industry.
DIRECT FLAVOURING OF DISTILLED BEVERAGES
More traditional are fruit flavoured brandies, but coupled with these I would also include the wide range of liqueurs which have reached the marketplace in the last few years—most of which contain distilled spirit in one form or another. I have included gin in this category.
At I.F.F. we spend a lot of time and money on research into natural fruit flavours, many of which have an application in alcoholic beverages.
We are not, as you may think, just extracting or distilling the fruit for these products, but also using fermentation and enzyme techniques for the manufacture of some unique products. We also extract other parts of the plant, flowers, leaves, stems etc., where flavour can be derived.
We also produce many other natural flavours such as herbal bitters, vegetable spice and nuts.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to qualify the term ‘natural’. We consider a natural flavour as defined by the American Code of Federal Regulations to be
“the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extract, protein hydrolysate, distillate or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis which contains the flavouring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products thereof, whose significant function is flavouring rather than nutritional.”
Many of these natural substances are specified in such lists as the GRAS list of American or the expert panel of FEMA (Flavour and Extract Manufacturers’ Association).
When we make a natural flavour, all flavour ingredients used have to be delivered from the product which name it bears. For example a natural orange flavour may contain only ingredients which come from the orange such as orange oil, extracts, essence oil or juices.
These natural flavours should not be confused with natural WONF which means ‘with other natural flavours’. In this category the ingredients must still be natural but only the predominant flavour portion has to come from the product which name it bears. This means that other natural ingredients may be added such as lemon oil in orange flavour or apple juice in pear flavour. Both these types of flavours are manufactured by I.F.F.
Perhaps it should be noted that what is considered natural in one country is not always the same in another.
In the area of gin, many companies are still producing by the traditional method of loading botanicals and spirit into a pot and distilling them together. However, more and more products on the world market are produced by what has become known as the ‘cold compound’ method. This involves dissolving flavour in neutral spirit and then adjusting the final alcohol level and filtering before bottling. This method, of course, has been known for many years, particularly in Holland for the production of Jenever, and has become widely accepted throughout the United Kingdom now with a number of products on the market produced by this method.
However, it has been noticed that by using a combination of the botanical oils to produce gins, a slightly less acceptable end product is manufactured, with a harshness on the palate and a less acceptable nose. We have, therefore, taken the cold compounding a stage further by distilling the individual botanicals together with neutral spirit and then concentrating the resultant distillate without totally removing all of the alcohol. This has given us a range of distilled concentrated botanical flavours which we are then able to combine to give a gin to meet the prerequisites of the bottler, and you will understand from this, that with a wide range of such distillates, a very varied number of gins can be produced. In terms of economics, these are competitive in price when compared with a traditionally distilled product and because the botanicals have themselves been distilled, the end product achieved has been found extremely acceptable.
It is my contention that beverage manufacturers are in the flavour business anyway. It is because the consumer likes the taste that he buys your product.
If we look at the marketplace, the majority of new products have been in the cordial/liqueur/cocktail group—and this can only be due to the growing sophistication of the consumers’ palate. People are experimenting with different kinds of taste, and the occasions for using these products are becoming more frequent. The flavour of the drink is an important part of its possible success in the marketplace, and I suggest to you that flavour companies can make a positive contribution to this success.