TOTC: Spirits of the Trees
Friends, I'm pleased to announce that this year, for the first time ever, I will be moderating a panel at Tales of the Cocktail!
This is a longstanding dream of mine, and I'm particularly excited about the seminar that finally got me there, which is called Spirits of the Trees: Acerum, Arrack, and Ogogoro.
(If that's all the sales pitch you need to come to the conference, my seminar is on Wednesday the 26th at 2:45pm, and you can get your tickets here. Otherwise, read on!)
Spirits of the Trees
The world is full of fermentable sugars, but most distilled spirits we encounter are made from only a handful of plants. We all love barley, grapes, and the rest of the usual suspects, but have you ever felt like there must be more out there? I sure have – I've had a minor obsession with spirits made from other agricultural products for at least a decade, and I'm finally putting that to good use with this seminar, which focuses on spirits made from the sap of trees. They have centuries of history and are made all over the world, but good luck finding them at your local liquor store.
I've pulled together a panel of sap spirit producers from three major traditions: Sri Lanka's arrack, which is made from coconut palm; Nigeria's ogogoro, which is made from raffia palm and oil palm; and Quebec's acerum, which is made from sugar maple. The panelists, respectively, are:
Devinda Balasuriya, owner of Ceylon Trading LLC, the largest arrack importer in the U.S.
Website: https://polarrack.com
Instagram: @polarrack
Lola Pedro, co-founder of Pedro's Ogogoro, the first distillery to produce ogogoro for export
Website: www.pedros.africa
Instagram: @pedrosafrica
Joël Pelletier, president of Distillerie du St. Laurent, one of the pioneers of maple distillation
Instagram: @distilleriedustlaurent
Seminar participants will taste the flagship products of the distilleries (and see how they're used in cocktails), hear how they're made, and learn their histories. The producers will then take audience questions and discuss common experiences and challenges in a roundtable format. No seminar like this has ever been offered before, anywhere – nothing has even come close.
My goal, my dream, my vision is that spirits made from tree sap will come to develop a kind of category consciousness, a sense of kinship and commonality despite the differences in the details, in the way that spirits made from fruits or cereals have; and that people will look back on this seminar as the moment when that began. If you would like to be part of that history, I remind you that you can register here (you'll want the Wednesday 7/26 day pass; Tales isn't selling tickets to individual seminars this year): https://whova.com/portal/registration/tales_202307
Lots more to come on what I have cooking for Tales of the Cocktail 2023 (this isn’t the end of it!) and on tree spirits in general. If you want to keep abreast of new developments, now is a swell time to sign up for the mailing list here: www.herzogcocktailschool.com/mailing-list
And also to follow the official HCS Instagram page: @herzog_cocktail_school