Beware, Blood Orange
After two years of hard work, we’re welcoming a new distillate to our citrus portfolio: the whole blood orange eau de vie. We’re talking with our master distiller Luka about what it took to create it.
THE IDEA TO FERMENT BLOOD ORANGES
The initial idea to ferment the blood oranges came naturally, as a reflection of our sustainable philosophy where we always try to use up all the good parts of the fruit that comes to our distillery. We use fresh blood orange peel for our There Will Be Blood Orange Gin, and since after removing the peel we are left with a lot of pulp that we do not use for the gin and at the same time do not want to throw away, we collected the pulp for two years in a row, fermented it and prepared for a standalone drink.
As always, we were ingredient-driven, and guided by the fruit: we had this fantastic blood orange that we knew we had to turn into a distillate.
Even though sustainability was the initial drive behind this eau de vie, I think this is our best fruit distillate so far.
TWO YEAR PERIOD OF PRODUCTION
We worked for two years on our blood orange eau de vie, fermenting the oranges two winters in a row, and working on the recipe to include the peel as well.
We studied fermenting citruses and working with fresh citrus peel with master distiller Hiroshi Eguchi in Japan, and even though this experience was precious, the final product is a result of trial, error, and various iterations at our own distillery.
For almost two years we’ve been collecting feedback from various people, from professionals to “basic” customers (at the bottom line it comes to whether one would or would not drink an eau de vie you made), but we weren’t happy with its balance until we had the second batch fermented and distilled, and dedicated ourselves to blending two years (2020 and 2021) to create a drink we are truly happy with.
During those two years of blending and working on a recipe we realized that blood orange could not be tamed, nor should it be- it had to stay wild in order to stay true to itself, and the only thing we could do is balance its acidity and bitterness.
As opposed to mild, tender mandarine, that was the first citrus we worked with, blood orange eau de vie had a very citrussy character already after fermentation, but to round up the whole orange experience, we couldn’t exclude the peel- as it is an essential part of this fruit.
Given the high amount of oil in the peel, we dedicated a lot of time to separating the oils and experimenting with different types of filtration at various moments, and that influenced the result tremendously.
CHALLENGES OF FERMENTING CITRUSES
Orange is very low on sugar and high on acids, and the fermentation was quite challenging. Working with the blood orange has taught us a lot about the importance of controlling the fermentation, and maybe it’s redundant to point out that the yield from this fruit is low. That means we’ve put a lot of effort into obtaining a small amount of final product from a big amount of raw material. Since the alcohol in the fermentation was low, we did a double distillation both years, and separated the best from the best- the result is a very refined product in small quantities.
WHY BEWARE, BLOOD ORANGE?
This eau de vie has all the characteristics of an orange, the good, and “the bad”: there’s acidity, there’s bitterness, there are citrus oils that we decided not to filter at the end, but only to separate from the top, as we didn’t want to hide those flavors. Drinking it can sometimes feel like an attack on the senses, and that’s why we called it Beware, Blood Orange. Surely by aging, even in the bottle, it will become smoother, and there might not be the need to be beware of it, but at the moment of creation, the name fitted perfectly.
CHARACTER
At the same time very expressive and nicely balanced, the best way to describe its character is “orange”, as drinking this eau de vie is a very similar experience to biting into a whole orange.
