This is your brain

"Collusion relies upon good memory. Stoners make horrible con men." This is from the pages of the White Dog, and leads us to item two in our series on How to Be a Criminal.

How to Be a Criminal, Item 2: Surprisingly, drugs and crime don’t mix. Stoners will forget what they have to remember, crackheads are unreliable, meth heads are crazy. Even drunks—they’ll either get pulled over for driving drunk or they’ll get in a fight.

The issue, at the time, was a certain individual's inability to remember previous conversations, but everywhere I went I learned stories. Why were the Stanley brothers pulled over with 473 gallons of moonshine in the back of the Econoline? Because they were driving erratically, due to their BAC. Why did the cops search the van? Because of the reefer smoke.

Meals on wheels

I was attempting to follow up and see what happened to the couple who were caught last summer -- I'm sorry: "set up." That's not right either, is it. Allegedly set up. There we go. They were allegedly set up and subsequently caught with a few gallons of moonshine inside a daycare center.

Read the original bust of the couple that ran the North Carolina Daycare here.

Here's a picture that was snapped at the bust:



The blue capped jars (the ones next to the sawed off shotgun on top of the beer which is holding up the milk jugs of moonshine?) are Courvoisier and a jug of Seagrams gin. You can see that more clearly in another shot, which also details revolvers and fanned out bills.

Among the comments on this story I found someone suggesting that "the perfect front" for a bootlegger would be to "drive a regular Meals on Wheels route." Which sounds a lot like the old ice cream truck drug dealer thing.

The thing is: it's not as if the cops busted in and found some guy upstairs drinking moonshine with a shotgun in the dresser drawer to protect his house. These people were selling booze out of a daycare center. The Meals on Wheels/Ice Cream Truck facade may, in fact, be a great cover. This one is not.

This didn't make it into the book. Had it happened earlier, I'd have been tempted to go down and follow their case. But these two definitely deserve a spot in the How to be a Criminal series.

How to be a Criminal, Bonus item #1: Keep the general standards of society in mind. Don't sell drugs at the playground. Don't run your nip joint in day care center.

How to be a Criminal -- a series

I heard a lot of stories from the wrong side of the law over the last four or five years, and almost without exception, I was surprised by how badly the crimes attempted were conceived and executed. Clearly, movie crime is overblown. I know that what I saw in The Italian Job never happens. But it has become obvious why D.B. Cooper deserves top spot in the criminal hall of fame.

Most crime is conceived by morons and carried out with breathtaking stupidity. I actually heard, for instance, of some guys who had grown enough marijuana to fill a big rig. They didn’t want to haul it right away, so they hired a guy to watch it over night. The guy they hired was a crack head.

So, in Chasing the White Dog, I decided to gather some tidbits along the way and present them as a series titled How to be a Criminal.

Here’s the first one:

How to be a Criminal, Item 1: Do not, while on probation or having recently come to the attention of the law, engage in large scale felonies with strangers.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled

Everyone remembers the line from The Usual Suspects; the greatest trick was convincing the world he didn't exist. Spacey said it with a twinkle in his eye, as I recall. My friend Matt Rowley (check the awesome present he gave to William S. Burroughs) was the first to use the line in reference to the modern moonshine business.

Over the last few years, I've tracked moonshine busts with much more than a cursory interest. One of the arresting officers says, almost without fail, that either they never see any moonshine any more, or that this bust is the largest one they can remember. My clipping file holds 265 articles (obviously some are repeats, and some aren't all that recent, but I doubt many go any farther back than the 90s). My online bookmarks number 129.

Clearly there's a disconnect, or a short term memory problem, or something. 300-odd busts in the last few years might not register in comparison to how many people have been arrested for assault or possession of a controlled substance, but it's hardly non-existent. And yet, when they busted Roger Lee Nance in North Wilkesboro with 929 gallons of moonshine a few days ago, the lead read: "in one of the largest liquor seizures in recent memory."

I'll give it to them this time, that's a lot of hooch to have on hand.

The Gun, the Blackberry, and Seven Pounds of Pulled Pork

Last week, I received an e-mail with this picture:

The text of the e-mail couldn’t have been more straightforward. My friend -- who had just shot these birds -- typed “Smoker?”

You’ve got to love a Blackberry put to good use.

Pheasants aren’t very big. They’d certainly feed us, but they’d look a little lonely in the smoker. Just a few days before I had tended to a small square of pork belly all alone on the rack, and throughout the cooking my joy was underscored by a sense of opportunity lost. All that smoke, all that good peach wood burned, just for a small square of belly. I should have planned better. I should have put a shoulder on, a couple of chickens, some sausage, whatever.

 I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. The pheasants would go on next to a seven-and-a-half pound butt. For reasons of timing and convenience that aren’t particularly germane to this, I decided to reverse my process. Most barbecue folks agree that after about four hours, you aren’t getting any more smoke flavor into meat. You’re still cooking it, but maximum penetration has been achieved. I’m not sure if it’s true, but I have cooked many times as if it were, and I like the end product. So my technique -- or what was my technique -- involved a few days. Rub and Smoke the meat on day one. Then slow roast it in a wet environment on day two. Pull it and heat it on the stove on day three. It’s a fun way to get pulled pork, and it allows for lots of adjustment of seasoning, and lots of snacking.

This time, however, I started the meat in the oven. First, I rubbed it. I change my rub all the time. This one had a little rubbed sage, some coriander, a lot of red & black pepper, and salt.

In the bottom of a roasting pan went apple cider, apricot vinegar, half a beer, and a sliced onion. Tinfoiled the top. Slid it into the oven, which was at a mellow 250 degrees.

I took it out seven hours later, peeled back the tinfoil veil, and plucked off a piece of juicy, melting pork. Then I ate another. This was already a very serious piece of pig. It was sweet and spicy. The vinegar had steamed into the meat. It was so tender that it ran a pretty serious risk of falling through the roasting rack.

Standing at the cutting board, I muttered a nonplussed “Huh . . .”

How could I get it in the smoker?

The tinfoil that had been on top of the pan was right there next to it, looking an awful lot like a bowl. I tried to keep the chunks large. Here’s what I got:

I sprinkled some more rub on the meat and into the smoker it went. Here it is about half way through, looking good:

I have made hundreds of pounds of bbq in my life. And this may have been the best. The open surfaces picked up the smoke flavor very nicely. The jagged edges turned to crispy bits of pork goodness. It cooled, I tore it up, and I’ve been eating it and giving it away for a week.

The pheasants? They were delicious.

What I'll do on my Summer Vacation

Tales of the Cocktail is one of the coolest parties of the year, and like the other ones (Royal Ascot, for instance) the sheer numbers of the thing astound. Last year in the big old Monteleone, all white and gold and aggressively air conditioned, well over 12,000 attendees went through 6,000 pounds of ice,  8085 mint leaves, 61 cases of Limes, and 23 pounds of Cucumbers. (The year before they used 800 watermelon cubes and 560 gin soaked dried cherries: You could follow trends in the cocktail world by watching these numbers change.)

At Tales, the public gets a great show, some wonderful opportunities, and many tasty cocktails. but while it is a good festival, it must be noted that the drinks crowd  — the writers, importers, distillers, reps, bar owners, mixologists, and retailers — dominates the scene. (At one point in a seminar last year a young woman prefaced her comment with “I don’t work in the industry, I actually pay for my drinks.” This was met with thunderous applause.) Strange celebrities of the world of intoxicants hustle through the halls, doing the West Wing walk-and-talk like besotted advisors to some mad campaign.  You can’t throw an ice cube without hitting a smartly dressed woman wobbling on high heels and shilling for a new liqueur. And everywhere, the best bartenders in the nation, looking exhausted, dirty, and hungover, shaking up drinks for us. (How exhausted, dirty, and hungover can a bartender be? Ask Patrick DeWitt.)

Throughout the hotel, liquor companies sponsor suites and offer tastings of their products and their signature cocktails. The ballrooms are converted to tasting arcades, with expectant bartenders working the tables like craft fair merchants, their offerings laid out before them. Last year was heavy on the cucumber and St. Germaine. 
    In the midnight hours, more suites, invitation only after-parties and after-after parties that roll on until everyone finally falls down.
    Tales starts Wednesday, and as of that moment every serious bar in the nation will be run by the third string. If you’re looking to get more than a Gin and Tonic or a shot and beer, you better come down to New Orleans to get it.
    I plan to post to the Ocean quite a bit while I'm there — even if I have to cover an eye to see straight. Wish me luck.

Young whiskey: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate

John Hansell, the editor and publisher of Malt Advocate, has brought up an interesting question on his blog. Using Jim Murray’s ratings as a “springboard” he writes: “I see emerging, from various sources, [. . .] a paradigm shift where young whiskies seem to become grouped together as a style, and then rated and scored based on the relative quality within that style, not on an absolute quality.” He poses this as a question. Is young whiskey a style?

The idea, I think, is that young whiskeys might be undeserving of their high marks, because it is inconceivable that a young whiskey could stack up against an older one.

(There’s a whole other conversation to be had about rating whiskey, stacking things up against other things, and all that. It’s clearly a weird exercise, but I think the drinking public needs something.)

The real question: Do you like the whiskey itself? Or the oak of the barrels? Is the implication here that “absolute quality” is equivalent to “oak?”

Whiskey is an excellent oak delivery system, but the barrel is not the whole story. That’d be like saying that it doesn’t matter what kind of meat you use for barbecue (another excellent way to get the complicated flavors of wood and smoke into your mouth).

I know my bourbons much better than I know my Scotch. In fact, I’d have stayed out of the conversation entirely if they hadn’t mentioned American whiskey -- at least I’d have limited myself to dropping “Ardbeg 10 is Really Good” in the comments section.  American whiskey is mentioned, however, and so I’ll stay close to home and start by comparing three bourbons I like a lot: Buffalo Trace, Evan Williams 7, and Elijah Craig 12.

I’m assuming that most of the whiskey in a bottle of Buffalo Trace is four years and one day old, because it doesn’t have an age declaration. In a side by side tasting, I think the Craig and the Trace pull ahead of the Evan W (although there’s not a real clunker here). Certainly the Trace scores higher than the Evan W. and on the right day I think it would score higher than the Elijah. More to the point: they are in the same league. No one at this tasting would say “Wow, this one here, clearly the youngest, just isn’t standing up to the others.”

There are (at least) two things that make whiskey: the new make spirit (which is called white dog) and the barrels.

The two elements should match, is my thinking. If there was no flavor element coming into the whiskey from the white dog, then all the barrels would be full of vodka.

Sometimes, barrels get in the way.

Mr. Hansell, in the comments section, wrote: “If a whisky (or spirit) is already getting a 96 rating, how will it taste at 8 or 10 years of age? And what score will it earn? There’s not much more room for improvement between 96 and 100 points. Are these whiskies actually peaking at 1-3 years of age? I doubt it.”

A year ago I was sitting around with Jake Norris at Stranahan’s  and we had an array of glasses before us. He was pulling stuff out of barrels -- I got to taste a few of the Snowflakes well before they were released. One of the things we tasted was the oldest barrel they had. Probably eight years old by now. I thought it was really good and I told him so, and I asked him if he ever thought they might do single barrel releases of the older stuff they’ve got.

He said something like “Well, it might be good. But it’s not Stranahan’s anymore.” And we turned to our original glass of Stranny’s (which is blended from barrels 2 to 5 years of age). He was right. The flavors that make Stranahan’s what it is had been stepped on by the oak. All that chocolate porter malt, all that lively grain flavor had given way to something more like bourbon. I love bourbon, and I’d still drink a limited release Stranahan’s, but Jake was right. That whiskey isn’t bottled young because they have to get it out the door. It’s bottled when it’s bottled because that’s what they want it to taste like.