Charlene McGee is a juniper spirit inspired by the Scandinavian culinary tradition of smoking. Juniper berries are smoked with their own wood, lightly crushed, macerated, and gently distilled at low temperatures to preserve the fruity, vibrant integrity of the botanical and the smoky flavor profile. The final blend is matured in Oloroso casks to impart a faintly sweet hint of woodiness.
The spirit has base notes of fresh juniper, fruity blackberries, and resinous, fragrant juniper sap that leaves a smooth, smoky finish. Unlike a traditional heavily peated spirit, this is an entirely brand new kind of flavor experience with smoke.
Flavour Notes: Smooth, Smokey juniper
Volume: 500mls
ABV: 40%
Serve: Italian Sweet Vermouth and Angostura Bitters or with cream soda and an orange wheel as garnish.
About Empirical Spirits | Denmark
Empirical Spirits is a Flavour Company and is forever inspired by the role flavour plays in our ability to create and transport experiences. Their primary focus is to explore flavour incessantly, by any means necessary. It was founded in 2017 by Noma alums, Lars Williams and Mark Emil Hermansen, in a warehouse just outside of downtown Copenhagen.
Using a chef-like philosophy in their approach to acquiring ingredients that are in-season and of the highest quality, they set about to create a distillation method that suited their goals. This lead Lars to become enveloped in vacuum distillation, a process in which the ingredients are heated to a much lower temperature relative to traditional pot still distillation, allowing for many of the properties of each ingredient to remain present in the final product. The first was built by Lars himself, and resembled the kind of machine you might find in sci-fi movies from the 1960s. They have since grown their operation to include multiples of these special stills, as well as other machinery to aid in the delicate extraction of flavour from their raw ingredients.
This approach to capturing flavour also influences every step leading up to distillation.