Standard Wormwood
Matt Pietrek traveled the world, visited countless distilleries, and wrote a medical textbook-sized book on them. Luca Gargano traveled the world and gave us Caroni.
I went to my local distillery in Brooklyn. Have you seen airline ticket prices these days?
History
Standard Wormwood is a pretty small operation in Industry City, a converted industrial complex in Sunset Park. Founded in 2006 by Sasha Selimotic and Taras Hrabowsky, the distillery is dedicated to a single ingredient: wormwood. Their website says they grow it on their own farm in Orange County, New York, and they use it as an aromatic component to a variety of spirits, including, but far from limited to, absinthe. They claim on their website that they are (perhaps?) the only distillery and full cocktail bar in the world that makes every single cocktail ingredient in-house.
Production
View from the lounge.
View from the bar.
The distillery floor is small but busy. By the windows up against the bar are what I believe are two stills. One appears to be a hybrid batch still with a 5-plate column head, with additional copper and steel segments nearby that may be swappable configurations. The other is a smooth steel column still, likely used for producing more rectified spirits. It all looks very modular and configurable, and it’s unclear whether they share a boiler or whether it’s two truly separate stills.
They only produce one rum, Standard Wormwood Rum, and I have reviewed it. The menu describes it as
High ester rum distilled with wormwood. Vapour infused with tropical fruits to give funky pineapple and banana undertones.
It sounds to me like they distill their base rum with wormwood present in the still, and then pass the distillate vapors through a botanical basket packed with tropical fruit before condensing? I’m not sure if that’s right, but it would be akin to a gin-style vapor infusion applied to rum.
I remember when I emailed Hovdenak distillery in Iceland for information about their rum, they told me that they actually buy molasses from Jamaica and then ferment it to be funky, and I thought that this was really cool. Taras told me that the distillery originally also sourced Jamaican molasses and fermented it themselves, but that they’ve since moved away from that, as the fermentation was labor-intensive, took up significant space in a small facility, and didn’t even save them very much money over simply buying bulk rum from a bulk supplier. They now source from Ultra Pure.
Looking at Ultra Pure’s catalog on bulkalcohol.com, one product jumps out at me immediately:
Jamaican Power Blender (Origin: Jamaica)
Blend of small batch pot still rums. Flavor profile: banana, pineapple, papaya, mango, and coconut. Intended for use in 5-15% concentrations with a base spirit.
So the base spirit is a light column still rum from USVI, a la Captain Morgan. In other words, Ultra Pure’s product is itself already a blend: a small proportion of high-ester Jamaican pot still rum mixed into a lot of cheap USVI column still rum, essentially the same principle as Rum Verschnitt (which is when German blenders imported small quantities of high-ester Jamaican rum and diluted it with neutral spirit, to stretch the funkiness of a small amount of Jamaican rum across a larger volume). Standard Wormwood then takes this pre-blended base, redistills it through their hybrid still with wormwood, and passes the vapors through a fruit basket.
Taras told me that Ultra Pure does not disclose which individual Jamaican distilleries the rums in the blend are from. It might be a bit of a shame, because making your own fermentation rich in acids to make it funky sounds totally radical! But, their final product is still very unique. It’s a funky Jamaican-style rum with the bitter finish of Malört, and it makes nice mixed drinks. Though, for the price, I can’t really say it’s a good value, when you can buy a 1L bottle of Planteray 3 Stars and 1L Spike’s Breezeway Blend combined for the same price as a 750mL of this rum. But I get it, it’s artisanal, small batch rum distilled in NYC. The bartenders were really friendly and knowledgable, and I do recommend Industry City for the vibes, and while you’re there,you might as well stop by for a good rum cocktail.
