southern gentleman | SOUTHERN SPIRITS
Drinking Local By Jason Frye | Photography courtesy of Kathryn Shea Duncan, Brightside Pictures and Cheré Coen
Three innovative Southerners are turning local and unique ingredients into tasty spirits. Like many of you fine Southern gentlemen, I grew up eating farm to table, picking corn and digging potatoes less than 100 steps from our kitchen. Now, the phrase “farm to table” has become synonymous with tasty, locally-sourced ingredients and we see it everywhere from food trucks to fine dining to farmers markets (you farmers market folks don’t really need to say this, we figure if the farmer is selling us some produce, it’s farm to table). But what about drinks? Shouldn’t we “drink local” the same way we eat local? We should. And I just happen to know a trio of distilleries that can help compliment your farm-to-table dinner with a little grain-to-glass libation. Let’s look to Louisiana for our first couple of bottles: vodkas using grain to glass to dispel the common myth that vodka must use potatoes. While it’s true that traditional vodka recipes use potatoes, a little innovation never hurt anyone, and in this case, it’s produced two damn fine vodkas. Over in Sulphur, Jamison Trouth uses cane sugar in 66 DeSoto
his Yellowfin Otoro Vodka. A spearfisherman with a degree in chemical engineering, Trouth’s taste for vodka was developed after years of careful tasting and experimentation in college, and after a class in distilling, he found a love for making the stuff. And he’s good at it, something reflected in the name: otoro refers to the finest cut of tuna you can get, a delicious, melt-inyour mouth cut from the inside of the belly. Like its sashimi cousin, Yellowfin Otoro Vodka delivers a delicious, decadent, melt-in-your-mouth flavor every time it hits your tongue. Cane sugar is an ingredient folks more often associate with rum, but believe me, there’s nothing rum-like about Yellowfin. Instead, the cane sugar serves as a sort of shortcut for the distilling process. Since yeast — the driver in fermentation — can only eat sugar, everything has to be broken down to its base sugars to be used in fermentation, and by jumping right to something as rich and flavor-forward as cane sugar, Trouth can get right to the heart of the matter: making vodka. Smooth and easy-sipping, Yellowfin Otoro is tasty
