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Topsail Insider
Bonus Episode - Hidden Ships Tasting with Owner, Andy Szwejbka
2024 Topsail’s Top Choice Awards:
- 1st Place - Favorite Craft Cocktails
- 1st Place - Favorite Full Bar
In this special bonus episode of Topsail Insider, join us for an exclusive tasting experience at Hidden Ships Distillery, led by co-owner Andy Szwejbka. Andy takes us on a flavorful journey through their award-winning spirits, from their meticulously filtered vodka to their bold barrel-rested rum and sherry-finished bourbon. With behind-the-scenes insights and fun anecdotes—like the “gin-terventions” for gin skeptics—you’ll feel like part of the fun…and probably want to treat yourself to a tasting yourself!
Book your tour and tasting on their website at https://www.hiddenships.com/tours
Topsail Insider is Sponsored by Saltwater Resort & Suites - Topsail Island’s premier luxury hospitality experience! Book your beach getaway today at SaltwaterTopsail.com or call (910) 886-4818!
Hosted by Christa Schroeder
Edited by Jim Mendes-Pouget | jimpouget@gmail.com
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All right, take it away, andy, okay well welcome everyone.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you being here. We're going to go through tasting. We're going to have some fun. Today we have all six spirits that we make here at Hidden Ships Distillery. You don't have to do all six. You're welcome to do all six. If you do, we call it a grand slam, but there's no pressure at all. I'm going to take you through tasting notes on each. We're going to start with Vodka. Vodka which, I'll point out, just won a gold medal at USA Spirit Ratings. That's an international competition, so we're very proud of that.
Speaker 2:Vodka is kind of interesting. I'll tell you, as a distiller, I wasn't super excited necessarily to make it, because by definition, it's tasteless and odorless, right Like that's what defines vodka. So it's a little hard to get excited about that. I will tell you now, though. I'm very proud of our vodka, not so much on how we distill it but how we filter it. We actually spend four days letting this trickle through this coconut carbon filtration system, and I think, because we give it that time, it really takes the bite off of it, and I think it competes well.
Speaker 2:So for this tastings, I want you to always smell them first, if you just bring them up to your nose and here I'll hand you that. And when you smell them, what I want you to do is actually try to keep your mouth open if you can. It's a hard skill, but I believe in you. I know you can do it. And the reason you're doing that is so that it kind of dissipates some of the ethanol alcohol that would just otherwise overwhelm the nose. So go ahead and bring it up to your nose. You're going to give it that smell with that mouth open first, and now again tasteless and odorless. You shouldn't smell a whole lot with vodka. You just kind of just smell like the ethanol. It smells like maybe even rubbing alcohol a little bit, so you're not going to get very much on the nose.
Speaker 2:When we do these tastings, I always want you to take a small sip first. So go ahead and take a small sip whenever you're ready, and all that's doing is getting your palate ready to receive some of the flavors. So with that small sip, your second sip can then be a little bit bigger. You don't have to finish it, but you can, if you want to, and now you're going to get some of the flavors that may be in there. Now again, taste this in odorless by definition, so we don't want a lot in there.
Speaker 2:Actually, at the awards competition it was recognized for just being super clean, not a lot of bite, and I think that's because we give it four days to filter, so not a lot of bite. We give it four days to filter, so not a lot of bite, a little bit of minerality on that at the end. So we're very, very proud of the vodka. I will tell you it's not every day that you probably drink vodka. Neat, I do. It's my job, though right Like I have to. So I've done kind of side-by-side tastings with other vodkas that are on the market and again, I think ours competes very, very well in terms of crispness and clean and really it's that bite that's not there at the end, that I think kind of what defines it. That is our vodka. Very, very excited and proud about that one when are you distilling from?
Speaker 2:So this is 100% corn that we start with. So same for the vodka and all the gins. It's all corn based, 100% corn and gluten-free. Sometimes that question comes up, but in our distillation process all gluten is removed. The only time there's gluten in spirits is if they add it after they distill it. If they're going to add some kind of flavoring that could have gluten in it, but we get that question pretty often, but we don't add any flavoring after the fact. Any other questions on vodka? There's a little bit of sweetness to it, yeah, and so it is corn-based. So, even though we're distilling most of that out, if you get any kind of sweetness, that's going to be because it is 100% corn-based and you know vodka. You can make liquor from anything. It's just a matter of efficiency, right, like if I threw broccoli in there, we could get alcohol eventually. It just would take a long time and take a lot of broccoli, and so we use corn because it's super efficient in making ethanol alcohol. All right, so we're going to move on to gin, next Gin we're probably the most proud of, and I was the most excited to even make a gin, more so than even bourbon or whiskey.
Speaker 2:We did seven different trials to come up with this gin. I made a recipe, my wife made a recipe, my brother-in-law, who just happened to be in town that weekend. He got to make a recipe. He was excited. And then a very smart guy that I keep on retainer, he runs a consulting company, his I did. And then a very smart guy that I keep on retainer, he runs a consulting company, his name's Steve, and he did four of the recipes for us. We distilled them all at small batch, like less than a gallon each, and then for gin we like it to rest for at least a month after we distill it. So we let all seven of those rest. Then we did a blind taste test. Out of those seven we picked the top three on just an arbitrary scoring system and that was drinking them neat. So we took the top three after drinking them neat and then I made three cocktails out of each of them. So if you're doing the math, yes it was a nine cocktail day, but someone had to do the work. It was a tough day at the office, but we took those three, we made a gin and tonic out of it, we made a Negroni and we made a Tom Collins and if you know anything about cocktails, that just represents a really broad kind of spectrum of flavors that could be in a gin cocktail. So we tasted them and again scored them.
Speaker 2:After all three of the cocktails there was a clear winner after drinking it. Neat, it was the same clear winner after the cocktails. I wish I could say it was my recipe, but it wasn't. I came in second Second's, pretty good. Whose was it? It was actually one of my consultants and if you think about it he had four, so the ads were in his favor to win. But it was actually his wife's grandmother's old recipe. So he was super excited that we picked that one as our winner because he'd only ever made it at small batch and so when we made it last year in our 250 gallons still, it was the first time he got to do it kind of at scale and so he was excited and he had. He had tweaked the ratios of those ingredients over the years but it was the same ingredient list that I guess his wife's grandmother family used to make. So that was very cool for us.
Speaker 2:The defining characteristic of gin is that it must be predominantly juniper. Juniper is that botanical that can sometimes make it taste like a Christmas tree. Well, for Amy and I, when we were doing our research, we didn't want it to taste like you were taking a bite of a Christmas tree. We wanted to kind of minimize the juniper as much as we could, and so that's what we did with this recipe. We call it citrus forward, there's orange peel, lemon peel, lemon verbena in there. We call it citrus forward, there's orange peel, lemon peel, lemon verbena in there. But it's rounded out, I think, at the end with some elderberry and some clove, actually for a little spiciness. And so same thing when you smell this one, try to do it with your mouth open, and on the nose you are going to get some of that juniper because it is the predominant botanical that's present. So on the nose, juniper will come through. When you take that first small sip. That'll prepare your palate to switch over to gin. And before I forget, I'll also point out, also a gold medal winner. We won gold on our gin at the New York International Spirit Comp, which is again international, against all the large distilleries. So on that second sip your palate's a little bit more prepared to taste what might be there. So you should probably pick up on some of that citrus and even some people can pick out the clove, kind of at the tail end of tasting it. It's delicious.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're very proud of it. It's done well, it's been well received. And we hear, at the bar especially, a lot of people come and say you know, I don't like gin. I haven't had gin since I was a teenager and I said, ah, you had a ginsident, didn't you? You did. And so what we like to do is introduce them to our gin and you drink it neat. Again, that's not common to do with gin. We like to put it in a really good cocktail. That's what's great about gin. It balances really well. And so what we do here at Hidden Ships for those that had ginsidence we have ginerventions and we reintroduce them to gin, and we've done that pretty successfully, with a lot of people that come back and say you know, I never liked gin, but now I really like your gin. So again, we're very proud of it.
Speaker 1:When I came here, I bought a bottle of this because I do like gin. Yeah, you know I'm a Tanqueray guy. This is one of the rare ones, though, that if I make a gin and tonic, normally you know you'll add lime or a twist or something to it, and this gin does not need that. Oh, okay, I have found that whatever's in it whether it's the lemon or the other botanicals makes that completely unnecessary, in fact it becomes overkill and I really have to admit I really it's one of the most.
Speaker 1:I think the way I phrased it to my wife was it's the most interesting gin I've ever had.
Speaker 2:Well, that's good In a good way. I appreciate that. Yeah, in a good way, that's great feedback. Thank you, in a good way, very much so.
Speaker 2:So we're going to move on to our barrel-rested gin. This is the same ingredients, the same botan. I mentioned before that for all of our gin we let it sit for at least a month, and the reason we do that is we want all those botanicals to kind of meld and become a single flavor profile. For this one, what we did was we let it rest clear for three full months, so it was really well blended. And then for another three months we rested it on oak spirals, and so when you taste it and when you smell it, you're going to get a little bit of that oak. What I think is really fun about it is you know it's our gin and then really I get it at the end there's just something special that comes, I think, from the oakiness, and so we're really proud of this.
Speaker 2:It just launched, actually July 4th, so it's only been out a couple of months now, and again, I think it's been well received. So you know it's our gin when you smell it and taste it, but then you get something a little extra special, so go ahead and smell whenever you're ready, again with your mouth open, if you can. So this one, because it's a new product. We didn't have it available to enter in some of the previous competitions that we've done well in. There's one competition that we're pending the results on. It'll be the first one that has our barrel-rested rum and gin. Those results should be out really by the end of this month, and so I'm excited to see how it did in a competition setting. I think it should do very, very well.
Speaker 1:Definitely a difference between the two, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure, very, very well. Definitely a difference between the two though. Yeah for sure, just add something to it. But you know it's our gin. When we put it on the menu we have it on as a Gin Ricky, which is kind of a spin on a Tom Collins, but it does very, very well in that drink. And then an old Cuban drink, which is very fun. And so, yeah, those have both done very, very well for us All. Right, we're going to move on to rum. We're going to switch it up a bit and I will take these. This is our unaged white rum.
Speaker 2:I mentioned all the trials we did with gin when it came time to do rum. We ran out of time last year so I didn't have time for a lot of trials. I asked my consultant, steve. I said what's a good recipe? He said let's go 50% molasses, 50% golden sugar. I said let's go 50% molasses, 50% golden sugar. I said perfect, we're out of time, let's do it. And I guess there is some different philosophical thoughts on what that ratio should be 60-40, 70-30. So we're straight 50-50 with our molasses and golden sugar.
Speaker 2:So when you smell this, what most people get on the nose is a butter or a butteriness, so you can go ahead and smell that. That's what comes through for most people. Other people's again. Everyone's kind of nose and palate is a little bit different, but most people get butter. They even start thinking popcorn because of the butter, butterscotch Absolutely Same thing on the palate. When you taste it, go ahead and whenever you're ready, that's what comes through. Predominantly is a smooth, buttery butter rum sometimes. Or some people even say Werther's Original, but it's all kind of associated with that butteriness and that just comes from the molasses and sugar that we use. All right, so now we're going to move on to our barrel-rested rum, and this one I'm really, really excited about Again just came out July 4th, so a couple months old.
Speaker 2:What we did with this one is it started the same as the rum that you just tasted. So it's the same recipe, same rum wash. But after it comes off the still, we actually put it into what was a bourbon barrel. So when we dump our bourbon, the barrel's empty. Then we fill it with the rum, and so you're going to get some of that vanilla, some of the sweetness from the barrel, a little bit of oakiness perhaps. But then we also added a wood spiral and the wood is called Ambarana wood. It's a South American hardwood and it gives it kind of a Caribbean. I get banana notes off of that and that all comes from the Ambarana.
Speaker 2:I had done some experiments with just white rum and Ambarana and rested it and that tasted delicious. I did not do trials to see how the bourbon barrel with the Ambarana was going to do, we just went for it. We did four whole barrels and I said I hope it turns out good. We waited seven months and I think it turned out very, very good when we tasted it. So again, same as our rum. So you're still going to get some of that butteriness that comes through. But I think you'll pick up on some Caribbean notes from that Ambarana.
Speaker 1:You can tell from the color.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So just on some Caribbean notes from that Ambarana you can tell from the color yeah, so it's not going to be as dark as a bourbon because bourbon takes years and years and years to sit in a barrel. This only had seven months, so it's got a little bit of that color. I love the smell.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me too, I agree. Oh, this is really nice, it's really delicious. This is really nice, that one's really good yeah.
Speaker 2:Really good. Yeah, so this one also. Again, we're pending results in our competition.
Speaker 1:Any coconut in any of those.
Speaker 2:So there's no coconut but, that kind of flavor would come from that Ambarana one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, is that what it's from?
Speaker 2:Yep for sure. I think it's going to do very well in a competition setting. It's been doing well in sales here. We actually featured it when we put it on the menu. Of course our old-fashioned with our bourbon is our number one selling cocktail. But we added this to the menu as a rum old-fashioned and I thought that was a cool spin on it because it sat in a bourbon barrel. The cocktail is going to be a little sweeter than a traditional old-fashioned but it's been very well received. The rum old-fashioned, I think because it rested in a bourbon barrel it gets just a little bit of that.
Speaker 1:So very proud of that one. I almost hate to lose the taste by mixing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that one could be put on ice, or some people like they drink bourbon. They drink it neat.
Speaker 2:I think that one has the potential to do that, all right. So we saved the bourbon for last. It's usually a crowd favorite. Now, bourbon is an age spirit. As I said, it takes years and years to sit in a barrel. I wasn't open years and years and years ago. We're coming up on our one-year anniversary in a couple of weeks here.
Speaker 2:At the end of September, when I was building the business model and wanted to open this place, I made a decision that I wanted bourbon day one, and so that meant that initially, I'd be sourcing bourbon from somewhere else. Sourcing in the distilling industry is incredibly common, more so than, say, breweries or wineries, although they do source a little bit. But in distilling, even the big distillers will source from each other when they need to. In fact, four Roses, who I'm sure you've heard of, started because they went to Roses Distillery and picked four barrels, so they called it Four Roses. Right, and that was sourcing. And so we made a decision to source because I wanted bourbon day one. We partnered with a company called Southern Distilling up in Statesville, north Carolina. That was really important to us, because all that corn that went into this bourbon is grown within 20 miles of that distillery, so it's North Carolina grown corn. The reality is I could have saved a lot of money buying bourbon from somewhere else, but that's just not the story we wanted to tell. So we wanted that North Carolina connection, so we sourced from them. I went up there, did tastings on everything they had the mash bill. Mash bill just means recipe. So the recipe and mash bill for this is 78% corn, so there's going to be a sweetness to it. From all that corn. It's 14% rye, so it's actually a mild rye bourbon and then 8% malted barley.
Speaker 2:What we do with it after we receive it is we take it through what's called a secondary aging for two months here on site. And when we were experimenting with this before we opened, we did five different trials. We rested it on five different pieces of wood to see which one we wanted to go with, and we rested those for two months. And so we rested it on a cherry wood, a mulberry, which is a fruit tree, we did a port, we did a sherry and we did a French oak, rested them for two months, did another blind taste test, arbitrary scoring system. We picked the two front runners this time. We didn't know at the time, but the front runners were the sherry and the French oak. So then I took those two and I made an old fashioned out of it, actually, because for me we wanted to make great spirits for sure, but it was also how is it going to be in a cocktail? How is it going to hold up? So we always put it up to that test, made the old fashioned out of both of those, and what we found was that there was just something special about the dry sherry mixing with the sugars of a cocktail. That just made it special, whereas the French oak made the base bourbon a little sweeter already, and so now we're adding sugar to sweetness and it was a little too much in the cocktail. So we slapped the table. We said the sherry is what we're doing and that's what we still do today.
Speaker 2:I just received eight barrels last week that will represent batch five of our bourbon, and each of those 53-gallon barrels gets another wood spiral. This time it's oak spirals that we soak in that dry sherry for about 10 days, two weeks. So you end up with a sherry finish Very similar to what, like an Angel's Envy, does with their port finishes and their rum cast finishes. And we did that just to make it unique Again because I knew I'd be sourcing initially we wanted to put our own fingerprint on it. We think the base bourbon was a great foundation to build on. They make a great bourbon up there at Southern and again we just wanted to make it unique.
Speaker 2:So go ahead and definitely smell this one. First, take a small sip when you're ready, just because now we're switching from run to bourbon. Take a small sip when you're ready, just because now we're switching from run to bourbon. And that second sip should prepare you to get some of that flavor profile a sweetness, vanilla characteristics, some oakiness. Perhaps A lot of people can't even pick out that it is a rye because it was already a mild rye, it only being 14% of the recipe, and I think our secondary aging with the sherry kind of mutes the rye even more Rye. Typically, if you ever have a rye, bourbon is kind of characterized by a spiciness, pepperiness, but I think ours is muted a little bit with that sherry and it's been well-received. We've had very flattering locals that will come in and say I did a blind taste test and we picked this out of a lineup against you know whomever, some of the big names. So I don't know if it's true or not, but it's flattering, it's nice to hear.
Speaker 2:Any questions on anything? We just tasted Well, great. Thanks again for being here. I really do appreciate it and we're open now, so stay for a cocktail.
