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Fellow Drammers!
In honor of the upcoming Chinese New Year festivities, on Sunday, February 7that 3pm EST / Noon Pacific / 21:00 in Europe, we’re going to turn our attention to China’s most popular spirit – baijiu! It’s kind of amazing that the West knows so little about this spirit given its huge popularity in China. The reality is that they drink so much baijiu in China that by volume nearly all of the top-selling spirits globally are baijius. Yet here in the West, it is virtually unknown. We know a lot of our members want to be literate in all things spirits, so this is a great opportunity, especially because our guest speaker is none other than Derek Sandhaus, the author of the definitive English language book on baijiu, Drunk in China! As far as we know, there is no better English-language expert on the topic anywhere in the world.
This is the 5thevent in our Drammers Book Club series, following on wonderful events in the last few months with authors Aaron Goldfarb (Hacking Whiskey), David Jennings (the Wild Turkey book American Spirit), Fionnan O’Connor (the definitive single pot still Irish whiskey book A Glass Apart), and Devan de Kergommeaux (Canadian Whiskey). Derek has become so prominent as an English-language baijiu expert that he even has started consulting for some baijiu brands and we’ll be tasting one of the baijius he’s working with.
Of course, we always like to try the extraordinarily rare stuff here at Drammers Club, and this is no exception, so we’ve sourced a couple of extremely rare Chinese rice wines that the auction house estimated are from the 1950s, both approx. 20% abv but still very, very rare. They’re only 500ml bottles (we’re guessing), so they will be allocated first-come, first-served as people sign up (we estimate we have enough for 20 sample sets). On top of those two expressions, we’ll also be trying three other baijius recommended by Derek:
- Ming River Sichuan Baijiu. In full disclosure, this is actually Derek’s own brand, but all the more reason that we’ll want to try it when we have Derek on hand, and by all accounts its both good and the rare baijiu that is pretty broadly available in the West. Distilled from Red Sorghum.
- Kinmen Kaoliang 58. 58% abv! You may have heard that there are different categories of baijiu (sauce aroma, which Moutai below is associated with, strong aroma (apparently Shui Jing Fang is an example of that), and this one falls in a different category altogether. We’ll try to get a little more intel on that to flesh that out a bit, but this baijiu gets high marks in its category.
- Kweichow Moutai Prince. This is probably the most recognizable brand out there, and they have Moutai’s that have been aged up to 30 years or more that can sell for thousands of dollars a bottle. We’ll be trying their more humble core range product. And if you go out and get a bottle for your self, note that they have two varieties, the Yingbin and Prince bottles, and we’re told you definitely want the Prince variety, apparently the Yingbin is very much an “acquired taste”, ahem.
Please note that the sample sets DO NOT include the book Drunk in China, which members are encouraged to get on their own in their preferred format. I’m about half-way through it now, and it’s a fun read – Derek has a great sense of humor as you might anticipate from the title. And as we hope to start doing in-person tastings again soon, we’ll try to make a habit of making clear for each tasting – this one will be an online/Zoom tasting, FYI.
We hope you can join us! All members are invited to pick up a copy of the book on their own and join in the discussion for free, and for those of you who want the sample sets, they’re $45/person for Drammers Members, $65/person for Drammers Observers. Please let us know if you have any questions.
Cheers!
Drammers Club