There are many reasons to love the Danish summer, for us seeing nature in full bounty has got to take the medal.
One never knows how many days summer will last in this part of the world. So without a minute to waste, we rushed to Aarhus to hang out for a foraging day with our mates Mia Hjorth Hansen and Mads Schack.
The pair has a strong knowledge of the local flora, picking various ingredients throughout the seasons to be used, infused, blended (and more) in their delicious cocktails at Gedulgt and Force Majeure.
And if you don’t know these two legends yet, here is a bit of an intro. Mia, voted Best Bartender in Denmark two years in a row, is heading the team at the cocktail bar Gedulgt, a hidden gem in the city center of Aarhus. With her young and passionate team, Mia designed a 3-part creative menu, mixing playful libations, twists on classics, and changing seasonal tipples.
Mads Schack is no stranger to Gedulgt himself, as he was heading the team there before opening Force Majeure in October 2020. Force Majeure is a hybrid space of sorts, a “liquor store meets cocktail bar” where Mads pours and shares his personal high-quality favorites and creates delicious cocktails to be enjoyed by his guests. Because what is better than shopping for your home bar with a glass in your hand?
Anyway, here was the plan for our Into the Woods, I Suppose day.
FORAGE, PREP, CREATE, SERVE. Easier said than done.
We arrived in Aarhus in the morning, ready to jump in Mia’s car to head to a secret foraging spot and see what we could find. Between the beach and the forest, we got ourselves quite a few delicious gifts of nature, like crab apples, woodruff, seaweed, beach rose petals, pineapple weed, and much more.
Random fun fact: A Danish ruling of 1241 allows for one to gather as much as they can carry in a hat. As for the size of the hat? Your guess is as good as ours.
Then off we went back to Force Majeure to prep and create a whole 4-drink menu to be served two hours later at the bar. And if you thought the challenge was too easy thus far, you’re in for a treat. To make things harder, we put more conditions. All the drinks had to be based on our marzipan-forward spirit The Plum, I Suppose, and had to contain at least one foraged ingredient. Oh and of course, all we picked had to be used, one way or another.
Needless to say, the team exceeded our expectations and created 4 banging and distinctive cocktails in no time. And before you discover them, check out this video for the highlights of the day!
*EMBED VIDEO*
A super grassy and bright sour-style cocktail, highlighting the fruity layers of The Plum, I Suppose and elevated by a touch of smoke.
INGREDIENTS
Sorrel & Crab Apples
Elderflower
Blackberry flower
Egg
Smoky spray
A super floral take on the classic, bringing forth the marigold notes in The Plum, I Suppose.
INGREDIENTS
Meadowsweet
Beach Rose Petals
Cocchi Rosa Aperitivo
Mugwort
Nettle Seeds
A highly refreshing highball, combining the vanilla-like aromas of woodruff and the marzipan notes of The Plum, I Suppose.
INGREDIENTS
Pineapple Weed
Woodruff Oil
Bubbles
An Umami take on the famous Gibson, because yes, mushroom, seaweed, and The Plum, I Suppose are a match made in heaven.
INGREDIENTS
Seaweed vermouth
Judas’ ears mushrooms
Manzanilla sherry
We sure had a blast with the Danish gang, and looking forward to see what’s in next season!
]]>Let us paint a picture. It’s Saturday evening, you just swallowed the last drop of your favorite Empirical tipple. No plans on the horizon for your Sunday but chilling in the warmth of your home. And in the corner of your eye, there is that beautiful bottle staring at you, begging not to be thrown away.
Well, here’s one of the many ways you can reuse your bottle and bring life back to it on your rainy Sunday. Or any other day.
Niki has many talents, one of them having an incredible green thumb. She created beautiful herbariums for our Tasting Room and thought you’d like to make one yourself.
It will look great on your windowsill and your friends' too.
And if you don’t have an empty bottle lying around, why not get a full one first? We promise the empty process to be delectable!
Alright, here’s how it’s done.
Rinse your bottle. Clean your gravel and let them cool down.
Place the gravel in your bottle to create drainage and sprinkle your activated charcoal over them
Add your soil as your thicker layer, leaving a large enough hole in the middle for your plants
Place your plants with long tweezers, starting from the largest to the smallest, and lightly pack the soil. Be careful not to overcrowd the plants, leaving them enough space to grow.
Pack moss over the soil layer.
Clean your bottle and leave it open for a couple of days for the moisture to evaporate. Use a plant mister to avoid overwatering in the following days.
First things first, key factors for a healthy terrarium include light requirements and preferences in moisture level and temperature.
Mosses and ferns are especially thriving in a terrarium, and trendy plants like Peperomias, Pilea and Baby Tears can be easier to grow behind glass than on a dry windowsill. Exotic epiphytes and the low-growing nerve plant also do the trick.
If you want to bring color to your terrarium, small orchids, mini-African violets, and other flowering exotics work wonders.
Closed terrarium care should be easy. During the first week, it is essential to check the terrarium daily.
Foggy glass indicates that there is too much water in the system. This is common in new setups, but it can happen any time you overwater. The solution is simply to open the terrarium to reduce the moisture.
Once ventilation has cleared the glass, you can reclose the system. But keep an eye on it. Repeat the process until you see condensed droplets at the top but the terrarium’s glass remains clear.
Watch the leaves for signs of wilting or yellowing. Wilting in dry soil means that the plant needs a drink, and in this case, we mean water. But, if they are drooping in wet soil, it can be a sign of problems with root rot.
When the plants reach the desired height, pinch back any new shoots. This will make them grow in width. Remove any dead leaves to prevent disease.
And importantly, stay alert for mold
Rinse your plants carefully before putting them in the terrarium. You don’t want to introduce bugs, mold, or foreign chemicals.
Make sure your soil and the gravel are sterile to avoid bringing pests and mold spores into a closed system.
Allow growing room.
Trim the roots to keep a plant smaller. Don’t cut the large tap roots, just the thread roots that grow from them.
The coolest part of having a terrarium is seeing how nature creates and sustains a living microcosm. Understanding how a closed system works helps you maintain it properly.
The soil within the terrarium supports healthy microbial processes that nourish living plants. Moisture from evaporation and plant transpiration recirculate as condensed “rain” droplets that keep the soil moist.
Photosynthesis powers a dynamic cycle that keeps the air healthy. The terrarium’s plants use light to produce oxygen which is consumed at night; carbon dioxide is consumed during the day through photosynthesis and produced through the dark hours by plant respiration.
The man who led the charge on making these beverages is our head of research and development, Chris Stewart. He’s a smart guy from Ireland who has been doing all kinds of booze experiments at Empirical since 2017. It’s not often you get to hear from people who make cans of ready-to-drink booze, because usually, the story behind them is, “we got some gin and some tonic and we mixed them up and put them in a can”. But these cans are special so we thought we’d ask him a few questions about them.
Hi Chris! How did Empirical end up making cans?
Two years ago I made a rip-off of a Bacardi Breezer/WKD kind of thing for the staff Christmas party. I even bottled it in similar bottles and made fake labels and everything.
It was made from douglas fir and pineapple kombucha, then fat-washed with coconut fat and coconut water - it was a really upscale, earthy, Christmas-y pina colada kinda piss-take.
We called it Weed Is Just Expensive Incense cos it smelled like pot, and we mocked up a label for it and made like forty bottles for people to drink.
So you just decided to make cans after that?
Everybody loved those things, so Me and Sam (former head of Empirical sales) talked it through, got the sign off from the team, and got on with it. It took us three weeks.
...that doesn’t seem like a lot of time.
It wasn’t. The first can we made I wanted to base around pomelo. My fiance is from Argentina so I’ve spent a bit of time in Buenos Aires. Historically it’s a port city, and immigrants from all over the world would work there and drink a bitter - like a Vermouth - with pomelo soda after work every day.
That kind of floral acidity that comes from pomelo - it just works in a long drink. So we started using hops and pomelo juice and heating it up along with different spices and fortified alcohol and stuff, to begin with. We ended up with pomelo, seshwan, and lemon verbena. From deciding to make a can to then making it then trialing it was 21 days.
But that first can isn’t what we’ve got now…
Well, we learned from mistakes with the first can. We had some cans exploding, one almost hit a cat. We would send some to places and they’d arrive exploded. Now we pasteurize them, they don’t explode.
Also, having to peel all the pomelos by hand, we decided that we didn’t want to do that again - never ever again - so we went in a different direction. That’s when the gooseberries came in. I was playing with the idea of gooseberry and oolong tea together, then I went to Argentina for a bit, and while I was away Lars (Williams, Empirical co-founder) put birch and douglas fir in the mix - the two flavors that pull it together - and that can (CAN 01) was done.
You make it sound so easy.
Well, then we had to figure out how to produce it all at scale.
We had to get hold of a wine press from Italy to press the freeze-dried gooseberries that we’d hydrated with alcohol. We tracked that down via a trip to Sweden to visit a cider maker.
We also had to figure out how to make 2000 liters of tea. Originally we had a container built with a filter to sit in that we could filter through the tea in one batch. Now we have a strainer that’s inside a vessel that can hold 300 liters - a forklift lifts it up and we can brew 300 liters of tea at once. It’s a giant metal teabag, basically.
What about CAN 02?
That happened because I started drinking fruit beers that had been aged in wood. I got obsessed with the idea of stone fruits and wood combined. I realized sour cherries went really well with walnut wood, So I’d just get a tree and shave some shavings off the tree, put some into water and brew a tea and put some into alcohol and drain it off.
The resinous quality of the blackcurrant worked really well with the wood. I had hop vinegar involved for this one for a while - it stayed in till almost the end, it was so close to being the right ingredient but it didn’t quite work. We replaced it with a lemon verbena kombucha which worked quite well.
It so happened that during this time I had got some young pine cones from Germany and had been making kombucha with them. The day we were due to sign off the can after maybe 50 different trials and a shit ton of stuff, I checked my kombucha like five minutes before we signed it off, I asked Lars to taste it and he did and was like can you do another version of the can with this?
We tried to sign off the can again a few days later, but then Sasha happened to get hold of a Maqaw pepper. I put some in alcohol and Lars tasted it and was like, this works.
So CAN 02 was signed off twice because we kept finding things that were like a missing piece that we didn’t see. But now it’s the way it is and it’s super nice and I like it.
Is it your palate that decides what works and what doesn’t?
To begin with, it’s all me, then as it starts to get to where I think it tastes kinda good, Lars and myself will taste it and have a chat. Along the way with the cans Eric was tasting things with me all the time, like, “oh that ginger’s a bit too much there,” and stuff. You always have to have a second palate to tell you if it’s bullshit.
What’s so great about cans anyway?
You know the expression, “a big bag of cans”? There’s a simple pleasure in going to the store, picking up a big bag of cans and going to sit by a river, or a lake or field or just hang out at a friend’s house or whatever. A bag of cans is a simple takeaway beverage to share and enjoy with friends.
The can I love most is the can you drink when you’ve been out for a skate all day, then you and your mate end up getting a beer from a corner store and you’re sitting on a bench with your board at your feet and you’re sweating in the sun and it just tastes amazing. That’s what I want for the cans we’ve made - that beverage that you can just crack open.
But it’s always the same stuff - corner store lagers or whatever, nothing very interesting - why can’t cans be nice? We’ve brought all these crazy ingredients together to make a can with a stamp of super high quality on it - that’s something nobody else is really doing.
Words Bob Foster and Christ Stewart
Photo's by Bob Foster @fosterfoster20