French Whisky is Coming! A Spirited Adventure into the Next Big Thing in Spirits with Annie Beebe-Tron

Talented and NPR-voiced De Maison Spirits/NoLo manager, Annie Beebe-Tron, decodes the future of French whisky in the US by drawing a circle around the next important narrative in the landscape of artisan spirits by highlighting one of the great up-and-coming French Whisky Distilleries on the scene: T.O.S. Distillery in the Hauts-de-France - a young venture already making waves within the sea of the whisky world.

Quietly, French whiskey has experienced a remarkable transformation over the last two decades, with over 100 distilleries now dotting the French landscape.

On this episode, Annie walks us through a primer on French Whisky and the protected areas, and highlights  T.O.S. 'Artesia' Pure Malt Whisky, a single malt, single distilled whiskey matured in ex-bourbon casks with a whisper of French oak.
The Genièvre 'Boutefeu', a traditional, un-aged, grain-based spirit from the area aromatized with juniper berries.
And finally, one of the rare Eau-de-Vie de Bière in the US, the T.O.S. 'Humulus'. 
Seeped in the aroma of local terroir and slow fermentation, these handcrafted spirits bear testimony to T.O.S.'s respect for tradition, innovation and craft.

For more Craft, Follow De Maison Spirits on IG
Visit the T.O.S. Website HERE
Follow T.O.S. on IG
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Original Music by Julian Tamers - @juliantamers on IG and Tiktok

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This is great.

Speaker 2: 0:02

Welcome to the Peronecast.

Speaker 1: 0:05

Very good, you do have an NPR voice. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 0:11

You're listening to NPR or not the Peronecast? It's not NPR. We would get kicked off at PR.

Speaker 1: 0:20

Oh my gosh, we might have just. Oh no, I feel like this is perfect, annie Vivitron.

Speaker 2: 0:33

Hello.

Speaker 1: 0:34

Welcome. I'm so happy to see you.

Speaker 2: 0:36

So happy to see you.

Speaker 1: 0:38

What is your title at DEMISON and will it fit on a card?

Speaker 2: 0:44

I think the title currently is designed to fit on a card and that it is Spirits Director. I think Spirits Portfolio Director, something like that.

Speaker 1: 0:53

We're really into titles at DEMISON. Obviously we are clearly.

Speaker 2: 0:57

But yeah, we sort of unofficially say that it is everything non-wine, which of course even that is not accurate, because that includes fortifieds and sherrys and those are wine, but everything that's sort of outside of, just, you know, our core wine portfolio, so non-alkan cider and fortifieds and spirits and all sorts of goodies.

Speaker 1: 1:21

How did you get into bars spirits? What was the moment that you were like this is what I want to do.

Speaker 2: 1:30

I had been interested in them for a while. I'd always been interested in food. I did my undergrad in film and film writing and directing and for a while I was like maybe I'll drop out and cook. And then I was like, well, I don't want to do that, that doesn't make sense for me. And then I was living in New York, working on wanting to put things together to head to grad school and the arts. And it's funny because I think there was a moment there where I could have split in a different direction. I tried, you know, potentially getting a job in a bar, and because I had an amazing cocktail at Gramercy Tavern which is stuck in my head forever.

Speaker 1: 2:06

No way. What was that cocktail?

Speaker 2: 2:08

Oh yeah, I can still remember it. I don't know if I have the base spirit accurate. Now I want to say it was gin, because that would make sense, but I don't think it was. I think it might have been brandy and it had celery bitters and it had a black pepper tincture. It was so savory and so good and I was having lunch there with my mom and I was like, oh my God, I didn't know beverages could be like this and they could involve so much of what I loved about food in terms of flavor.

Speaker 2: 2:34

So for a couple of years I thought maybe I would go in that direction, but I didn't. I went to grad school, did a master's in art curating and writing and then, after grad school, I ended up working at a gallery for like $10 an hour, 30 hours a week, and I thought, well, I can't live like this. So I got an evening job in a restaurant and then thought, well, I'm leaving the gallery early to go to the restaurant because I like being there so much, and then from there I just stayed, so worked my way into the bar side, you know, slowly, and that was kind of it.

Speaker 1: 3:06

When you worked yourself into the bar side. What was the cocktail? The in vogue cocktail, you know today, it's the espresso martini or the Negroni's Belliato with Prosecco Prosecco in it. What was the cocktail of choice then? What was the call?

Speaker 2: 3:21

I feel like it was when Negronis were just starting to be cool. I do not like I mean they had been cool, but people were like really starting to talk about Negronis. And then, of course, it's been funny since then seeing a thousand and one quote unquote Negroni variants with so many ingredients swapped out that at some point I don't you know how far from the tree does it have to get to become a new tree.

Speaker 1: 3:45

Right.

Speaker 2: 3:46

I think I really think this is when it was like Negroni's proper and Amari were anything with. Amari were starting to become become cool, just people doing shots of Furnette, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 3:58

I wish that was the case for me. I was in the cosmopolitan Mojito time, which was a little not as fun as the Negroni time, I think.

Speaker 2: 4:08

Both of which have come back, both of which are starting to get some love.

Speaker 1: 4:11

Well, that's when you know you're a little old, is when things start to come back. The bell bottoms of the cocktail world.

Speaker 2: 4:17

When you hold on to your cocktail closet long enough that it's cool again.

Speaker 1: 4:22

That's great. Well, I wanted to dive in on something that people don't really talk about. It's very, very early, but I wanted to talk about French whiskey. I wanted to just start with In your perspective, why is French whiskey not a thing today? I know there are some people that are aware of French whiskey, but if you were telling someone, this is where we are now with French whiskey, what would you say?

Speaker 2: 4:49

The first thing I would say with French whiskey is it is coming. It is coming and there are a lot of sort of things that speak to that and a lot of reasons for that, but I'm not entirely sure why it hasn't happened here yet, except that the conversation isn't happening here around it. Whiskey writer that I was speaking to was talking about how and you know not to name names, I don't know if this was on the record, but was saying that no one has sort of drawn a circle around the conversation. All these producers are having their own conversations and having these separate pieces of it being told, but Japanese whiskey, for instance, now has a cohesive conversation.

Speaker 2: 5:35

Some people would say there is sort of, broadly speaking, a Japanese whiskey style. Some people would say that's too general. You can't make that kind of sweeping statement. But there is a conversation happening there about why it is what they're doing, where they come from, in relationship to, you know, scottish origins. There is a narrative that tells the story and I think the narrative hasn't happened here in the US. People still don't understand why or what's interesting about it and that sort of circle hasn't been drawn around all the different things that are happening in that region and in spirits there, in whiskey there particularly.

Speaker 1: 6:12

I feel like this is the time to draw a circle. Then, In terms of whiskey, you were just there. Give us a primer on the. Are there protected geographical areas for French whiskey? What would you say as a general style? Do you think what's so special about French whiskey? Just those three easy questions for you.

Speaker 2: 6:33

No problem In terms of the history of French whiskey. You know it's a relatively recent history, but not as new as people think. Warringham was the first really French whiskey distiller in 1989, I think and then they released the first French single malt in the 90s and they're in Brittany. They make whiskey, breton specifically, and so there is history there. There is, you know, now 30 plus years of tradition happening there, but it has exploded in the last really 20 years, really since 2000. There are, I think, over 100 whiskey distilleries now in France, I mean, and that has been really in the last couple of decades, and part of I think the trick is that there are.

Speaker 2: 7:20

You know, france, of course, is a country that understands its terroir very well. There is a thorough understanding. When you talk about the difference between Alsace and or Doe and Brittany, even just saying those things to anyone in the beverage world, you have a sense of what is there, what the history is, what else they grow, what the land is like, what the soil is like. There's a lot to explore and right now there are only two protected regions Brittany and Alsace. Alsace has pretty strict parameters around what whiskey can be there. Brittany, it's pretty open. It's a pretty wide sort of set of rules for what can be a whiskey Breton. And then I don't remember where your question was.

Speaker 1: 8:02

Perfect. That's because I asked four questions, I guess I'm wondering so you have these protected geographical origins, these two. You have a very people don't know about French whiskey, but it's growing. You have a country. My understanding in France is that they consume a lot of whiskey whiskey without the E. So a lot of Scotch whiskey, a lot of whiskey goes through France. They're a big consumer.

Speaker 2: 8:27

The most in the world as of a few years ago.

Speaker 1: 8:29

Okay, great, I guess I'm wondering what's special. So you have a deep history with great based spirits, these legendary. You have the legendary herbal occurs. So France has a long history of distilling and making great shit, basically.

Speaker 2: 8:46

Well, they have all the components that you need. They have great land, they have great agriculture, they have great water, they have great fermentation knowledge in the long history of French beers. They have great distilling knowledge, like you said, they have a great understanding of their land and I mean, depending on the area of the country you're talking about, they have peat box, they have great you know. They have a ton of barley. They have barley that's different in different regions and expresses itself differently. So they have all the components of making great whiskey and so they're kind of deciding the French whiskey industry is kind of deciding what is important to them and how they put those components together, what their priorities are, and there are a couple of different paths that people are kind of taking. Which is really going to define, I think, the future of French whiskey and what that looks like In terms of style, in terms of flavor, you could say.

Speaker 2: 9:40

I think there's, for me there's often a little bit of a delicacy to French whiskey. They tend to be pretty light on oak, very intentionally. They're not trying to replicate certainly you know American whiskey production which is really oak heavy. They tend to be very aromatic, in my experience, and I think this is partly coming back to their, of course, long history of Odovies. They take a lot of knowledge from brandy production, from fruit distillation, and it lends a very aromatic quality to the whiskey. That is really exciting.

Speaker 1: 10:16

That's brilliant. What is Toss Distillery?

Speaker 2: 10:20

Toss is a really exciting sort of young project up in Haut de France, the northern most region of France. I always say it's where, like Dunkirk and Calais are. I mean it's really like it's a. It's a. It's a wild region historically and one that people I think forget about, like they're like an hour 55 minute train ride north of Paris. They were just right up there and and de France of course is. I mean they really have Flemish history. They are really connected to you know Flemish beer, which of course is, is sort of where Toss started.

Speaker 2: 10:55

They've been brewers for over 20 years of classic, like Flemish style bottle conditioned, large format beers, and they're also the heart of barley country.

Speaker 2: 11:06

I mean there is, of course, barley growing all over France. You know, notably there's barley in Brittany and Alsace, these regions that have been sort of isolated for whiskey. But Haut de France is the heart of where that is, of where that's at. There's so much barley being grown there and a lot of it is sent to, you know, mass production, like to do distillation for people, for other people's purchase, but they are working with two local malteries to source local barley using local water, and so they're applying really their, their knowledge of fermentation, their deep knowledge of this Flemish style fermentation to the local terroir, and then adding into it the element that their master distiller, cati Gravina. She has a background in perfuming, so she's the partner of Stefan, one of the brewers, one of the founding partners of Toss, and her background is as a perfumer, and so she brings this, not just technical knowledge of aromas and compounds and molecules, but this flair, I think, to their whiskies that that really gives it such a such a beautiful identity in such a beautiful expression.

Speaker 1: 12:15

What does Toss stand for?

Speaker 2: 12:18

Toss stands for the other side, because when they wanted to open the distillery, they decided to open a distillery on the other side of the brewery walls, which I love. They're just like the sweetest beer nerds I know. I mean, they're really just like tender folks who are like we'll open it on the other side, no problem, no problem.

Speaker 1: 12:41

Yeah, this distillery in the grain bowl of France, as someone said to us, is doing these. Really, everything that I've tasted from them is just so beautiful and pure and there's an element of kind of a wink with like oh de Vitebière, that is so, oh it's. When you smell it, you know what it is and you don't have to be some wacky nerd. It's great. What are the three current bottleings we have from from Toss, from the other side?

Speaker 2: 13:11

The one that they started with was whiskey, of course, because whiskey takes time and that's one of the beautiful things, of course, about it is that it necessarily involves patients, and so that was the first thing that distilled, first thing they laid down and, of course, the thing that we currently have the least of, because we're just grateful to 2017 them for having made it and laid it down and saved it at all. But they started with the whiskey. Which is an interesting thing about de France is they have a history of distilling and we'll talk about that in a second with their second distillate, the Chignève, but whiskey, there is not really a thing. People aren't really producing whiskey there. One of the things that is happening now in France is, as people are sort of seeing it a little bit as a as potentially a whiskey goldmine or a gold rush. People are looking at well, where do we produce spirits in France and we should make whiskey there, not where should whiskey be made and how can we produce it there?

Speaker 1: 14:09

Fascinating.

Speaker 2: 14:10

It's a huge sort of again sort of turning point or split that's happening in the production there. But they're in a difference, working with Barley, having fermented barley for a couple of decades and understanding their local terroir and agriculture and the way that applies to beers, and so they made whiskey. So it is single distilled, single malt, local grains, local water, slow fermentation, which is really important. They have a nice, cool eight day fermentation, very much coming from their brewery knowledge. Single distilled on a Holstein Alembic and then aged in mostly ex-burpen casks with just a little bit of new French oak blended in there. So a really classic profile in terms of the barrel aging, which is uncommon in French whiskey. Most of the time people are going well, we ain't French whiskey, so we should age it in barrels that speak to other French beverages ex-coniac barrels, ex-sautern barrels, ex-white burgundy barrels. There are a lot of barrels to choose from floating around France. That's true.

Speaker 2: 15:11

And they went. We wanna make a great whiskey period and keeping to a more classical profile in the aging. Let's what's distinctive about the terroir, the land, their fermentation and distillation speak through clearly, without getting muddled by layers of barrel that are not necessary.

Speaker 1: 15:30

Cool, they don't add any coloring, they don't mess with any of that stuff.

Speaker 2: 15:35

So yeah, no color, no filter.

Speaker 1: 15:36

Okay, so this is. I've heard you describe this as a not-okey, light, delicate whiskey that's atypical, or, as you said, stylistically, that kind of broadly speaks to French whiskey, but does toss. Do it in a very nuanced way.

Speaker 2: 15:55

Yeah, I mean it definitely has a really beautiful delicacy and elegance to it, which is, for people who are coming from a perspective of wanting to hold on to Scotch age statements and American style whiskey, which is often a story of barrel as much or more than it's a story of agriculture. They're really following in the thinking of we were talking about Japanese whiskey, where you'll pour Japanese whiskey that's incredibly light often and they're not afraid of that. They're not afraid of it being a lighter, more delicate, and that often leaves it more expressive. Distillate, Because if your base distillate, your base grains are really beautiful and really showing through. You don't need a bunch of oak to cover them up, but you're supporting it with the barrel aging and so A whiskey about agriculture and elevage.

Speaker 1: 16:44

I think, that's wonderful and that's called artesia. So if someone happens to encounter the bottle, it's toss artesia whiskey. What is the genève?

Speaker 2: 16:56

The genève, which is called Bouteffin Genève, is essentially the French cousin to Yeneve, so there is a fair amount of debate about where Yeneve started. Most people, the Dutch, are telling the story of Yeneve through brands, of course, like bowls, and the Dutch would say that it started there. The Belgians might disagree. The French are kind of not getting involved. They're just like. We've been making it for a long time and that's that Because they've been making Yeneve, or in French genève, for hundreds of years in eau de France, but where it used to be distilleries all over the place making this enormously consumed spirit. It was really. Eau de France is a very it's also a very industrial region, a lot of textile factories, a lot of mines, and genève is a chance to distill what's around there, to have something to drink on the cold morning, to like prepare yourself for a long day of work, and so it was really just a very commonly consumed spirit. There are now three distilleries of it, including Toss.

Speaker 1: 18:01

Three total.

Speaker 2: 18:02

Three total of genève in the region.

Speaker 1: 18:05

What is it exactly?

Speaker 2: 18:07

It is a grain based spirit, mostly barley but a little bit of rye, often so sort of. They say it's a malt spirit, but that can include other grains, not just barley, with distilled, with a little bit of juniper. So people say it's the pre-gen, it's the proto-gen, because the British, of course, took the Dutch sailors. They were tasting it. They were like, well, no problem, we could make something like this. And so they took it to England. They distilled a more neutral spirit, not grain based, and added way more juniper and a little bit of sugar. And that's how the early gins were created.

Speaker 2: 18:43

And so a lot of people talk about it as a multi-gen or a grainy gin, but I think that really does it a disservice. It is a unaged grain spirit, really more following in the tradition of something almost like Japanese barley shochu, where it's clean, beautiful grain distillate, not pre-whisky, not white dog, not moonshine, not any of these things that in the US we refer, that we think about as white whiskies or white grain spirits. It's treating barley almost the way that you would treat fruit. It's a barley Oda V and so there's a I love that.

Speaker 2: 19:23

It's just, I mean, when you smell it, you smell so much fruit, you smell so much aromatics, but then it has this rich, really beautiful body and honestly the rye and the juniper are just there, sort of to spice it and give it structure and backbone.

Speaker 1: 19:37

I feel like they're harmonics almost in sound. There's these beautiful nuanced the vapors are strong enough to where you can definitely smell them, feel them, but they're not this prominent full-chord thing. It's very nuanced. I love it. How do you use it?

Speaker 2: 19:56

That still sort of remains to be determined. It's Bolz. Yenever has been working for a really long time to try and make a Yenever cocktail and they haven't sort of settled on the one the Negroni is to Kempari or what the Oaxacan old-fashioned was to mezcal. There isn't one of those for Yenever and I think that's been one of the tricky things about it as a category is because people don't have their default way of understanding it. In the US we understand spirits really through cocktails.

Speaker 1: 20:20

For sure. How do you play with the Zhinyav? You're very good at this.

Speaker 2: 20:25

I'm very much still playing with it. I really think about mostly how it relates to fruit and this is something that Jim Meehan was doing as well a little bit with Yenever. To be clear, most Yenevers are by definition. They made space for most of them to be a very small amount of grain spirit and a lot of neutral spirit. Something like 15-20% will be grain spirit and the rest visible presence of malted barley or rye and the rest will be purchased neutral alcohol or self-produced, but still neutral.

Speaker 2: 20:59

It is very different playing with something like that than it is playing with something like toss which is 100% high-quality self-produced grain spirit, 80% barley, 20% rye, double pot distilled, all of this incredible flavor. It just brings a lot to the table. I think a lot about how it pairs with fruit. I've been playing with it with actually fruit odour thieves, drawing out a little bit on the palate what you get with the Ginev on the nose and leaning into the rich graininess with something like a pear or plum or cherry odour v, which something Jim Meehan has done with a little bit with Yenever as well, and there's a lot of room to play there.

Speaker 1: 21:41

Well, I guess that's a challenge to all the amazing bartenders out there to play with this Ginev and see what comes up, because it's new territory. What about the odour v? Let's cover this amazing thing that is. I haven't seen anyone be like meh with the odour v.

Speaker 2: 21:58

Yeah, there are no neutral reactions to the humulus, which is their odour v to beer. And I've tasted before with someone who was like, oh yeah, I've had lots of beer distillates and number one. I'd really like to know all the beer distillates they're drinking, because I've seen a number, but not that many, not a dismissive amount, where I can be like, oh, I know that category, it's just a. Really it's an interesting category. You see some beer schnapps, you do see some beer distillates and you do see some whiskeys made with beer mashes, particularly in the US. That's really different and it's different than something like artesia. It's a really different profile making a beer direct distillate and then aging it.

Speaker 2: 22:40

The humulus in particular is a distillation of their flagship lager, which is a reserve hildegarde blonde. So it is a blonde Flemish style beer to guard so it goes through the full 30 days of loggering. I mean it is a ready to sell beer that they then distill. They single distill it in the Holstein Alembic. The original beer is hopped with Streiselspalt and Brewer's Gold hops really, really classic Brewer, like noble hops. I mean Brewer's Gold is where I can never remember if it's Cascade or Centennial, but one of the cool hipster hops.

Speaker 2: 23:16

You know one of these like modern Brewer, beautiful, celebrated hops I think it's Centennial, but Brewer's Gold and Streiselspalt are the OGs in terms of this kind of lineage, and the original beer is not super hoppy, which is so funny to me because the spirit has so much incredible hop aroma and not just the green thing that you would expect, though you totally get that like. It's a little bit dank to me and I say like it's just it does. It has a little bit of that like sweet grass kind of delicious green quality, but it's also really tropical and has pineapple and all of these amazing fruit notes that you get in a beer like that but usually are secondary to the bitterness that's on the palate. Humulus really takes the beer flavors and the hop flavors and isolates them and intensifies them and then cuts out the palate of bitterness and so you have all these aromatics with ultimately a really sort of clean, rich, fruity palate. So it's a totally different expression of beer and of hops than you would get drinking a beer itself.

Speaker 1: 24:27

That's really cool. How do you use that? Have you seen someone play with this in a cocktail format that you're like that's dope?

Speaker 2: 24:35

Oh for sure. I mean, we've only had it for a little bit and already I'm like people are doing stuff with it. That is beyond what I initially thought about, and my first thought, of course, was to return it to beer on some level, to think about it in high balls, or you know, we made a humulus paloma, so thinking about it in sort of a shandy kind of expression, we did a little bit of a like hot salt rim with that, just to bring out more of that.

Speaker 1: 25:03

I'm getting thirsty. I know what time is it. Is it noon yet?

Speaker 2: 25:08

Do we care? It's fine. And then I saw a great bartender in Chicago immediately want to make a negroni with it. And so you know.

Speaker 1: 25:18

Back to the beginning. Perfect.

Speaker 2: 25:19

Yeah, well, it brings back the and I'm like of course you pair it with a red bitter, because then it's bitter and it's citrusy and it sort of fills in this palette, but in this really cool way. And I mean people are starting to do all kinds of things with it because it really immediately it sparks your sort of bartender brain, because normally in cocktails you see hops in specifically a bittering expression. So like grapefruit hops bitters is probably the most common way that you'll see hops in a cocktail. And this is cool because it's the reverse it's all aromatics and expressiveness sans bitters. So it makes space for you to do what you want with the cocktail itself.

Speaker 1: 26:00

Yeah, a spirit like this that sparks creativity is something to take note of. So the Oda Vita Biaire from TOS, I would check it out. If you see it, get some. Well, annie, I want to thank you. I want to share something with you really quickly. At the beginning, when I was thinking about this podcast, I wrote down a couple segment ideas and one of them was Annie knows best, and I just feel so thankful to work with you and I appreciate you coming on.

Speaker 2: 26:30

Thank you so much for having me. Always incredibly lovely to chat and get nerdy and mostly not know things, but then try and learn things. So I think that's, that's all we got.

Speaker 1: 26:42

Really, thank you very much. Thank you Thanks for listening to the Perron Cast. I'm your host, ryan Looper. Today's episode was produced by yours truly, theme music by the Julian Tamers. Special thanks to today's guests, the teams at Dumezon East and Dumezon selections and all of the growers in the Dumezon portfolio. Remember to turn the bottle around. You find the Perron is Dumezon and if you have a permanent party, you should really share that thing. Quit hogging it. Okay, pass the Perron. You like the podcast? You want to find it on one of the platforms? Just search the Perron Cast, hit follow. We got lots more to come. We're also on the Instagram at the Perron Cast. Look forward to sharing some more with you soon. Thanks,