Alaskan Bulgarian

Bootlegging

Last night I got to see the traditional Bulgarian rakia-making process. Rakia, for those not in the know, is what everybody around here calls "Bulgarian brandy." It comes in many fruity flavors, the most common is grape, but around Silistra a lot of people like to make it out of apricot. It being a little late in the year for apricot, we distilled some grapes last night.

A friend of mine here in town invited me to help out a friend of his who was distilling 100 liters or so in one of Silistra's boilers. Interesting process. Mostly because the process has little to do with the end result. The grapes and fermentation are what matter. Once the liquid and pulp go into the boiler you can add some sodium bicarb if you're afraid of an acid taste, but other than that you're stuck with what you've grown.

The kazan, or boiler, or distillery, we used was a good sized shack just outside of town on the road to Varna. Apparently, these kazans keep a hectic schedule and all three of its distillers are in constant use through the fall. So we arrived there on a suddenly cold November night and huddled around the warm door waiting for the three groups inside to finish their distilling. Inside was warm enough from the three fires burning under the boilers, but it was also coated in flies. They say it's worse in early fall when fruit juice coats everything and the flies don't care if they're in or out, but it was still pretty bad. Two flypaper strips hung down from the ceiling and, as long as a fly slipped into one of the millimeter cracks between the thousands of corpses on each sheet, they did their job.

When it was our turn, we hauled two big plastic barrels full of wine pulp up near the door and brought up a good pile of sticks and wood. As we did this, the kazan's manager cleaned out the boiler we were going to use. He popped open the lid and shoveled all of the remaining mess inside out a hole in the back where it landed with a steaming thud among the cooler remains of all the other unused bits from past distillings. These bits get combined with other fertilizers and are put back into the earth. Circle of life stuff, indeed.

When everything was ready, we poured the wine pulp into smaller buckets and brigaded it into the boiler. When the boiler was full, the manager closed it up and we put more wood onto the dying fire below. Then we sat and waited for the first drops. Distilling liquid into hard liquor is one of the things that I can't imagine ever being invented. I'm sure I could look up the exact minute-by-minute account of the opening days of liquor distillation, but it's better to imagine a few guys sitting around, drinking wine, and one saying "You know, Ivan, I'll bet if we took this here wine and boiled the living hell out of it, then passed it through some cool water so it would turn back to liquid, then drank the product--you know I just think we'd get drunk a hell of a lot faster. You think?" and they try it and by gum, it works.

So while we were waiting for our own rakia to have all hell boiled out of it, we sat and talked about various liquor making processes. Whiskey gets mosts of its taste from the oak it sits around in and the water it's made from, vodka's tasteless vodka, and rakia gets its taste from the fruit. So really, it doesn't matter what you do to the stuff before or after you distill it. I went through the options with the guys there. Storing rakia in wood wouldn't change the taste that much, but it would yellow the color. Storing it in plastic is just as good, and cheaper, apparently. There are, as always, some benefits from letting it sit in bottles for a while, but when you come right down to the basics, it's the fruit. That makes it unique among most of the hard stuff you can get around Bulgaria. Bulgarians, the guys said, could never make whiskey because no Bulgarian would have the patience to sit and wait a year or two for it to become just right.

When the first drops of rakia came out of the distiller, about a half an hour after we had closed the lid on the boiler, the manager shoveled some of the coals from the fire into the kazans barbecue and we did a bit of an optional ritual. We had bought some sausages and bread before we came and we went outside and cooked up some dinner with the very fire boiling the rakia. The sausages cooked to perfection and the four of us cleared two plates and a loaf of bread. Then we tested and tried some of the rakia.

It tasted strong enough, as it should have. At its best, the first rakia out of the distiller should test at around 60% alcohol, the last out should be 30% and a good final number somewhere around 45% alcohol for the whole product. The stuff we made came out at 55%, which left satisfaction but no leaping for joy. When the process was all over, about 4 or 5 hours later, the stuff we made came out to around 16 or 17 liters of 40% alcohol. Not too bad for a night's work.

Most, if not all, of that rakia will go to the friends and family of the guy who brought the wine pulp. I'm not a die-hard rakia fan myself. I'll drink a cup or two of it at parties for toasting's sake, but I'm certainly no alcoholic. Anyway, rakia's part of the process that keeps Bulgaria going during the winter, and never has that season seemed so ominous as it did this morning when, while I was staring out a window at the morning's rain and wind, one of my students said "Now you'll get to know what a real Bulgarian winter is." After reminding her that I'd been here last winter, she said "I know, but they say that this one will be the coldest in ten years." and then she walked off to talk on her phone. Spooky.

Posted by Rob at November 15, 2004 03:58 PM