View from the North 40: Belly up to the bar for a shot of beaver

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that a New Hampshire distillery has created a new bourbon, Eau De Musc, which derives its flavor in part from secretions extracted from a beaver’s castor sacs.

Do you remember the coffee bean that became insanely popular (as in costing up to $600 per pound) a few years back because it developed what was reported as a super sweet and complex flavor of plum, tea and rose in a fermentation process? Do you remember this fermentation occurred in the digestive tract of a creature that looks like the love child of a cat and a raccoon, called an Indonesian palm civet?

This sounds civilized until you realize that what “in the digestive tract” means is that the civet ate the raw coffee beans and workers harvested the beans from the civets’ feces – which brings me back to beaver castor sac bourbon.

The castor sac is also referred to as the castor anal sac. That’s right. And beavers use the castoreum from these sacs combined with urine as a scent marker. At this point you might want to rinse your mouth with some good ol’ wormy tequila. You should, though, stay sober long enough to understand that the beaver thing isn’t the worst thing about the bourbon, or at least it’s not the only bad thing about it because castoreum is actually FDA approved for human consumption.

That’s right. While castoreum is usually used in perfume, the FDA has labeled it as a “generally recognized as safe” food additive that is generally used as a vanilla substitute or in raspberry and strawberry flavoring. In the list of food ingredients it is generally recognized as “natural flavoring.”

I just really can’t make this stuff up.

The Tamworth distillery website says castoreum “exhibits bright and fruit qualities (raspberry) and rich leathery notes along with creamy vanilla aroma,” which I thought was a little tacky. Sure “rich leathery notes” might be as the site says “common among barrel aged spirits,” but since the “castoreum-flavored whiskey” (says that on the label) gets its flavor from an animal once harvested almost to extinction in the U.S. for its plush, leathery pelt, the description seems like a tasteless cheap shot at a large rodent that has sacrificed so much.

Tamworth Distilling isn’t the only spirit-maker using castoreum. It’s a key ingredient in a traditional Swedish schnapps called Bäverhojt, which literally translates to Beaver Shout.

I’ll bet it did.

And the deliciousness doesn’t stop at the castor anal sac at Tamworth, either. The site says Tamworth Distilling is careful to use water from an aquifer that is protected from fracking chemicals by granite walls and uses only locally sourced foods, even those found in the New Hampshire wilds. The AP reports that the distillery completes the flavor bouquet with raspberry, Canadian snakeroot, fir needles, birch bark and maple syrup.

It doesn’t say on the site or in the article, but I’m starting to think that they just swept out a shed behind the barn, threw everything in an oak barrel and then came up with some pretty words to describe the resulting hooch that tastes in part like something most of us wouldn’t touch on a bet.

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Well, at least it’s 88 proof, so it’s got that going for it and http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.