Heavy Water vodka

The 1965 war film The Heroes of Telemark was on TV a few weeks ago, about the plucky Norwegian resistance saboteurs who stopped the Nazis from using heavy water made at the Vemork Norsk Hydro plant in Norway to develop nuclear weapons. By interesting coincidence, only the day before I had been at the Distil spirit show and had encountered an engaging vodka called Heavy Water, which is named after the same incident.

Heavy Water photographed at Distil

OK, just look at the picture—it’s called Heavy Water, and it comes in a bottle with what looks like a fuel rod in it. What’s not to like? According to Mark Chapman, MD for Europe and Asia, the plastic rod is an aerator (though he also admitted that primarily it was there to look cool).

Heavy Water has a creamy, vanilla, almost toffee nose with, for me, a hint of strawberry fruitiness. The palate shows the same sweet fruit but it is not oleaginously smooth—there is a peppery edge that leaves a tingling on the tongue. I compare it to some Adnams Longshore that is to hand, and the Adnams has a woodier nose and perhaps a smoother palate. Sipsmith has a similar sweet, fruity nose to the Heavy Water but a very smooth palate; Chase potato vodka has a similar toffee element, which carries over on to the palate, again giving a very smooth impression. Finally I compare the Heavy Water to some Krepkaya strong Russian vodka—which has sharper, thinner nose, with a hint of grapefruit; in the mouth it is fiery (but then it is 56% ABV). For me the Heavy Water has an interesting balance between a sweet, fruity approachability and backbone that makes its presence felt.

I try a vodka Dry Martini using Heavy Water. I’m normally much more of a gin Martini man myself, but this cocktail works remarkably well, with the vodka lending a plump, creamy mouthfeel, but with that peppery character poking through the vermouth too.

So what about this aerator rod? You don’t actually seem to be able to unscrew this assembly, so you can’t compare the vodka poured through the rod with vodka just poured normally. The best I can do is pour some into a shot glass, up to the brim, then clingfilm over it and leave it for about 48 hours, then compare this with some freshly poured through the mighty aerator. There is actually a difference—the fresh-poured is smoother and fruitier, whereas the previously poured stuff has a more medicinal nose and an oddly flat, almost smoky element to the flavour. But I have no idea is this is simply an effect of making the vodka sit in a shot glass under clingfilm for 48 hours.

The hydrogen plant at Rjukan, Telemark. It is not involved in the production
of Heavy Water vodka (and in fact was destroyed by bombing in the war)

Heavy water is water in which a high level of the normal hydrogen atoms are replaced by deuterium, an isotope that has a neutron in the nucleus as well as a proton (normal hydrogen just has the proton). Deuterium occurs naturally in a ratio of one to every 6,400 hydrogen atoms. In ordinary water there is about one deuterium atom to every 156 million, but at the Norwegian plant they found a way of producing deuterium-enriched water. Although not radioactive, heavy water had the property of stabilising early experiments in nuclear fission, which was why Jerry was keen to get his hands on it. Heavy water is indeed heavier than regular water.

You should be pleased to hear that Heavy Water vodka doesn’t contain any more heaviness than ordinary water (heavy water in concentration in the bodies of humans and animals stops cell division, so will ultimately kill you). It is actually made in Sweden, on the shores of lake Vänern, from Scandinavian winter wheat and water from an artesian well, apparently from a subterranean lake formed during the last Ice Age. The marketing bumf makes great play of the five-times distillation, the filtration through Norwegian black birch charcoal and the rarefied water source, claiming that Heavy Water is the “purest vodka in the world”. Privately owned, it was actually launched in 2005, and I was intrigued to discover that Jared Brown and Anistatia Miller were involved.

“Anistatia and I had been living in Boise, Idaho,” Jared explains in response to my questions, “where we worked as tasters on Bardenay Gin as it evolved from something we were making on a glass chemistry set still in a one-stall employee toilet (the only part of the building licensed at the time), to when it was being churned out on a gleaming Holstein copper pot still.

Kirk Douglas sports a stylish sweater in the film

“But, buckling under pressure from our editors at Wine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado, and Random House, we moved back to New York. Once there, Anistatia decided to get a job outside the house and became creative director for a marketing and PR firm. One of the first clients she was presented with was Heavy Water, in the pre-natal stages of start-up, but with a decent set of guys behind it. I was invited to the meeting as well.

“We thought the bottle was novel, the name was good, and then tasted the product they were going to fill the bottle with. We looked at each other for a minute, thanked them for coming and walked out of the room. We didn't want our names anywhere near it. The young CEO was deeply offended, but one of the older guys at the table followed us out and asked if we thought we could do better. We tasted their vodka every morning for a week, then sent our organoleptic analysis off to them. The distiller, impressed we knew his starting and finishing fermentation temperatures by the taste of the final product encouraged them to bring us over. A month later we were working through the first samples in Norway and Sweden.

“We finally got it to the point where we were happy with it. One of the investors had insisted that the spirit not be entered in any competitions. ‘I’ve got a lot of money in this and a bad score would kill it,’ or words to that effect. Anistatia took a gamble and sent it off to the Beverage Tasting Istitute anyway. They liked it. They liked it a lot. It got best spirit in the white spirits category and a nice high score [94 points]… Heavy Water went on to rack up an impressive list of medals and accolades. But without a giant bankroll to fund the roll out, it has remained a boutique brand.”

Heavy Water vodka can be had for about £30 a bottle if you can find it. The only online source I have found is Drinkology—who are really German.

The trouble with vermouth

Sipsmith co-founder Sam Galsworthy shows off
Prudence, their magnificent still

On Monday night I attended a "Martini Masterclass" with Jared Brown at the Sipsmith distillery in west London. It's a glorious place, basically a garage in a well-heeled suburban street which happens to have a gleaming copper still at one end—the first new one in London for 200 years. It took them some two years to get their distiller's licence, which they have framed. I asked why it was so difficult to get licenced—were there tough requirements, does the government investigate every aspect of your history and character? No, apparently it's just because it had been so long since they issued a new licence that nobody in power knew how to do it. (The Sipsmith chaps sought help in Scotland, where they are much more on the ball about such things.)

Anyway, unlike many Martini aficionados who devote time and ingenuity to crafting techniques and even specialised equipment for delivering the most homoeopathically small doses of vermouth into their gin, Jared prefers the more classic proportions of 2:1 or even 1:1. (We began with an early recipe that was a 1:1 mix of gin and sweet red vermouth, in this case Carpano Antica Formula, allegedly a recreation of the original vermouth from 1786; the result was delicious, pleasantly vanilla inflected, and not as sweet as I feared—I think the same thing made with Martini Rosso would make my teeth curl.)

Jared Brown, our guide in the masterclass

But all of this raises a question that has vexed me for years—how do you stop your vermouth from going off?

Vermouth is a wine and, at about 14% or 15% ABV, not really any stronger than conventional wine and certainly not strong enough to preserve itself. With any other wine if you opened it, poured out a small measure then put the bottle back on a shelf for weeks or months, you would expect it to be oxidised beyond palatability next time you opened it. Yet people tend to assume that vermouth, because it is a cocktail ingredient, will last indefinitely. Jared tells all kinds of horror stories of being served Martinis in bars where the ancient vermouth has ruined the drink—his strategy, apparently, is gamely to drink the drink, then to ask the barman if he can open a fresh bottle for vermouth for the next one. If the barman is offended, Jared challenges him to compare the two.

At home the problem is more pronounced, as you probably aren't processing the volume of Martinis that a busy cocktail bar does. To my tastebuds every drink after the first one with a new bottle has that sour whiff of oxidation; if you're lucky it seems to dissipate a little after the drink is initially mixed (or maybe that's just the booze kicking in and numbing my senses), but it still spoils the first savouring of one's cocktail. I made a Manhattan the other day from a bottle of red vermouth that had been opened once and immediately resealed and stored in the fridge, and even then the oxidation was clearly there. All the connoisseurship surrounding precisely which spirits to use, in what proportions and whether to shake or stir seem irrelevant to me if there is that rank overtone of oxidation squatting in my glass.

One technique I tried was storing vermouth in small doses

I did some experimentation into this a year or two ago. One technique was to open a new bottle and immediately decant it into test tubes (each representing about the right amount for one drink) which I sealed, initially with corks, until I discovered that the cheap test tubes I had bought had a tendency to crack, so I used cling film instead. It didn't really work: perhaps I needed to fill the tube to the very brim, or perhaps I should have chilled them as well (thought there isn't really space in my fridge for a test tube rack).

I also tried pouring the newly opened vermouth into ice cube trays and freezing it. Because of the alcohol content it forms quite soft ice but interestingly you can use one of these both to add the vermouth element and to chill the drink without dilution (although Jared feels that some dilution is actually important to releasing the flavours of the ingredients). Again, it didn't work as well as I'd hoped, as the frozen vermouth still seems to oxidise eventually—and in an open tray it also tends to take on the flavours of other things in the freezer, such as coffee beans… I may try zipping the ice cube tray up in one of those self-sealing plastic freezer bags.

Frozen cubes of dry vermouth. Yes, I know they look like raw scallops.

One technique I have heard about, but not yet tried, is to use a layer of inert gas to shield your vermouth from the air. I have been advised that Halford sells canisters of argon and argon/nitrogen mix for welding purposes, but I suspect this is a bit hardcore and God knows what equipment you need to release it. There is in fact a product called Private Preserve aimed at wine preservation, which is an aerosol that sprays an argon/nitrogen/CO2 mix into your opened bottle. I have heard good things about it, so I may well investigate.

Private Preserve in operation

Mr Bridgman-Smith is less exercised about all this. He simply shrugs and says, "Use miniatures." Have you ever tried to find miniatures of Noilly Prat? They do exist, but I am not aware of a reliable source. Martini Extra Dry miniatures can be found, if that is the vermouth you wish to use, but it all adds up to a lot more money for the volume than you pay for a 750cl bottle. I'd be sorely tempted to get myself a bottle of Carpano Antica Formula (see above) if it weren't for the fact that it comes in one-litre bottles at £26 a pop—it would take me a fair while to get through a litre, and after the first few uses it will have started rotting already.

No, I'm convinced there must be a way to preserve the stuff.

If anyone wants me I'll be in the Martini Lab.