Book Review: Fire Water

By Richard Thomas

Given that one of Corsair Distillery’s principal claims to fame is its Triple Smoke Whiskey, it’s not surprising that one of co-founder Darek Bell’s books on craft whiskey-making would be about smoking it up. In Fire Water, Bell has penned a guide on the methods and materials of smoking grain for making whiskey, and in essence recounts the results of his varied experiments.

I don’t necessarily agree with Bell’s enthusiasm with smoke, because while I enjoy many smoked whiskeys I have found others that were less than agreeable and the smoke was either a contributive factor or, worse, the root cause. That said, the idea of getting past peat-smoking malted barley as the sine qua non of whiskey smoke and into using other materials to smoke other grains is one of the most exciting aspects of the American craft whiskey movement.

So, from that point of view, reading a summary of Bell’s work with smoking is a delight. It’s a technical delight, of interest only to those who want to get into the nitty gritty of how else to smoke whiskey, either for nerdy reasons or because they want to try it themselves. Even so, it’s worth reading.