I want to make okolehao - need ti roots!

Amen brother!!!

On 2007-07-22 22:48, Okolehao wrote:
This crazy haole wants to make some old fashioned okolehao. I need a large amount of ti roots to make the mash. Does anyone have any, or know of someplace I can get them? Some retailers sell small cuttings for growing your own plants, but I want several pounds worth. Anyone on the islands want to dig some up from their yard? :)

3 years in the making!!! Sorry it wasn't all you hoped but sounds like you're ready to give it another shot, good luck! :)

Well, it's sort of the dirty little secret I think. Not of oke, but most all liquor. it all starts exactly the same. You take some sugary stuff and heat it to get the alcohol to distill off. What comes out is 180 proof pure alcohol that is pretty much PGA.

Then to make it into something else, be it rum, scotch, oke or whatever, you do a few things like add flavorings, but mostly you blend it with other stuff and put it in a barrel. After a few years in the right barrel, you have either rum or bourbon or whatever.

My guess is that oke was started with breadfruit or some other mash, then they maybe used the ti root to flavor it when they put it in old bourbon barrels to age. Dunno. It may well have just been old rot gut hooch!

Your problem may be the still. The distillation path in the water purifier maybe so short that your getting to much cooked mash flavor up into your product. If you make it too long your product will taste like vodka. You have to find the perfect balance.

My second suggestion is see what it tastes like after you age it. If a little aging helps, then a long period of aging may drastically improve the flavor.

Then again I didn't taste it. Good luck with your effort.

I've also had a few cooked and pealed sticks of ti root in a bottle of whiskey for about a month and the scent and some of the flavor is definitely coming out. That smoky vanilla smell. I'm becoming more convinced that the oko that was marketed back in the day was made this way. Commercial brewers may have distilled some ti root to call it real okolehao but they probably added more flavor buy steeping the roots after the fact. Maybe they barrel aged it too but I know you can add flavoring to give booze a bourbon taste. I don't know. Do you think a company like Hawaiian Distillers, which sold mostly to tourists, would put that much effort into it all? The real old time moonshiners goal was to get as much alochol out of their mash as possible and good taste, while preferred, was not 1st on their list. What are your your guy's feelings about it.

What I was told by Kimo at Maui Distillers is that what they used to sell as oke to tourists was just brandy or bourbon.

I live in moonshine country and have had various mason jars fo the stuff. Mostly it is clear and is liitle more than a form of PGA. Strong and tasteless. I have had brown moonshine and it is from an aging barrel. Probably discarded Jack barrels.

I think the distilling is not where the taste comes from. And ti root is probably not very sweet is it? So, sugars, which drive distillation are not coming from the ti. So, if it's the Ti taste, it must come afterwards, as you say, steeping. If that is the way, then start with vodka and Ti root and then maybe put it in a barrel too. You can buy small barrels for this on Ebay and elsewhere.

I applaud your efforts!

Well I tried another batch using a tubo yeast made expressly for getting a high alcohol content. I made a 2 liter mash using a lot more ti root, brown sugar, rice, and a store bought can of concentrated frozen pineapple/coconut juice. I distilled it and got about a cup of eye watering, very strong white lightening again which trailed off to a couple cups of something more drinkable. It has a green plant sort of taste with a touch of sourness. It still doesn’t taste anything like okolehao though. There’s none of that vanilla taste and smell to it. I can see that if you aged the stuff it’d be a pretty interesting drink. Maybe something like a strange jungle tasting (literally) infused vodka. And maybe that’s what authentic okolehao made by moonshiners was. All the stories about it were that it was nothing like anybody had ever tasted. I've never tasted anything like this!

I’m absolutely convinced now that what was commercially sold had to have been an infusion of the root. The taste is there if you do it that way and it takes a lot less of the root for the process.

I'm going to try a new approach and come up with an infusion recipe of the root with other fruits and herbs. The root itself doesn’t have a flavor that seems that complicated. Just sort of vanilla-ish. There has to be more things in what we think of as okolehao. An infusion would also be easier if I use quality liquor as a base rather than me trying to come up with something from scratch. I've heard, read and been told that whiskeys like Makers Mark, Knob Creek, and Rebel Yell (which reviewers say has a medicinal taste to it, like oke)are a good place to start. My mixologist advises also mixing good brandy in with them to get an approximate okolehao taste.

Any suggestions for ingredients besides ti root as part of the infusion?

[ Edited by: Okolehao 2010-06-05 20:45 ]

I don't know anythiong about Oke but I admire your perserverance :)

Some vanilla flavors can be added from being aged in charred barrels.
Throwing a vanilla bean into the boozey stuff along with a piece of ti root wouldn't hurt.

Been a while since I've been here and I'm glad to see things progressing.
I believe your troubles with obtaining a drinkable okolehao stem from a couple things. Your distilling apparatus is, as you know, far from ideal. What you're using is best suited to making bad vodka. There are plans and operating instructions online for very simple and cheap stills with copper tubing which work very well. Obviously experimenting with your mash recipe will help a bit. But you should be able to obtain very drinkable spirit without aging.
As far as the ti root infusion goes, that is certainly doable, but most certainly not the way any commercial producer would have used. It is far too labor and time intensive. Distilling is actually quite easy, and a commercial distillery which already has all the necessary equipment and technique would rather add flavorings to the distillate rather than mess with maceration/infusion. The flavorings would be extracts, sherry, etc.
This really goes to the heart of what you want: to make a traditional okolehao in a traditional way, or make something that tastes like an old okolehao tastes. On the one hand, keep distilling, on the other hand, experiment with infusions of rum and whiskey. You may try adding some oak sticks to simulate barrel aging. That actually works quite well, but can quickly add too much wood flavor so be careful of the quantity and time. kamau ki`aha

[ Edited by: mrdistiller 2010-06-13 21:57 ]

[ Edited by: mrdistiller 2010-06-13 22:00 ]

Ahhh
A real home distiller has shown up! I'm really glad you're here. I'm a lurker on a couple distilling sites. I know the criticism of the still I use. Another T.I. friend has a copper stove top still that we were using but it blew a gasket and has been out of order. I went ahead and got mine so I could try lots of batches quickly.

Actually, I like the liquor I made a lot better now. I put it thru an activated charcoal filter and cleaned up the taste nicely. I'm in the process of getting some medium char french oak sticks to do some aging. I'm told the kind I'm getting imparts a nice vanilla flavor with some fruit overtones. I think it's going to get closer to the taste I'm looking for.

I've got some commercial liquor essences that I may experiment with to add some whiskey and brandy flavoring. I think I'm going to eventually get something pretty good. But I'm wondering what the magic ingredients, other than ti root, went into the commercial oke of old. I'm not convinced they actually distilled the root unless it was only a token amount. It's just too hard to find the stuff to do something like a 25% proportion my recipe calls for. Someone out there must know what the commercial recipes were. I wish I could find them.

We're all counting on you. Keep us posted!

I pulled this from a recent post by CincyTikiCraig on another Oke thread I started long ago:
Posted: Yesterday; 10:15 pm

"I have read in Da Bum's latest tome that he now recommends Rye Whiskey as a better substitute for Okolehao than Bourbon, which was the go-to sub in his previous book. Any opinions on using Rye??"

My response:
"Holy Mackerel! Rye Whiskey!! Which book? I've got a commercial micro-distiller in my town that does boutique rye. I was going to work with him on bourbon but he already makes an incredible rye. 'Fog's End Monterey Rye'."

Wow - can somebody chime in on this?

Which book?

Beachbum Berry Remixed

I don't know if this is of much help, but the label on my now empty :( bottle says-

'Okolehao is made with aged whisky, tropical flavors and the ancient and revered Hawaiian Ti Root plant...'
' ...our Okolehao bourbon liquor...'

This was the last modern run that Hawaiian Distillers ran in the late 90's, early 00's I believe.

As this is the only version I've tried, I can't say if it has the classic flavor, but it was tasty that much I recall. Hope it helps your search.

There was an article earlier in Dec. (Honolulu Star Advertiser) about some old school okolehao...
http://www.staradvertiser.com/s?action=login&f=y&id=134983043

Good Luck!

Our shipment of Okolehao Liqueur from the same people that make Maui Rum just arrived. I have no idea if it is authentic at all, but it makes an awesome Happy Buddha.

The commercially available okolehao from Haleakala Distillers (makers of Maui brand rum) is admittedly inauthentic. These folks were featured on Zane Lamprey's Drinking Made Easy and said as much.

http://drinkingmadeeasy.com/episode-guide/drinking-made-easy-maui/

Did anyone figure out the traditional Oke recipe?
Please update.