A good cucumber pickle is only as good as it’s brine. Traditionally, dill pickles are flavored with fresh dill, mustard seeds, dill seeds and maybe a few other savory herbs. When pickling other produce — like carrots, peppers, garlic, rhubarb or watermelon rind — just about anything goes. Making gin also requires a great deal of herbs, spices and other botanicals, which is where Seattle’s Batch 206 Distillery comes onto this common ground with these brined cucs.
Batch 206 owner Jeff Steichen looked at the spices leftover after making the distillery’s Counter gin and began thinking of ways to give it a second life. “We’d end up with 50 pounds of spent botanicals after making a batch of our gin, but there was still a tremendous amount of life in those botanicals,” he details. ” In there, tarragon, juniper, verbena, two different kinds of citrus and lavender all make for a very interesting flavor profile. And, it turns out, it makes for a delicious brine for pickles.”
Steichen teamed with Seattle-area chef Kelly Gaddis to create an offshoot of Batch 206: Batch 206 Provisions. They started by infusing the spent botanicals into a brine and making gin pickles — cucumber pickles that riff on the classic dill pickle flavor profile with distinct savory, aromatic herbal flavors.
Gaddis continued coming up with other ways to get a second life out of the distillery’s products. Along with “chief cucumber cutter” Steichen, the duo started aging their pickle brine in whiskey barrels leftover from the distillery’s Old Log Cabin bourbon. The result is what Steichen describes as a “mellow, slightly oaky, char and whiskey tinged pickle.”
Buoyed by these early successes in their first year, Steichen and Gaddis are releasing more products under the Batch 206 Provisions label in the coming months. They are developing more barrel-aged products, like maple syrup, hot sauce and relish. They are also planning to begin selling the pickle brine itself, in 1-liter bottles, perfect for “picklebacks.”
Not familiar with a pickleback? Traditionally used to take the burn off a shot of alcohol (and more often seen with beer or soda), a pickleback is a shot of whiskey chased with a shot of pickle brine, and is perhaps the most common usage for pickles or pickle brine in the cocktail world. The brine however, makes a great addition to Bloody Mary’s, Micheladas and even as a stand-in for olive brine in a dirty martini. Of course, you can’t deny the appeal of crunchy pickle garnish nor can you rebut the restorative properties of pickle brine, full of electrolytes and any easy solution for dehydration.
