The Truffle Epiphany (Day 1)

The day started with sleeping in, which was well deserved after the travel marathon yesterday. The first order of business was working out how to make coffee. The apartment came with a French press, blade grinder, and a water kettle. Yesterday we stopped by a grocery store and bought some beans. It's been awhile since I've made a French press, and oddly enough, I've never done it with a blade grinder. While I was digging around in the kitchen looking for something to scoop the beans with I also found a kitchen scale. Hot dog, I'm in business now. After weighing the beans and the water I was able to produce a passable pot of coffee to start our day. We paired that with some rye bread, butter, and avocados that we also bought at the grocery store. Additionally, I opened a jar of the largest caper berries I'd ever seen... which were sublime. We washed that down with a second pot of coffee and made a plan for the day. 

Dawn booked us a distillery tour at 1:00 in Vestmanna which I'm super excited about.  The distillery is a 45 minute drive away. That gives us enough time to take a quick stroll around Torshavn and visit some clothing shops before we hit the road. 

The Faer Isles Distillery was a bit of a gamble. I learned about this distiller a few weeks before the trip, and was very enthusiastic about the fact that the Faroe Islands made their own aquavit.  Dawn's research said that they only do tours if enough people book a tour for a given day. When we got there we learned that they only open the distillery to the public if they our doing tours. Fortunately four people was enough for them to do a tour. I grew even more excited when they said the tour was going to be at least 75 minutes long. I've done a lot of distillery tours and a motivated tour guide can usually explain the process and give you a tasting in less than 45 minutes. This tour was unique being that they started with the tasting and talking us through the genesis of each of their four base spirits and what made them special. 

They had two aquavits, a gin, and a vodka. Every single spirit was exceptional. Unsurprisingly, one of their hallmarks is using botanicals from the Faroe Islands in their spirits. Specifically, all of their spirits include some kind of seaweed. Both the gin and the aquavit were excellent on their own, and I suspect would be great mixed into cocktails. I'm not usually impressed by a vodka... and the tour guide started out saying that neither were they. Initially, they weren't interested in making a vodka. In fact, they have intentionally avoided it even that that's the obvious thing to make when starting a distillery, because they couldn't figure out why anyone would need yet another vodka. 

 However, that changed when a new under sea tunnel was being drilled between Streymoy and Sandoy. In the process of building the tunnel, the excavation team encountered an undersea reservoir of fresh water. They actually contacted the distillery and asked them if there was anything interesting they could do with it... and they decided making vodka with crazy sub-ocean water that happen to have crazy high minerality might be an argument for a vodka. The spirit truly celebrates the unique water supply. It has a definite mouth feel, a lot of salinity, and significant minerality. In fact, they apparently had to dilute the spirit down with normal water to qualify as a vodka because their initially offering was too distinctive to be categorized as a vodka. 

The last of their four base spirits was the Ocean Truffle Aquavit. When Dawn and I independently looked at their website, we both commented on how unfortunate a thing adding truffles to an aquavit was. What we didn't appreciate, until we took the tour, was that Ocean Truffle is actually a kind of seaweed. This is a umami forward aquavit that we both really dug. The plan is to buy a couple of bottles as we leave the islands at the airport. What a unique spirit that is truly of the place that it is distilled. 

The tour guide also told us that the vision of the distillery was actually whiskey, but that would take time. The founders started the distillery after learning about the factors that made Scotland such a good place to age whiskey: stable temperature, humidity, and salinity. It turns out that the Faroe Island has all of those things as well.  Some may argue that they perhaps have and even better environment, but until recently, it was lacking a legal way to distill spirits. That changed a few years ago, and now they are trying to prove that the Faroes can age an amazing whiskey. 

We got to try a sample of a two year old whiskey, and I'm a believer. It tasted more integrated and more mature than many 3-5 year old spirits I've tasted. I can't wait to see what this island is able to produce over the next ten years. I plan to follow their progress with interest. 

After spending 2-3 hours at the distillery talking to the staff and having a great time we decided to explore more of Streymoy. We started by stopping at the town of Kvivik. We spied this town on our way to Vesmanna because there is a scenic overlook above the town. We drove down into the town and took some photos. We were about to leave, but Dawn discovered that the town also had a knitwear and yarn shop, so we hopped out of the car and decided to find it. A two minute walk later and we were there.

This was a cute little shop run by a woman who was proud that all of their products were hand-knitted by women in the Faroes. She also died her own yarn and apologized for not spinning it herself. It was a truly charming shop. I was so impressed with their sweaters that I decided to buy one. Even to my uneducated eye, their hand-knit mens sweaters were obviously better than what we had seen earlier in the day in Torshavn. 

After Kvikik, we decided to go north and drive up to the Fossa waterfall. I can't understate how beautiful the island is and how distracting the scenery can be from the act of driving. As we got closer to the waterfall this was compounded by the road becoming a single lane road and having to negotiate two-way traffic by pulling off the road to allow on coming traffic to pass. We had the waterfall to ourselves with only some sheep looking on. We scaled the hill side as much as we dared. On the way down I made a poor choice in foot placement and submerged the better part of my left shoe in some kind of muddy (I hope) sludge. 

Once back in Torshavn, we struck out for dinner. Our distillery tour guide told us that The Tarv in Torshavn was using their Ocean Truffle Aquavit to make a martini, and they were doing some of the best cocktails in the islands. He warned us off the expensive mains and told us that their seafood starters were what we wanted. The Tarv was a short walk from our apartment and we had no trouble getting a table. The seafood starters were indeed delicious. We also got their chartuterie plate which included a Faroese speciality, wind dried lamb. Dawn really enjoyed this shaved meet. I didn't know you could dial the gaminess of lamb up to 11... or maybe even 12. I understand why she was enjoying it, but I am certain that paticular speciality is not for me.