When our black pepper is smoked, its familiar piney heat generated by the chemical compound piperine remains an up-front focus, but then it moves over to make room for an altered flavor profile. After the spicy pine, the flavors of smoky sweet bourbon and oak move in, digging deeper into pepper’s woody aspects. Next the citrusy brightness emerges in a spry bloom of flavor, then fades back to lingering pine heat as the finishing flavor. Bourbon and smoke dominate the aromatics, though it doesn’t take long for the citrus of the volatile oils to cut a clean path through the fragrance. This is a coarse, 20-mesh grind that is good for the preservation of the volatile oil content, which is 1-2.5% by weight. We chose the coarse grind specifically for this product. The larger grind pepper acts as a storehouse for volatile oils, giving them plenty of nooks and crannies to adhere to. This permits the pepper to retain its potency and freshness.
This is a product of the cold-smoking process, a thousand year old method of preservation that allows Master Smokers to protect food from spoilage. By keeping food in one chamber and the heat source in another, any generated smoke has the opportunity to cool before it reaches the target food. To make our Bourbon Barrel Smoked Pepper, coarse pepper is spread on a baking tray and smoked for 10 hours. Our pepper is infused with flavor without cooking it. Our Bourbon Barrel Smoked Pepper is infused with smoke from spent barrels used to age bourbon, in a professional smokehouse in the midwest.