Whale Waste? Billy Sunday Uses Ambergris In Its Cocktails

By Amy Cavanaugh in Food on Feb 3, 2013 9:00PM

We're used to sipping cocktails made with bitters, hot sauce, and unusual fruits, but whale waste? That's a new one, even for seasoned imbibers like us.

At Billy Sunday, the new cocktail bar in Logan Square, we recently sipped the Cocktail, made with malted rye, Spanish brandy, ambergris-laced palm sugar, and bitters. The drink is delicious and close to an Old Fashioned, but we won't lie—we were most excited about the ambergris.

Ambergris is, in the words of National Geographic, "intestinal slurry" from a sperm whale. It's solid and waxy, and—stop reading now if you want to eat tonight—while scientists don't know exactly how it's formed, when something irritates a whale's stomach or throat, such as a squid beak, they "cover it in a greasy substance and cast it out." For years, it was believed that whales ejected ambergris from their mouths, which is how it became known as "whale vomit," but now scientists think it comes out the other end.

This should be disgusting, but ambergris was historically used in perfumes, since it was a "fixative that prevented fragrance from evaporating." It's not used often now, due to trade restrictions.

So why is ambergris used in cocktails? Our friend Derek Brown wrote in the Atlantic that there's no more compelling reason to use it than "its pungent, sea-drenched, musky aroma, which can be described as nothing less than 'umami' of the nose."

Chicagoans may remember that ambergris was the ingredient used in Charles Joly's Key Ingredient cocktail challenge in the Reader last year. Joly could only source ambergris extract, which wasn't food-grade, and he used it in the aroma of the cocktail he made.

But Billy Sunday has the real deal. Bartender Alex Bachman said that he gets ambergris from a wholesaler in New Zealand. He macerates the ambergris in high-proof neutral grain spirit and then adds it to palm sugar syrup. We sampled a bit of the maceration and it smells like walks on the beach at low tide.

"It's a well-documented ingredient in old-school punches, so we just wanted to bring it back to the forefront," he said. "It has a wonderful salinity and ocean air funk that plays well with malted spirits."