Tasting Whiskey

by Lew Bryson

  The fact is, you have to be careful. If you want to support your local distiller, that’s great, but it might be a bit different if you’re supporting your local distiller by paying a $20 premium for whiskey you could be buying under a different label!

  St. George Spirits, Alameda, CA

  Craft Whiskey: The Real Story

  Let’s talk about the real story that craft distillers have to tell: the things about craft distilling that set them apart from the big distillers, and the reasons that people should consider spending the extra money that a bottle of craft costs. (I’ll tell you about why the cost is higher a little later.)

  Locally Made: Local People, Local Ingredients

  Just as craft brewing started with “local” as a strong draw (and is moving back to that concept now), just as community-supported agriculture farms are enrolling more and more participants who want to know where their food comes from, and just as the “farm to table” movement in restaurants is bringing food suppliers and chefs closer together, so is local production making craft distillers more interesting and more authentic.

  Spring rye crop in Tennessee

  Take my local distillery as an example. Mountain Laurel Spirits makes its Dad’s Hat Rye whiskeys in Bristol, Pennsylvania, a town on the Delaware River just north of Philadelphia. Business partners Herman Mihalich and John Cooper use Pennsylvania-grown grain. They know that their distillery is sited only 5 miles from where the once-famous Philadelphia Pure Rye distillery made whiskey until Prohibition, and they make rye Pennsylvania style (with rye, rye malt, and barley malt and no corn), like the old Monongahela Valley distillers in western Pennsylvania, where Mihalich grew up. They stress their regional focus in their marketing, and it works even outside the area; local roots are authentic, even when it’s not your locale.

  Hillrock Estate Distillery in Ancram, New York, takes it even further. Here in the old grain-growing region of the Hudson Valley, south of Albany, owner Jeffrey Baker is growing rye and barley on his land, including two fields right beside the distillery. He buys his corn from local farmers. The grains are malted and milled on-site, and some of them are smoked with peat here (Baker is looking at old maps to find local sources for the peat as well).

  Hillrock’s maltings (another name for a malt house) was built for them by Christian Stanley, who, with his wife Andrea, runs Valley Malt, a small custom malting operation in Hadley, Massachusetts. The Stanleys know by name every farmer who supplies grain to them, and they can prepare specialty batches of almost anything a distiller can think of; I saw Andrea packaging a batch of cherry wood–smoked triticale malt once when I was there. They supply distillers in places ranging from Gloucester, Massachusetts (Ryan & Wood), to central New York (Finger Lakes Distilling, which sends barley from a local farm to Valley Malt to be malted).

  Finger Lakes Distilling in New York State proudly uses a 12-inch column still.

  You’ll see a local bent in some big distillers, too, of course. Quite a few have a protected source of water from a spring or well. Some Scotch distillers, such as Bowmore and Highland Park, make some of their own malt, and Highland Park cuts the distinctive peat found there on Orkney to smoke its malt. Heaven Hill gets part of its corn from farmers’ fields around its warehouses. But the craft distiller who can take you to the spring, show you the field, and let you hold the green malt and lay your hand on a barrel filled with aging whiskey — that’s a story, and a link.

  Ryan & Wood, the Gloucester distillery that uses Valley Malt, has built up a solid trade with area restaurants and retailers, like the Blue Ox Inn, in Lynn, Massachusetts. The bar manager at the Blue Ox told me that Ryan & Wood owner Bob Ryan had dropped off sawn chunks of used barrel wood and the chef had cold-smoked steaks with it. “He loved it, the best flavor; [now] we have it on special every day. Can you imagine, having a rye Manhattan with a steak smoked with the barrels the whiskey was made in?” Only from a craft distiller. People like the idea of a whiskey with that kind of personal touch.

  The Moonshine Mystique

  We tend to like the idea of the honorable outlaw, that person who’s working outside the boundaries, not to cheat anyone but to serve the people, Robin Hood style. When we hear stories of illicit distilling, do any of us cheer for the revenuer or the exciseman? No, we cheer for the moonshiner, for the crofter with his sma’ still, for the wily poitín maker. Craft distillers tap into that mystique almost automatically, because there’s something in us that just can’t believe a small distillery can be legal; these people sure look like they’re getting away with something!

  That mystique is clearly boosted when the distiller’s selling unaged whiskey, a.k.a. white dog or new make. You and I, we know that upstart distillers sometimes sell white dog because they have to; it’s quick cash flow, but at the same time this is something the big distillers could have done all along. The big distillers are doing it now, and the craft distillers led them to it!

  They should have been doing it before, because people are bubbling with curiosity about whiskey. They want to know what it’s like, and tasting the stuff before it goes in the barrel is a hugely interesting part of the whiskey experience. It’s educational, it’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s revealing. These days you can even buy small barrels so you can age your own.

  White dog shows the skill of the distiller, and it can show the intent of the distiller. What’s more interesting, some distillers change the run for what they’ll be selling as white dog, and what they’ll be barreling. They want the stuff for the white dog coming off cleaner. The barrel, I’ve been told, needs more to work with. As I said, it’s educational.

  There are craft brands that claim moonshining heritage, or at least a link to illicit distilling, like Templeton Rye, Popcorn Sutton Tennessee White Whiskey, or Junior Johnson’s Midnight Moon. At least one distiller has employed three ex-moonshiners, or “wildcatters” as they refer to themselves. Short Mountain Distillery, about 50 miles southeast of Nashville, works with Jimmy Simpson, Ricky Estes, and Ronald Lawson, who legally make Short Mountain Shine according to the recipe they all used independently.

  “That’s how it’s made in Cannon County,” said cofounder David Kaufman. The recipe is fairly simple: 70 percent cane sugar and 30 percent corn and wheat “shorts” (roughly milled bits of wheat bran, germ, and flour). That mixture is fermented, and the wash is drained out from under the fairly solid “cap” of grains that forms and is sent to the still; the cap and slurry are used as sour mash in the next batch. The three wildcatters make it their way on a hand-hammered still outside, a live working display. The main work goes on inside, on a bigger still, with a full-time distiller, but the output of both stills goes into the bottles. It’s a real link to how things used to be done.

  Not all white whiskey is good, not by a long shot. I’ve received samples that showed a bit of green — actual green color! — and tasted like that would imply. But I have also had samples of unaged whiskey that were quite good — the R5 from Charbay and Low Gap from Craft Distillers — that I would choose to have again. White dog also shows well in some cocktails. We drink white rum and blanco tequila, after all; we drink grappa and marc. Why should whiskey be different?

  We need a name for it, though, or a rule change. The name “white whiskey” isn’t accurate if it’s unaged, and the idea that “aging” the spirit in a barrel for a day, an hour, or a minute legally makes the spirit whiskey is silly. Beam’s new Jacob’s Ghost is white whiskey; they age spirit for about a year, then filter the color out, leaving an interestingly flavored spirit that’s definitely not white dog. Highwood in Canada does the same kind of thing with its White Owl whisky, and it’s been a huge hit. This is closer to what white rum is: “lightly” aged, enough to take the edges off and to filter some of the nasty bits out.

  There has been talk of making changes to the U.S. standards of identity, to create a category for these unaged or lightly aged grain spirits that are not vodka, straight whiskey, or blended whiskey. It might also b
e helpful for the standards to allow more flexibility about aging in used wood, an option that would make it possible to make malt whisky in the traditional Scottish manner, before fiddling with it in some innovative way, which brings us to the final twist in the story.

  It Really Is Illegal

  While we’re discussing moonshine, remember: real moonshine is illegal. Make no mistake about it: Making whiskey — or vodka, grappa, brandy, or eau-de-vie — at home without a distiller’s license is very much illegal. Period. No wiggle room, no “if I’m just making it for myself, it’s okay” escape hatch.

  There are hobby stills being made and sold, there are books out on the subject (I’d recommend Moonshine! by Matt Rowley), and there is a lot of Internet discussion about technique, but unless you live in New Zealand, the only country in the world where home distilling is currently legal, you should know what the risks are.

  For instance, not only does U.S. law completely forbid home distillation of alcohol, but you are not even allowed to own a still larger than one gallon (smaller ones can legally be used for making distilled water or plant essences but are subject to inspection). If you buy one of those hobby stills, beware: if asked, the companies that sell them have to supply the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) with the names and addresses of anyone who’s ordered a still, and the feds don’t even need a warrant. If you are caught and prosecuted, it’s a $10,000 fine and 5 years in federal prison.

  Herein lies one of the other disadvantages craft distillers have in comparison to craft brewers, as Corsair Distillery’s Darek Bell explained it to me. There’s no “farm system” like there is in homebrewing to develop the next generation of distillers.

  “Craft brewers have tremendous bench strength in homebrewers,” Bell pointed out. “There are tens of thousands of people with at least some hands-on understanding of brewing. But home distillation is 5 years [in prison] and 10 grand; it’s life destroying. We’ll see legal pot before home distilling is legalized.” (Bell had homebrewing experience but also had an odd kind of legal distillation experience: he and friends were making biodiesel when one of them had the brainstorm that making liquor would be a lot more fun, and smell better, too.)

  There is home distilling going on in the United States; I’ve tasted the results. But I stay away from it, and most craft distillers are even more careful. They want to have nothing to do with something that could potentially cost them their license just for being associated with it. So don’t take your homemade samples to the local distiller, the way homebrewers will take beers to the craft brewery. You won’t find a warm welcome. Better yet, don’t make any samples at home. It’s very much illegal.

  Variety and Innovation

  Variety and innovation are the craft distiller’s bread and butter, or should be. They’re similar to what made craft brewing successful: being a genuine alternative to the major brewers’ beers. Even the first brewpub I visited, way back in the early 1980s, at the onset of the microbrew movement, had three different beers, unlike each other and so very different from the light lagers that occupied the vast majority of the market at that time.

  Checking lab samples at St. George Spirits

  Some craft whiskey makers have taken to innovation tentatively. Stranahan’s (out of Denver), for instance, makes essentially one whiskey, an all-malt whiskey (using exclusively regionally grown barley; there’s that local factor again) that’s aged in new, charred, white oak barrels, as required by the standards of identity. That’s different, in that there are no big American distillers making all malt whiskey, but it’s the regulated model for an American malt whiskey. Stranahan’s varies things a bit by distilling in a hybrid pot still — pretty common for a small distiller — and with occasional cask-finished Snowflake bottlings, but its real selling point is that it’s “Colorado whiskey”: malt whiskey from a new charred barrel aged at high altitude.

  With its peated malt whiskey, Lost Spirits Distillery in Monterey, California, is doing it more like Steve McCarthy at Clear Creek (see A Small Start) but throws in a handcrafted aspect or two. Lost Spirits uses California-grown malt, which is then wetted at the distillery and smoked in a self-built smoker with Canadian peat, from Manitoba, to pretty stiff levels. After fermentation, distiller Bryan Davis puts the wash through a wooden, steam-heated still. It’s not the primitive “box of rocks” wooden column still full of smooth stones; it’s a wooden pot still that looks like a very large barrel with a copper dunce cap on the top. This intensely smoky whiskey, aged in California cabernet casks, is very craft distilled.

  Take it up a step, and you’ve got what Chip Tate is doing at Balcones in Waco, Texas. Tate wanted to create a Texas whiskey, something imbued with Texan grain, wood, and climate. So he and his crew fabricated their own stills to their own design (they used the more conventional copper). They make whiskey from roasted blue corn, and they also make whiskey from blue corn smoked over Texas scrub oak — which is jaw-twistingly smoky — and they age both in the Texas heat, which speeds up the evaporation rate tremendously.

  For mad variety, though, it’s hard to beat Corsair Distillery in Nashville. The distillery team uses many different grains: corn, blue corn, millet, buckwheat, triticale, spelt, oats, sorghum, quinoa, malt, barley rye . . . and that was all in one whiskey, the Insane in the Grain bourbon. “Some of the grains are a pain in the [butt] to process,” said cofounder Darek Bell. “They all have different personalities.” They have also made whiskey from imperial stout, oatmeal stout, and pilsner, and they’ve flavored the whiskey by running the alcohol vapors through a stack filled with hops or elderflowers.

  Corsair experiments with hopped whiskeys.

  Corsair has made something of a side project out of smoke. They smoke grains with different peats and woods; the Triple Smoke uses peat, cherry, and beech and manages to taste like Scotch, German rauchbier, and pipe tobacco. Bell told me he was experimenting with forcing smoke directly into the rectification column. “There are a lot of different ways to get smoke flavor in.”

  He then delivered the distillery motto. “Imitation is suicide,” he quoted with obvious pleasure, then added the second dose: “If it has been done before, we do not want to do it. Look, I live in the shadow of Jack Daniel’s. I can’t match them on marketing, on equipment. But creativity is free. Craft brewers know that; they’re trying everything. The diversity of beers is incredible, and I keep waiting for that to happen with distilling!”

  It’s going to take a while for excitement like that to spread, although Bell has written a book about it (Alt Whiskeys) that is stuffed with inspiration, ideas he’s simply giving away. It took a while for craft beer brewers to really start experimenting as well, if only because they were getting their practices down and looking back to the classics that had been overlooked or marginalized. That’s something we’re soon going to see more of in craft distilling. For all our talk about traditions in whiskey making, there are a lot of changes that have happened over the years. A quick list would include the dominant use of the column still and the all-but-exclusive use of new charred oak barrels by American distillers, the subsequent wide use of those bourbon barrels by Scottish and Irish distillers, much less use of direct fire on still coppers, the blending/flavoring whisky model of Canadian distillers, and the use of newer hybrid grains.

  These are all areas in which a craft distiller could “go retro,” making pot-stilled American rye, or aging in a much wider array of barrels, or using heritage grains. Some distillers are already headed in this direction, but I see much more potential. One that is likely unique is Indian Creek Distillery in New Carlisle, Ohio. Joe and Missy Duer are using a set of small stills that were used at a family farm distillery to make rye whiskey from 1820 to 1920 — at the same site where they’re distilling today. The family disassembled the stills at the start of Prohibition, and they were in storage until 1997. In 2011 they were finally put back into service, with the same recipe and water source.

  Crafting a Category
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  When you have a group of distillers relying on their innovations and differences to set themselves apart, it begs the question: what makes them similar? It can’t just be size. The craft brewers thought that was their difference at first, but they quickly grew larger. Boston Beer Company, one of the original craft brewers, is now one of the five largest brewers in America.

  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being united in not being like the established distillers. They have a lot invested in being large, and in making whiskey pretty much just like they’ve always made it. Warehouses stuffed full of tens or hundreds of thousands of aging barrels of whiskey make whiskey makers like supertankers; it takes a long, long time to significantly change course. They can change older whiskey to an extent by careful blending, they can work with younger whiskey pretty easily, and clearly they can do flavored whiskey at the drop of a hat. But to start in a whole new direction, with new stills or a whole new grain? That’s small and nimble craft distilling territory and will be for quite a while.

  Craft whiskeys are still young. But to some extent, they’re caught in the same kind of difficulty as the big distillers. As they make better whiskey, they’ll sell more whiskey. But to have enough whiskey to sell as much as your growth projections say you’ll need in 5 years, you have to make a lot more whiskey today than you’re selling today. You have to pay for the grain and barrels you need today with the proceeds from the sales of the much smaller amount of whiskey you made 3 years ago. Where do you find time for change? How do you put aside whiskey to age for longer periods?