On a quiet street in the industrial no-man's land north of I-70 in Denver, where billboards and commercial businesses have never set foot, award-winning secrets are a-brewing. Scott and Todd Leopold are hard at work, one wearing a tie and one sporting Carharts, in what could be called an over-sized garage. Stacked barrels, bottles strung with International Wine and Spirits Convention gold ribbons, and a big-screen TV attached to a Nintendo 64 decorate their no-frills warehouse. A reflective copper still squats watchfully against one wall like the benevolent monarch of this small distillery.
You'd think from Todd's overalls,
nonchalance, and boyish glee, that while his brother handles the marketing,
he's at play on a playground of casks and corks. And you'd be half-right.
After leaning into the hatch of the still, Todd takes a deep breath,
and whispers, “What's this batch going to taste like? Who knows! That's
the fun of it. We did a nice peach eau de vie this year that was so
fun to make and tasted so good, we didn't even sell it.”
But once he gets going, it's
clear that being a craft distiller is a lot more involved than having
fun with metal and alcohol: artisanal distillers are in the business
of marrying chemistry to poetry. “Essentially,” Todd explains,
“You're trying to capture the very essence of what you've put in there.”
He rubs the belly of the still lovingly. “This was made in Germany
by a super-nice family that's been making stills since the 1800s. It's
built out of a single sheet of hand-hammered copper. Just fascinating
stuff. I mean, it's beyond gone, in terms of being a trade.” But distillers
like the Leopold brothers are revitalizing a dying tradition with a
combination of respect for their moonshining ancestors and modernization
of distilling techniques.
Any consumer can tell the difference
between a handmade sweater and its thinner cousin from K-Mart, or a
frozen lasagna from one folded lovingly by a mother's hands. It makes
sense, then, that spirits made by craft distillers strike a stark contrast
to the mass-produced gunk you may have disguised with Hawaiian Punch
in college. “I remember having cocktails when I was in college, and
thinking, well that's just not for me,” Todd muses. Not so anymore.
“Everything I make here is made with real fruit, except for the French
Press Coffee Liqueur. For that, we use our bladder press [a gigantic
French press that inflates outwards and sends coffee trickling into
a catch bucket–ed]. It's unbelievably coarse, and the losses are ridiculous,
but it tastes really good.”
The aim of an artisan distiller
is much like that of an artist: start with the bare essentials, alter
them stylistically, and create something that will both please and persuade
an audience to think. Outside of their “office,” the Leopold brothers
head to the mountains to find berries that are in-season and work with
local farmers to create harvest-born products.
“Well-made spirits seem to
be one of the things that's missing at cooking schools right now,”
Scott admits, before popping corks off herb-filled apothecary jars.
“But in the last five years, restaurants have finally started to wake
up and realize they have artificial flavors on the back bar. It's really
no different than cooking; you want to blend the sweet and the savory.
You don't serve a steak-flavored steak or a meat-flavored sandwich,
do you?”
The delicate clumps of wormwood, coriander, and root of iris flower stored in the jars will go into the still and come out as the mythologized, misunderstood, but fairly innocent absinthe.“A good absinthe will actually fill the room with the aromas from the herbs that you've used,” Todd says as he holds a lime green, hand-numbered absinthe bottle up to the light. “I sit with my assistant and fill all the bottles for hours. Boy, I had some hand problems at the end of last year. But it really lets people understand that this really is a craft. It's something that hasn't come off an assembly line; it's very much small batch. It's something special.”
Inside a bottle of truly handcrafted
whiskey, absinthe, or liqueur there lies a whole history of tradition
and fine tuning. Take, for instance, the Clear Creek Williams Pear Brandy–a
bottle with a whole pear resting inside its thin-stemmed frame. How
does a distiller fit a fruit in a bottle, how does one extract the essence
of nature for the perfect spirit? One part appreciation, one part innovation
(the stem of a pear tree is inserted into the bottle, and the pear grows
there), and one part throwing caution to the wind.
“My motivation was partly
personal,” Stephen McCarthy of the Clear Creek Distillery in Oregon
attests. “Our family's orchards in the Hood River Valley saw their
share of ups and downs in the span of a 100-year period.” McCarthy,
who turns the bounty of the Northwest into bottles of exceptional brandy,
is a man who follows his nose past the bottom line. “We've done a
lot of what the little distilleries abroad have done: wander around
Oregon, and find things that we will make great eau de vie.”
<i>Eau de vie<i>
is a clear, colorless brandy that translates, in French, to “water
of life.” Eaux de vie are generally not aged in casks, nor are they
adulterated by additives. Fruit is harvested when ripe, then crushed
and fermented before being distilled and carefully preserved. What you
get when you drink a good eau de vie is a distiller's steady hand at
a craft he likely learned under the tutelage of centuries-long European
expertise.
“In a sense, we don't really
make anything,” McCarthy says. “The yeast ferments the natural sugars
in a fruit, and distillation is a matter of the laws of physics. When
you heat the pot, ethanol evaporates before water, and then you condense.
If you do it right, it's very pure and wonderful, but if you do it wrong,
distillation magnifies your mistakes.”
McCarthy, like the Leopold
brothers, talks about distilling like a fine artist who's photographing
a shifting subject or working on the next great American novel. “Distilling
concentrates the spirit, but it concentrates it in a way that's not
very forgiving. If you've got a mediocre fermentation, you will make
mediocre brandy–or worse.”
Clear Creek Distillery is not
very seasoned in the mediocre, however. Today, they're producing 24
world-class products, and shipping them to most states and even abroad
to Europe. “I didn't say to myself, let's duplicate X-Y-Z distillery
in Alsace, but their products look remarkably like mine. It's kind of
eerie. Some people say we're just copying Europeans. In a sense, that's
accurate, but are the Oregon winemakers copying Burgundy? Are the Napa
Cabernet Sauvignon makers copying Bourdeaux? No. Most of them are very
respectful of the European tradition. The good ones earn the right to
wander off on a slightly different path over the course of decades.”
After 25 years of wandering
around the Pacific Northwest, McCarthy says he's now just slightly changing
some of his fermentation and distillation techniques, according to the
changes in local fruit and the nuances in the American palate. Still,
he holds strong to the tenets of his overseas teachers, and warns: “Beware
of the distiller who's going to invent a whole new whatever-it-is. They
might be disregarding a couple hundred years of very good work.”
The reason McCarthy and the
Leopolds are so passionate about what they believe in the integrity
of the craft over the almighty dollar. Many people who call themselves
craft or artisan distillers actually buy their vodka in bulk from major
distributors, then they flavor it, bottle it, and slap a homemade-looking
sticker on it. Mercifully, any consumer can taste the difference. A
sip of the Loganberry Liqueur from Clear Creek clears up the discrepancy
between small, artful batches and large, artificial loads.
“The fruit is far and away
the most important part of it. Then you have to use exactly the right
process, the right still, and take good care of it after it's finished,”
McCarthy advises. “If you do that, you get an elegant product.”
Snooping around cranberry bogs, foraging Mt. Hood's hedges, and picking
30 pounds of Bartlett pears just to make one perfect bottle of brandy
are part of the artisan distiller's everyday job. “Most of the good
eau de vie makers, like good winemakers, are a little crazy. If you
see a sort of button-down, type-A guy in a distillery, don't buy his
product.”
“It makes you wonder,”
McCarthy says of people who do what he's doing, which is far from easy
work, “Is there something in our DNA? What is making us do this?”
A bit further south, in Alameda,
Calif., a man of a similar composition is on the same spirited hunt.
For Lance Winters of St. George Spirits, making good spirits is about
creating a legacy. Thirteen years ago, Winters joined with Jörg Rupf,
who had ventured from Germany's Black Forest with 30 years of distilling
experience on his back. “I was moonshining in my garage,” Winters
remembers, “and I basically tracked Jörg down because I knew he was
one of the best distillers in the country. He told me, 'If you're going
to do this, understand why you're making a whiskey. Don't make it just
because other people are making it; make it so that you can make a product
that's your very own.' ”
Winters had already tried his
hand at brewing beer, but like Leopold and McCarthy, he was after something
else–something harder to make that would have a longer life and a
little more soul. “So much of it is completely ego-based; you make
a beer (and I still love drinking and making beer), but your product
isn't meant to last. If you take that same beer, and you concentrate
all the elements about it that you really love–the flavors, the aroma–and
lock that all away in a spirit form, as a whiskey, then all of a sudden,
you have a product that's a legacy.”
For example, the boys at St.
George made a pear eau de vie a long time ago and squirrelled some of
it away in a single oak barrel. Eventually, in the midst of running
a business, they forgot about it. Twenty years later, Winters came across
it, pulled a sample, and the taste blew him away. “All the fruit was
still accessible,” he marvels of what has since become the De Profundis
Reserve. “A spirit can be sitting on a shelf for 100 years, and someone
will go to it and know what you were doing at a particular moment in
the past. It's an olfactory and flavor snapshot of a day in your life–it
completely immortalizes the qualities that you love about something.”
Of the original batch, they have 200 bottles left, which retail for
an considerably inexpensive $150.
In today's economy, when people
are trying to save money, you have to wonder if all the work distilling
higher-end spirits is worth it. But Winters sees not only a shift in
the tightening economical market, but also a shift in personal preferences.
“You could downshift on your bottled water to tap water, and it's
not going to be that great a difference,” he says. “But if you get
used to drinking a really well-made spirit, and you downshift to something
lower quality, you're going to get what you paid for. I'm the same with
spirits as I am with food–I'd rather drink less frequently and drink
really well.”
The standards at the Leopold
Bros., Clear Creek, and St. George distilleries read like rules to live
by: be curious, experiment, take care, and aim to immortalize what you
love best. It takes a certain kind of person to approach the fruits
of the world like an inquisitive child. The result is a shelf of awards
and a public that's asking for more. These eaux de vie aren't just the
waters of life, they're the stuff of which legacies are made.
—Meg Nix